
Gaming's most fiendish anti-piracy tricks (2010) - trueduke
http://www.gamesradar.com/gamings-most-fiendish-anti-piracy-tricks/
======
Illniyar
I think the most ingenious anti-piracy trick was "Game Dev Tycoon"'s, which is
after this post was made.

The pirated copy had users unable to win or pass a certain point because their
games started to get pirated (in the game).

They also released the cracked game themselves to torrents, thus bypassing the
troubles other games had where legite players got hit by anti-piracy issues.

[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/)

~~~
justherefortart
I typically download cracked games because I'd like to one, try them first.
Second, have a copy that doesn't require some DRM/Online check, etc.

I've bought probably 10-20x the games I've actually played as well. I stopped
playing video games regularly in 1998, but kept buying for the next 2 decades.
My rule about 10 years ago was the game had to have all DRM and be under $10.

I'll finish Baldur's Gate and Thief 1 & 2 eventually!

------
CM30
Earthbound had a pretty fiendish one too, with the game not only increasing
the difficulty of the main game by spawning extra enemies on a pirated
version, but also wiping out your save data after it deliberately crashed at
the final boss fight. Given that this was a 30 odd hour RPG, god help anyone
who suffered from that one.

There's also the infamous scorpion trick they did in one of the Serious Sam
games too. If it detected the game was pirated, it'd load an invincible
monster that could kill you in seconds and would hunt you down through much of
the game. Certainly made for a memorable experience, though it may also gave a
bunch of people the amusing extra challenge of trying to avoid the thing for
as long as possible.

~~~
Valmar
The scorpion trick sounds like pure fun for those up for a challenge! :D

------
emptybits
In the C64 piracy heyday of the mid 1980s, there was an urban legend of this
anti-piracy tactic: At manufacturing/packaging time, some games' floppies had
a physical hole punched in a far-away track where _normal_ game usage would
never ever send the drive head, so no problems.

Of course, pirates got a lot of mileage out of brute-force full-disk/bit
copiers which would try to simply dupe every track on the disk, without regard
for format or contents since this would successfully duplicate a handful of
file-level tricks such as hidden or intentionally corrupted files that the
game would look for. Anyways, the story goes ... if your bit-copying drive
stepped out to that distant track ... whammo. <insert-expensive-mechanical-
noise>

Or so the rumour goes. As brave teens, we doubted it and it never deterred
anyone I knew. Interesting concept, though, if the topic is _fiendish_ tricks.

~~~
mizaru
According to Jon Burton, something like this was actually done for the Amiga
game Leander, although not with the intent to damage hardware:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qaq9vlfoGnA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qaq9vlfoGnA)

~~~
pdw
Here's a photo of the disk:
[https://twitter.com/herrprofdr/status/959186835929878528](https://twitter.com/herrprofdr/status/959186835929878528)

------
shakna
> What is known is that like more recent EA DRM, the base blasting trick
> caused all kinds of problems, in particular blowing up the armies of plenty
> of legitimate players.

I remember spending hours on EA's helpline trying to get them to fix this,
because now and then, my base would explode, despite the game's legitimacy.

From memory, it became a "won't fix" when we worked out it was only when I
would connect to a match with someone with an illegitimate version of the
game.

~~~
stordoff
It can happen in offline games as well - I had a legitimate install where the
campaign worked but a AI skirmish would trigger this (IIRC force-applying the
latest patch, even thought it ostensibly was already installed, eventually
fixed it).

------
paulie_a
While not game related, 3d studio max had a genius one in the early 2000's.
They could detect when the software was cracked and would slowly degrade the
model polygons. Eventually there were a bunch of questions on the support
forums.

~~~
dTal
Games are one thing, but if I was evaluating that software before buying it,
such funny business would not favorably incline me towards it.

~~~
izacus
You'd probably be running the evaluation version not a pirated copy then.

------
shahbaby
I think that Steam has been the best actual deterrence to piracy.

~~~
testmasterflex
What’s their strategy?

~~~
maccard
Always online DRM, combined with an easy point of entry for people to buy and
manage games. Their prices have historically been good, and they are also
convenient and trustworthy

~~~
Drakim
Is it always online? I thought you just needed to be online when you booted
the game, so your singleplayer game wouldn't exit on you if your internet
died.

~~~
lozenge
Close enough. There is an offline mode in the Steam menus, but you need to be
online to initially activate it.

~~~
proactivesvcs
IME the offline mode is very flaky indeed. Every time I've needed it, it
failed me.

------
rudolfwinestock
Burger Time for the Apple ][ was apparently a pile of copy-protection triggers
with a mediocre video game attached to it.

[https://ia801505.us.archive.org/33/items/BurgerTime4amCrack/...](https://ia801505.us.archive.org/33/items/BurgerTime4amCrack/BurgerTime%20\(4am%20crack\).txt)

[https://www.jwz.org/blog/2016/01/1982-burgertime-drm-was-
har...](https://www.jwz.org/blog/2016/01/1982-burgertime-drm-was-hard-core/)

~~~
plantain
jwz has an entertaining referrer check on that link...

~~~
kuschku
You can avoid that by setting a referrer header override for jwz’s site in
your Firefox settings, so his site never sees the HN referrer.

Luckily it seems like browsers are starting to retire that header soon anyway,
so his annoying trick will break.

~~~
james-skemp
I don't believe they're retiring that header totally, just returning only the
domain, and not the full path. Correct?

~~~
shakna
It's only in "Private Browsing Mode", not for the everyday part of Firefox,
firstly.

Secondly, you're absolutely correct, they're just stripping path information,
not the domain.

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mchahn
I was hoping this would be about how piracy was detected, but it was mostly
what happened when it _was_ detected.

------
tschwimmer
This article came out before GTAIV. It enabled permanent 'drunk mode' on
pirated copies: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oSL_x-
TKnvM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oSL_x-TKnvM)

------
stordoff
Red Alert 2 highlights the perils of this approach - it's very easy to trigger
on a legitimate install (I had it happen even on a clean XP install with the
game installed directly from CD), and it just makes the game appear broken.

~~~
nickpsecurity
The reputation and sales risks of false positives are what concerned me. I'd
probably not do it for that reason. I think Windows XP Activation was the
first time I saw anti-piracy features go really, really bad for all kinds of
paying customers.

------
ZenoArrow
I thought the two methods described in this video were both good:

[http://youtu.be/Qaq9vlfoGnA](http://youtu.be/Qaq9vlfoGnA)

Also, the method described here, even though it didn't result in a financially
successful game, was pretty clever (pirating the game meant your game company
would be defeated by pirates):

[https://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/04/30/game_dev_tycoon/](https://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/04/30/game_dev_tycoon/)

------
dang
Discussed at the time (a bit):
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2738195](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2738195)

------
nickpsecurity
There's a few more not in this article or HN comments in the two, Cracked
articles below:

[http://www.cracked.com/article_20482_5-hilarious-ways-
game-d...](http://www.cracked.com/article_20482_5-hilarious-ways-game-
designers-are-messing-with-pirates.html)

[http://www.cracked.com/article_22222_6-hilarious-ways-
game-d...](http://www.cracked.com/article_22222_6-hilarious-ways-game-
designers-are-screwing-over-pirates.html)

This might be worth a page that comprehensively lists and summarizes various
games' approaches. Developers of new games that glance at such a page might
find old ones that would work for them or get ideas for better ones. Has
anyone started on such a page?

------
vr46
Funny stuff. I still have my Lenslok with my copy of Elite for the ZX
Spectrum.

Square Enix used to punish pirates for their multiplayer games by putting them
all together on to the crappest servers they had and making the gameplay
slightly crappy in every possible way.

