I wonder if he really was afraid of the government, or if he was just tried to keep his brother from loading the games.
The part where he actually cuts the physical tape is great.
The funny thing is that, without cutting the tape, anybody can load the games any way, just like this:
Rewind the tape. LOAD the first program (i.e. the password program). Note that the tape is positioned after the password program now. Reset the C64. Enter LOAD to load the actual game.
Or rewind, reset the counter, load the protection, write down the number in one of those math copy books and fast forward to the same number every time. I still have a box full of tapes and those books.
Great story. Also, a great learning experience. This is what I liked about the old times of the C64 and others, they invited so much for these learning experiences. Good old times :)
But even today, many years later and working as a software developer, my greatest source of innovation are the at the beginning goofy ideas and silly experiments.
Reminds me when I wrote my first .COM infecting virus. It worked very well. It infected COMMAND.COM and then the rest of the hard drive. Unfortunately, it had a bug so programs wouldn't work anymore (except command.com).
And I did the test on the PC of a friend of my dad.
A very long moment of loneliness happened to 15 y.o. wannabe hacker when dad and his friend realized the mess :-)
Depends on the program being loaded. Tape loaders used by c64 commercial games will autostart to make sure that you can't easily copy. Defeating the tapeloader with the autostart is how you cracked games distributed on tape. The iconic tape loader is Cyberload. A real beast to crack.
The MERGE command would work if you were loading a normal BASIC program, but quickly you'd learn this didn't work with commercial games.
(Which largely loaded the system variables, and state, since the memory-map was fixed. If you tried to MERGE you'd load those values and your system would crash, reset, or otherwise hang.)
