

Devs make cracked game impossible to win - bigsassy
http://kottke.org/14/11/the-work-of-art-in-the-age-of-mechanical-reproduction

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AlyssaRowan
Since the dawn of time (well, the 1980s) copy protections have had booby-
trap/fail pits. Some of those fail routines have been remarkably creative (and
occasionally ridiculously destructive).

Delayed flags with adverse consequences, subtly changing CAD points or musical
note timings or slowly corrupting user data if a dongle has bad wiring.
Deliberate hardware damage, from the C64 disk drive happily being made to chew
on its own heads to (arguably) setting counterfeit USB serial interface chips
to a PID of 0. I've even seen one which quietly dropped to desktop with a
virus when tripped (in fact this was the origin of that particular bootsector
virus, which achieved an unexpectedly wide spread on its platform, and its own
payload had a generation counter attached so you wouldn't notice for quite a
while).

This one is curiously poetic. Very meta. But still a logic bomb.

 _Don 't_ booby-trap your code. It's incredibly unethical and stupid. Logic
bombs misfire. Frequently.

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roghummal
I agree with you.

However, in this case they didn't booby-trap the real product. They released a
special "pirate edition" torrent with the "piracy logic".

I'd consider it a kind of "collector's edition" ;)

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8_hours_ago
Here is the original source with more details:

[http://www.greenheartgames.com/2013/04/29/what-happens-
when-...](http://www.greenheartgames.com/2013/04/29/what-happens-when-pirates-
play-a-game-development-simulator-and-then-go-bankrupt-because-of-piracy/)

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rdc12
My immediate thought was about this interesting sounding book [1]

[http://www.amazon.com/Surreptitious-Software-Obfuscation-
Wat...](http://www.amazon.com/Surreptitious-Software-Obfuscation-Watermarking-
Tamperproofing/dp/0321549252)

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cLeEOGPw
Although amusing at first, if this practice would become widespread everyone
would just wait for cracked release of proper version from respectable cracker
team. This game is in unique position though because it is itself about making
games.

~~~
erroneousfunk
I don't think it's meant to be a one-size-fits-all technique for ending game
piracy. It is amusing though.

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adt2bt
This is so ironically genius. I love it. Kudos to the GDS Developers!

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robert_nsu
I remember hearing about Rocksteady doing something similar with Batman:
Arkham Asylum.

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drivingmenuts
If I recall, in Arkham Asylum, it was impossible to win the big boss fight,
but there was no messaging about it - it just happened.

~~~
fphhotchips
You may be thinking of another game. In Arkham Asylum, they disabled the glide
function ([1]), you definitely knew about that before the final boss.

Now, EarthBound had a hook like that one [2], where the game would first make
it _much_ more annoying to get through the game (by churning out extra random
encounters), and then when you get partway through the final boss the game
will freeze _and delete your save game_.

[1]
[http://forums.eidosgames.com/showthread.php?t=95030](http://forums.eidosgames.com/showthread.php?t=95030)

[2] [http://earthboundcentral.com/2011/05/earthbounds-copy-
protec...](http://earthboundcentral.com/2011/05/earthbounds-copy-protection/)

