I was around when Quake was launched, but I was entirely unaware of this story.
By June 1996, after three years of hard work, id Software had completed their next title, Quake. As for their previous title, they were going to release both a shareware version and a full version of their game. Since it used a mere 22 MiB of storage, people at id Software had the idea of leveraging the remaining capacity of a CD-ROM. Why not include encrypted versions of the full id catalogue of games? Not only this would cut out the middlemen, it would give instant access to gamers with a simple phone call and a credit card.
The concept was implemented. The CD was announced on July 3, 1996 and released on August 30th[5]. The hacker group GNOMON released
↫ Fabien SanglardQuakecrk.ziponly 39 days later. The archive containedQCRACK.EXE, a tool allowing to decrypt every single game on the CD-ROM.
The system id employed turned out to be incredibly primitive and simple, and hackers found out quite easily that the system required no secret sauce from id at all – the code you’d get over the phone contained no secret, and all the validation program on the disk did was check to ensure the code received over the phone matched the code generated by the disk.
No wonder it took them only 39 days to crack this.
As always: they have had one team and one attempt to get it right — while there are endless adversaries with unlimited time and patience to proof them wrong.