Patching out these checks has existed for literally decades. Even in the 90's (And possibly 80's and before), this was common. Games distributed on floppies w

Patching out these checks has existed for literally decades. Even in the 90's (And possibly 80's and before), this was common. Games distributed on floppies would have a check that involved asking you what the 13th word of page 4 of the manual was, or would have some sort of decoder wheel. And it wasn't hard to find cracked versions that had those checks patched out. When games started coming on CDs, there were copy protection tricks that could detect if the game was running from an ISO image (via Daemon Tools or something) or even a copied disc, and those were all patched out. GameCopyWorld was a very popular website in the early '00s. It served up these cracked versions of games. How it still exists is beyond me, tbh.