It wasn’t. A lot of the copy protection was the game asking for the word on a particular page and line in the manual. When you pirated the game (which was easy, since it was literally just copying the disk to another disk), you photocopied the manual as well. Or rather photocopied the photocopy of the manual, I didn’t see a lot of original games for the PC and Commodore 64 back in the 80s, but I sure had hundreds if not thousands of games.
I guess the colour thing was probably a method of circumventing the photocopier, because colour photocopiers were not really generally available back then.
It wasn’t. A lot of the copy protection was the game asking for the word on a particular page and line in the manual. When you pirated the game (which was easy, since it was literally just copying the disk to another disk), you photocopied the manual as well. Or rather photocopied the photocopy of the manual, I didn’t see a lot of original games for the PC and Commodore 64 back in the 80s, but I sure had hundreds if not thousands of games.
I guess the colour thing was probably a method of circumventing the photocopier, because colour photocopiers were not really generally available back then.