There’s no doubt that piracy packs a powerful sting to the dismay of the entertainment industry. It continues to be an issue with copywrited music, films, and of course gaming. Hackers have managed to successfully mod systems that allowed them to play illegally copied games, and in some instances, allowed them to be downloaded to the console itself. It is the hope of Atari founder Nolan Bushnell that a new chip will effectively stop, or at least bring forth a serious halt to gaming piracy.

Bushnell recently spoke at the Wedbush Morgan Securities Management Access Conference about the new Trusted Platform Module (TPM) stealth encryption chip that will be placed on the motherboards on recent and future computer systems. He then went on to explain what the chip means to the gaming industry, “What that says is that in the games business we will be able to encrypt with an absolutely verifiable private key in the encryption world - which is uncrackable by people on the internet and by giving away passwords - which will allow for a huge market to develop in some of the areas where piracy has been a real problem.”

He feels this is particularly true for videogames and not necessarily music and movies because as he put it, “if you can watch it and you can hear it, you can copy it.” Games are much more complicated because they aren’t so easily duplicated like you’d find a CD or DVD to be.

“Games are a different thing, because games are so integrated with the code. The TPM will, in fact, absolutely stop piracy of gameplay” said Bushnell.

If this magic chip proves to be as effective as Bushnell makes it out to be, it’ll force a lot of pirates to quit their day jobs. It could also prevent aspiring game pirates from even starting to practice the trade. Making sure products aren’t being used for illicit purposes is a major concern for game developers and publishers, so maybe now they can sleep soundly.