I admit completely that one of the biggest reasons, perhaps the reason, that I spent my hard-earned money on a copy of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade game back in the day was because of the Grail Diary in the box.

LucasArts is finally bringing back several of its older games and franchises, in a variety of ways. This week, the new Tales of Monkey Island series debuts. Next week, the original Secret of Monkey Island will launch on Xbox Live Arcade with optional new HD graphics. And the publisher said today that it will bring more of its older games to Steam, including Last Crusade, a point-and-click adventure in the Monkey Island style that follows the plot of the third Indy flick.

The Last Crusade movie resonated with me moreso than the others in the series because I loved the idea of puzzles and hidden treasures, and what was this movie but a treasure hunt, with its book of cryptic clues and lost secrets of ancient religion? The fact that the game included a replica of the movie's central MacGuffin, the diary of Henry Jones Sr., was enough to get me to buy it.

The fact that I was already a dyed-in-the-wool fan of point-and-click adventure games helped, of course, but I didn't say I wouldn't have ended up playing the game otherwise – just that I was convinced to actually pay for it. Not that we ended up pirating very many games once the CD-ROM format became standard, mind you, as the increased size made it impractical.

The Grail Diary was, although I couldn't have articulated it to you at the time, a many-layered method of copy protection. In the days before online DRM, there was, generally speaking, nothing that a PC game publisher could do to stop consumers from making as many copies of a piece of software as they liked.

What they did, instead was twofold: Make it difficult to play the game without being in possession of the game's hard-copy instruction manual, and make it more enticing to own the game by including awesome physical goods in the package.

The diary, then, was all of these wrapped up in one. As a collector's item, it was a chance to actually read the book that propelled the movie forward – or rather, a version of it written by LucasArts writers and illustrated by (who else?) Steve Purcell of Sam & Max fame. As copy protection, it held clues to solving the game's puzzles that could not be found in the software itself.

The downside to this form of copy protection was that if you ever lost the manual (or things like the "Dial-A-Pirate" wheel included with the original Monkey Island), you'd render your game unplayable. This, plus more sophisticated technology-based copy protection schemes, led to the rapid decline of techniques like this after the early CD-ROM era.

I just find it interesting, in this day and age of protests against DRM, to look back on a time when game publishers occasionally found solutions that gave the consumer some notable benefits to make up for the fact that they were being inconvenienced by the copy protection schemes. I read the diary cover to cover before even installing the game. I'm sure there were others who felt the same way – looking around now, there's a fan community that's sprung up around the diary and creates their own replicas based on the pages from the movie props that have been leaked or shown to the public.

There's a PDF of the diary available on ReplacementDocs, a repository of old game manuals. Lucas has said that an official PDF format of the diary will be included when you buy the game from Steam.

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