This was the first release for THG. Dave (Candyman) was running Candyland, and we had gotten cash from George (Nightwriter) to buy the game. So, Dave ordered it, and had it shipped to his house. He called my desk phone (I was at work. Stupid trivia: ALL THG cracks were done while I was at work), and put me on the speaker while he opened the box. He'd give me trivia as he went along "OK, in the box there are 2 3.5" floppies, and a postcard". While he was opening the box, I connected to Candyland (Sometimes he would have to disconnect a user so that I could get on), and I would shell to DOS, and wait. He would then insert the disks in order "OK disk 1 is in the drive" he'd say, and I would zip the disk up to a file in the hidden directory of the BBS. Once we had went through all the disks, I would download the files, crack the game, write the .NFO (or crappy text mode intro screen thing like this one), zip it all back up, call Candyland (If I got a busy signal, I'd call Dave to boot someone again), I'd upload the game, and then go back to work on my normal day job.

This was our first original, and as I said above, we had George give us money for it, and then I got it, and it was Superlock protected. Superlock isn't really HARD, it's just tedious. Fortunately for me, CopyIIPC came with a program called "Unguard" that cracked Superlock games. So, I ran it on this game, it spit out an unprotected .EXE, and BOOM. We had our first release. Once we had proven to be successful, we got more money from other people (Whom we would send the games to once we were done with them), and we were off and running. One could argue that without Unguard, there wouldn't have been a THG, as if I had failed on Bubble Bobble, or if I had taken too long, and we had got beaten on this release, we wouldn't have had the cash to buy more games, and would have given up.

Wow, this is GREAT trivia and a fascinating story. Thanks for sharing, FabulousFurlough.

Great, thank you! I wish more veterans would use our comment section like that.

One comment that I left out. The design of the screen, (the color bars), was based on a common trick done on the Commodore 64 where you could change the border color. Normally, the border is 1 solid color but using assembly and the timer interrupt (I believe it was), you could change it at JUST the right speed to cause the border to be not *1* color, but MANY colors, in bars like this. I wasn't a graphics programmer at the time, so that was the best that I could do for an "intro screen". In truth, this probably took longer to create than the game crack did.