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Gaming's most fiendish anti-piracy tricks (2010)
- CM30 9y agoEarthbound 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 9y agoThe scorpion trick sounds like pure fun for those up for a challenge! :D
- dang 9y agoDiscussed at the time (a bit): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2738195 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2738195
- shakna 9y ago> 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 9y agoIt 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 9y agoWhile 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.
- mchahn 9y agoI was hoping this would be about how piracy was detected, but it was mostly what happened when it was detected.
- rudolfwinestock 9y agoBurger 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/BurgerTime%20(4am%20crack).txt https://ia801505.us.archive.org/33/items/BurgerTime4amCrack/... https://www.jwz.org/blog/2016/01/1982-burgertime-drm-was-hard-core/ https://www.jwz.org/blog/2016/01/1982-burgertime-drm-was-har...
- plantain 9y agojwz has an entertaining referrer check on that link...
- kuschku 9y agoYou 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 9y agoI don't believe they're retiring that header totally, just returning only the domain, and not the full path. Correct?
- shakna 9y agoIt'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.
- hota_mazi 9y agoYeah, it's pretty childish. Just open the link in incognito mode.
- tschwimmer 9y agoThis 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
- ZenoArrow 9y agoI 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/
- shahbaby 9y agoI think that Steam has been the best actual deterrence to piracy.
- testmasterflex 9y agoWhat’s their strategy?
- maccard 9y agoAlways 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 9y agoIs 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 9y agoClose enough. There is an offline mode in the Steam menus, but you need to be online to initially activate it.
- proactivesvcs 9y agoIME the offline mode is very flaky indeed. Every time I've needed it, it failed me.
- floatboth 9y agoDepends on the game. Some games (especially older ones) can launch in offline mode
- stordoff 9y agoIt's completely game dependent. You can distribute games that are completely DRM-free through Steam if you wish: http://steam.wikia.com/wiki/List_of_DRM-free_games http://steam.wikia.com/wiki/List_of_DRM-free_games
- emptybits 9y agoIn 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 9y agoAccording 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 9y agoHere's a photo of the disk: https://twitter.com/herrprofdr/status/959186835929878528 https://twitter.com/herrprofdr/status/959186835929878528
- herpinderpin 9y agoDebunked in this thread by Galahad ( an oldschool amiga cracker ) and Richard Aplin ( a dev ) : http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=89662 http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=89662 That Jon Burton guy isn't a reliable source of information.
- ceautery 9y agoI don't know about physical holes in the media, but a number of Apple // games had a few bad sectors sprinkled throughout the disk that would cause the 5.25" drives to make sort of a "BBRRRRNK" noise when copy programs hit them, and then ultimately the copy program would stop and show an error. Copy //+ defeated this by letting you choose what game you were copying, and it had a list of sectors to avoid for each game. The good ol' days. This was back when calling stolen programs "warez" was still cool.
- Illniyar 9y agoI 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-pirates-play-a-game-development-simulator-and-then-go-bankrupt-because-of-piracy/ http://www.greenheartgames.com/2013/04/29/what-happens-when-...
- justherefortart 9y agoI 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!
- vr46 9y agoFunny 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.
- stordoff 9y agoRed 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 9y agoThe 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.
- nickpsecurity 9y agoThere'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-designers-are-messing-with-pirates.html http://www.cracked.com/article_20482_5-hilarious-ways-game-d... http://www.cracked.com/article_22222_6-hilarious-ways-game-designers-are-screwing-over-pirates.html http://www.cracked.com/article_22222_6-hilarious-ways-game-d... 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?