Here's EA's Solution to Missing Red Alert 3 CD Keys

Red Alert 3 is one of the most expected titles of this holiday season, promising to bring back the franchise's unique tongue-in-cheek approach to strategy games. With a star studded cast ready to deliver the classic FMV (Full-Motion Video) cut scenes, and three very engaging and distinct single-player campaigns to play through, Red Alert 3 is definitely a "must have" game for any strategy fan.

The game was just recently launched, and has enjoyed quite a few very good sales, which pushed the title to the top of the charts. However, a pretty interesting problem occurred when some fans got their hands on the long-awaited title. It seems that some of the manuals of the game, which contained the CD Key necessary for the installation of Red Alert 3, were misprinted and, consequently, gamers were provided only 19 digits of the mandatory 20-character serial number.

Although the customer support team at Electronic Arts, the developer and publisher of the game, said that the misprint only appeared in a few copies, they did found a simple solution for the players who needed to find out their last CD key character, namely that of guessing the last digit. That's right, people were advised, through a blog post on the customer support page, to start typing the letters of the alphabet, or different digits, until they found an accepted combination.

“There is currently a work around that may allow you to bypass this issue. Since you have the first 19 characters of the code already, you can basically try “guessing” the last character. To do this, simply enter your existing code, and then for the last character, try the letters A-Z, and then the numbers 0-9. You should eventually get the right combination, and be able to play the game.”

Although this might seem an awkward solution, it is the easiest one found. Sure, if you don't want to try all of the letters and digits, you can call customer support, which will give you a valid serial number. However, trying to guess the combination might prove to be a bit more fun.