Only old-time gamers are going to remember the early attempts to halt piracy. Back in the 8bit days it was fairly easy to take a computer game, pop it in your two-deck tape machine and run off as many copies as you had blank tapes. This was of some concern to the software houses.

Several attempts were made to solve the problem with the introduction of better loaders that required top-quality tape machines to load the games, but this caused problems because not everyone had a decent tape machine with which to load their games into their computers. Other, more bizarre solutions were needed.

The strangest was the Lenslok. This was an articulated strip of plastic that bent into three with a strange piece of transparent plastic in the middle. When a game was loaded, an encrypted code was displayed on your TV screen. The idea was to hold the Lenslok, in a kind of triangle, box-thing over the code, with the clear plastic bit in the middle. You then read the now visible code, typed that into your machine and away you went. Sound in theory. Dreadful in practice.

People just couldn't get it. The quality of the Lensloks made it nigh on impossible to see any code, let alone the correct one through the things and the instructions were lamentable. Even Future Gamer's esteemed editor remembers spending well over an hour trying to get a brand-new game to load on his Spectrum because he was holding the Lenslok the wrong way round! Doh!

Needless to say, the Lenslok didn't survive for long. Still, it would only be a couple more years before the 16bit machines arrived and floppy disks became the media of choice for games. Everyone hailed the floppy as the end to piracy (cough)...