Earthbound: An Oddball Game That Fights Piracy in Oddball Ways
Video game piracy has been a bit of a hot news item, what with all copy protection software that seems to be designed to cause honest gamers to pirate their own games. People forget that piracy has nibbled at the heels of the video game industry throughout most of it's existence. Even cartridges, whose very design is practically a form of copy protection, were never safe. This lead to some developers to come up with some rather creative ways to block pirates.
In particular, Nintendo's SNES classic Earthbound had quite a few copy protection checks hidden in it's programing. Some of it's mundane stuff, like screens that pop up telling you that copying games is bad. However, there are some checks that alter the game in order to create a negative play experience for a would-be pirate.
For example, there is one check that increases the occurrance of random enemies on the overworld. Just how much does it increase, you ask? Just look at the screens below:
For reference, there should never be more then one dinosaur on screen, and there shouldn't be any enemies in Saturn Valley proper
However, the absolute meanest thing the game can do to a pirate comes at the very end of the game. Right when you fight the final boss there is a check, which if the game fails, will cause it to freeze up and delete your saves. I'm not kidding about this, just watch the video (and if I have to warn you about spoilers, then you're probably not reading this article anyway):
Can you just imagine the look on some Hong Kong pirate's face back in the day, who had scoffed at the warnings and just muscled through the ridiculous enemy encounter rate only to find it was all for naught? Truly, I can't think of a better example of crime not paying.
SecuROM? StarForce? You guys should be taking notes from this. Who needs root kits if you can make the game delete its own saves to spite the pirate?
Press the Buttons via Starmen.net
In particular, Nintendo's SNES classic Earthbound had quite a few copy protection checks hidden in it's programing. Some of it's mundane stuff, like screens that pop up telling you that copying games is bad. However, there are some checks that alter the game in order to create a negative play experience for a would-be pirate.
For example, there is one check that increases the occurrance of random enemies on the overworld. Just how much does it increase, you ask? Just look at the screens below:
For reference, there should never be more then one dinosaur on screen, and there shouldn't be any enemies in Saturn Valley proper
However, the absolute meanest thing the game can do to a pirate comes at the very end of the game. Right when you fight the final boss there is a check, which if the game fails, will cause it to freeze up and delete your saves. I'm not kidding about this, just watch the video (and if I have to warn you about spoilers, then you're probably not reading this article anyway):
Click to viewCan you just imagine the look on some Hong Kong pirate's face back in the day, who had scoffed at the warnings and just muscled through the ridiculous enemy encounter rate only to find it was all for naught? Truly, I can't think of a better example of crime not paying.
SecuROM? StarForce? You guys should be taking notes from this. Who needs root kits if you can make the game delete its own saves to spite the pirate?
Press the Buttons via Starmen.net