When Sega released the 2012 version of Football Manager, they sneakily included code to enable the company to track the internet addresses of everyone who pirated it. Of the 10 million copies ripped off.
Rather than simply blocking pirates from playing the game, Rocksteady chose to give them just enough tantalising bat-joy to show them what they were missing. Illegal copies of the game worked perfectly apart from one little detail. Batman’s cape glide ability was disabled, making the game playable but uncompleteable. If the Joker made DRM, this is the DRM he would make.
After 30 seconds of play on a pirated copy of the game, the player’s base and units would detonate. Whether the cause was suicidal pirate guilt or an overzealous bid on the units’ part to escape the horror of war is unknown. 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. Call it a pre-emptive strike just in case they were thinking of passing a copy on.
Like Arkham Asylum, the original Flashpoint chose to punish pirates with broken dreams of what might have been. But if Arkham was cruel and unusual punishment, Flashpoint was Guantanamo Bay.
The intro sequence in Dragon Quest V looped infinitely in knock-off copies, meaning that only very patient sailing obsessives needed apply. FFCC turned into a 20 minute demo, complete with a “Thank you for playing” kick in the stones from a couple of jolly Moogles at the end.
If Mirror's Edge from EA detects you're playing with a pirated copy, it automatically slows you down before you reach key jumps that require lots of speed. Clever!
Rockstar is yet another developer to implement a simple-but-effective method of punishing pirates attempting to play Grand Theft Auto IV without paying. If a pirated copy is detected, the in-game camera wobbles around wildly after a few minutes of play. Bonus points for any gamer that can get Niko drunk in game with this screen wobble on and still complete a mission.
Remedy's anti-piracy solution in Alan Wake isn't quite as aggressive as the others on this list, but it's still a good bit of fun. Pirated copies of the PC release give Alan... a pretty epic eye-patch. Pirates are also given a gentle reminder to please buy their software in the game's loading screen.
Arguably the most devious and notorious example of "creative" copy protection is also one of the oldest. The good people at Starmen.net have the full scoop onEarthBound's anti-piracy measures. The short version? Enemy encounters become much, much more frequent, making the game a slog. If a pirate still manages to make it to the end, the game freezes in the final few moments before the climax, and deletes the save file. Brutal!
Immediately after picking up the game's very first gun in the very first level, pirates are greeted with a super-fast, immortal red scorpion enemy. Doh! If these thieves manage to cheat or otherwise get around the deadly foe, a few levels later the camera locks up in an "up and to the left" position, forcing players into running silly circles.
