Anti-Piracy measures in games

[Cobra!]

I've been going down a rabbit hole, I suppose you could call it, of games that have creative anti-piracy measures, how they can detect piracy, and what they do when it does.

Things like Mega Drive and SNES games trying to save memory to addresses that the original carts don't have, but copies are very likely to.

And like how GTA IV gives you a permanent drunk camera, and Batman Arkham Asylum not letting you glide.

I think my favourite, though, is Puggsy on the Mega Drive.

What anti-piracy measures do you guys know about and what are your favourites?

[Kutan]

I love old anti-piracy stuff. The ones that don't tell the player that they've tripped the copy protection are my favorite. I'm a big fan of Earthbound, and it's got some pretty mean copy protection. It's got the standard region/sram checks, and you can bypass those pretty easily. And if you do, the game will let you play, but makes the enemy encounters way, way higher to make the game super frustrating. And the best part: if you actually make it all the way to the final boss, the game freezes... and it deletes all your saves.

This is my favorite resource for this stuff, it's pretty comprehensive!
https://tcrf.net/Category:Games_with_anti-piracy_methods

[wris]

My favourite is Ultima VII: The Black Gate, where all NPCs spout spouting nonsense versions of famous quotes instead of their actual dialogue if you answer a series of questions incorrectly at the beginning.

Close second would be Simon the Sorcerer which asks you which icons are on which pages of the manual, just because the manual was so nice and the pictures were so charming.

Third place goes to Uplink, which gets you to enter whichever value is at certain X/Y coordinates on a really nicely printed card that comes with the game. I'm talkin' high-GSM black card, embossed lettering. Must've cost more to get those printed than they would have lost in sales by letting everyone pirate the game.

[Starstorm_X1]

I think one of my favorite anti-piracy measures has to be the one found in the DS version of Michael Jackson: The Experience. If the game sees you're playing a pirated copy, it... blasts vuvuzelas over the music. Kind of a fun way to joke about the 2010 World Cup's use of them. (Oh, and it bit-crunches the music and makes the notes untappable, rendering the game unplayable)

First runner up is La Abadía del Crimen's. When you reach a certain point, it'll check the files for tampering. If successful, you'll hear a rendition of "Ave Maria". If not... you'll get bombarded with "PIRATA PIRATA PIRATA (and so on)", and the game locks.

Second runner up is Mr. Gimmick's. Much like La Abadía del Crimen, once you reach a certain point, the game will check the code (in this case, the intro code). Playing a pirated copy will net you a screen that says "BLACK HOLE". Quite silly out of context, but as it turns out, it's actually a callback to another game from the same developer studio, Atlantis No Nazo, which infamously had a trap room where you fall to your death that just says "BLACK HOLE!" in it

[TheFrugalGamer]

The most egregious example of this I can think of was when I used to have Prince of Persia on the old Macintosh PC we owned (before it was called Apple). Every five levels or so, you'd be taken to a special level that had potion jars with letters all over the floor. You would be instructed to look on page so-and-so and paragraph so-and-so of the manual, and you had to drink the letters that were shown there. If you got the wrong ones, you'd lose a heart and eventually end up dying (since there were multiple jars you had to drink). It was a weird kind of way they chose to incorporate it into the gameplay, and it wasn't included in other versions of the game.

One that I'm not sure was intentional or not, was when I first played the original Sims back in 2000. My dad had somehow gotten a hold of a pirated copy of the game, and there was NO SOUND whatsoever. I have no idea if that was meant to happen, or something went wrong when the files were moved over, but I played hours of that game without hearing anything, and when we finally got the full version I was so happy to hear all the little noises it made!

[Julikins]

The concept of anti-piracy is always interesting to me. I have seen a few fake ones that were good, but most of them tend to be created with the intention of being creepypasta content. Not exactly a creepypasta enthusiast, but most of the time they were not exactly scary and end up being either watered down horror stories or silly. Nonetheless, that's not my area to talk much about and I let those that do enjoy that be.

The most common ones that I got used to seeing were the SNES ones considering my emulation roots. Scary when I'm just wanting to play Tetris Attack/Mario Picross... *sob* Although on the subject of SNES games, Slam Dunk: Yonkyo Taiketsu! had probably the most funny anti-piracy lockout. Maybe its due to how it supposed to act like an analog TV of the era, but it just looks so cool to watch in action. Some of the games I grew up playing and never knew about having an anti-piracy method implemented were mostly there to stop progression for the players like both Pokemon HeartGold/SoulSilver and Pokemon Black/White. Some also did RAM checks that would halt the game at logos instead of the "Serious crime to copy games" screen. Sonic Adventure 2's was more surprising than not but fairly underwhelming to me. All it does is just take away collision when you start Dr. Robotnick's portion of Cannon's Core.

Spyro 3 - in similar fashion to what Earthbound did - was the one that got my interest in the anti-piracy stuff to be honest. Between randomly removing eggs collected and freezing/crashing the game, it really does hamper one's progression in the game. My favorite is when you get to the Sorceress near the end only for it to boot you out and saves over your file putting you back to square one. So dirty!

Pokemon Battle Revolution on the Wii had some questionable anti-cheat stuff (not anti-piracy but still worth the mention) that locks you out of transferring mons from the DS games. The GBA Dragon Ball Z games were a runner-up mention for the category considering it does seem tongue and cheek to me to lock you out of playing with the message it couldn't run on the hardware.