Reply 20 of 32, by FabulousFurlough
More than the games, I wish I still had the TOOLS that I wrote. I wrote a tool that would strip Rob Northen's Copylock, and spit out a virgin .exe as if it had never been packed in the first place. I wrote a util that would unpack the .SQZ files that Titus liked to use, and they would go on to license it to Bethesda for a time. I wrote a generic Everlock cracker. And probably a bunch more that I've long since forgotten. If you made a protection, and then used it on multiple games, odds are I either had, or was making a tool to automate the cracking.
A later story. Reflexive.com. They used to ship all those Bejeweled like games. They had thousands online that you could download, install, and play for 30 minutes before it would exit the game, and demand that you pay for it before it would start again. They wrote their own wrapper and all of that for the games. I had a tool that stripped it off that you could automate. So, with 1 small app, you could crack all 2000+ games they had on their site. The same with PopCap games. I had a tool for them as well. 😀