The European version of Um Jammer Lammy and the US version of Dino Crisis mistakenly use the Japanese version of the generic PlayStation anti-piracy screen.
The pro version of Talking Tom Cat has an anti-piracy feature - if the game detects that it was pirated, Tom's voice will be so fast that it cannot be comprehended. The free and 2.0 versions of the game do not have this feature.
When The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom launched, a player who acquired the game early posted an image of them playing it and tagged multiple accounts associated with Nintendo to provoke them. This would be responded to by former Nintendo president Reggie Fils-Aime with a quote from the movie Taken. While the gaming press and many fans thought this was humorous, it also received major backlash (particularly from people who had already grown to dislike Reggie due to his comments on the blockchain and the police force, and allegations of Nintendo's corporate culture during his tenure) due to Reggie directly quote-retweeting the post for all of his audience to see, screenshotting the post without censoring their username when the user took precautions to protect themselves from the audience attracted by Reggie's post, and using a quote that - in its original context - was a death threat, which only intensified when it was discovered that the user in question was 16 years old at the time.
Not counting cheat code utilities, MaxPlay Classic Games Volume 1 is the only unlicensed Nintendo GameCube game that is known to have been sold at retail.
The Action Gamemaster was a 16-bit portable game console announced by Active Enterprises, infamous for Action 52, in 1994 - it would've had a slot for games designed for it, as well as adapters that would allow it to play SNES, Genesis, NES, and CD-ROM games, alongside adaptors that served as a TV tuner and cigarette lighter.
The console never released due to Active going out of business, and if it were to release it is unlikely that it would have bared much resemblance to the overly-ambitious original plan due to emulation not being in an advanced state at the time and patents for the 3 game platforms still being active.
Notably, the Action Gamemaster is also the name of a character in the NES version of the Cheetahmen minigame of Action 52.
British Telecom's "Firebird Software" label, publishers of Don't Buy This, encouraged players to pirate the game, and had a competition where the players who sent the best hate mail would receive stickers and badges.
eAMUSEMENT support for the BeatStream series ended on September 1st, 2017, with conversion kits for ノスタルジア (NOSTALGIA) offered in March the same year. However, unlike other discontinued BEMANI games, no offline patch was ever created, which is necessary for the game to be playable without an eAMUSEMENT connection.
This renders BeatStream completely unplayable in any official capacity.
The original Japanese version of Gimmick contains a unique anti-piracy response where, if the opening cutscene is tampered with, the player will not be able to access the secret final level and it will instead cut to a black screen saying "BLACK HOLE" in reference to the game Atlantis no Nazo. Contrary to popular belief, this was not intended as an anti-piracy method, but rather a failed attempt by game designer Tomomi Sakae to prevent his name from being removed from the opening credits. This trigger was neatly edited around its intended purpose, and was eventually removed in the Scandinavian release of the game, though Sakae's name was reinstated as an unused line of intro text.
In 2023, an unknown person by the name of Brandon White bought the UK rights to Cookie's Bustle under the fake company name of "Graceware" and began filing DMCA takedowns against any website or video with documentation of the game, in some cases fraudulently using the name of Nintendo, believed to be in an act of copyright trolling. This led to an uptick in interest in the game, with many content creators streaming, making fan works based on, and reviewing the game in retaliation.
The ZX Spectrum version of Sqij was made using Ocean Software's Laser BASIC coding software, and contains significant chunks of the library in its code, which could be easily reverse engineered, allowing one access to the suite of Laser BASIC tools for the £1.99 price of Sqij as opposed to the £14.95 asking price of Laser BASIC.
The game will detect for any piracy activity during most screen transitions in three different ways: by saving, by writing to read-only memory, and by checking if the game is played on a PAL-region console. Should the game detect itself as a pirated copy, the game will display a black screen with the Japanese katakana word "ビデオ" ("Video") on the top right corner of the screen, imitating the video input channel display on common television sets at the time. The text then proceeds to behave erratically, as if the TV had glitched. Presumably, this screen was designed to taunt pirates for playing an unauthorized copy of the game.
A variant of this screen exists in the game's sequel, From TV Animation Slam Dunk 2: IH Yosen Kanzenhan!, serving as the screen saver for that game's debug mode as well.
In early 2021, a man from Nagoya, Japan was arrested after hacking and modifying Pokémon in his copy of the game and selling them to people. The Japanese police and The Pokémon Company felt this was in violation of the country's "Unfair Competition Prevention Act (UCPA)" and therefore illegal. The man was first brought to the police's attention after selling a modified Sobble for ¥4,400 (US$42), but he was eventually able to make ¥1.15 million (US$11,000) from various transactions before being arrested. It's suspected that the reason for trading these hacked Pokémon was due to the potential ability changes that hacking allowed which could provide easy advantages in the competitive scene without going through the time to catch them in-game.
To detect if the Steam version of the game is a pirated copy, the game registers a fake DLC ID with SteamAPI. If a Steam emulator unlocks all DLC, the game won't progress past the first chapter and will open browser windows to the Steam page of the game every frame, potentially freezing your computer for having too many tabs on your browser.
pack/database/stat.rbrb also contains this text about a popular Steam emulator. It's referenced in the exe so it's not completely unused, but if it actually triggers anything is unknown.
"steam_api.dll.ali123 ALI123.INI - STEAM NOT DETECTED! RESTART GAME TO ENABLE STEAM FUNC! -"
As of 2.00 the game also checks the integrity of steam_api.dll and will softlock after defeating a boss in Chapter 2 by disabling your controls.
Although the PlayStation has extraordinary copy protection, many hackers, home-brewers, and pirates worked around it via the infamous "Disc Swap" trick which is possible as the console uses a lid in a similar fashion to a portable CD player. This trick involves swapping a regular PlayStation disc with a back-up or rewritable CD during the startup.
Likely because of this exploit, Sony created future numbered PlayStation consoles that use disc trays rather than lids.
If the game detects the copy you are playing is pirated, all dialogue text will be replaced with the Borginian "language" font from Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney, making all the dialogue in the game unreadable, as the characters are swapped randomly. The game is still playable, but playing a visual novel without being able to understand the majority of the text is not intended for the genre. Various button labels, character names and evidence you collect have their text values intact, but the Organizer descriptions on the Touch Screen are replaced with several X's.
If the game detects that its cartridge is a pirated copy, Zelda's hair will turn into a giant pentagon in cutscenes, fishing will always result in a hooked fish escaping after 51 frames of animation, and Spoiler:the exit to Ganon's Castle during the escape sequence will be blocked off to Link, as Zelda will run right through the bars, leaving Link behind and making the game impossible to finish.
Before Sword and Shield's release, nearly the entire game was leaked onto a Discord server by four users. The Pokémon Company decided to take action almost a week after the games officially released by filing a lawsuit against those four users. Perkins Coie LLP, the international law firm hired to represent The Pokémon Company during this case, believed that the company was “[harmed and disrupted in] its ability to market Pokémon Sword and Pokémon Shield” and issued subpoenas to Discord as well as the website 4chan where the leaks were also posted in an effort to try and identify the perpetrators.
In the PC version, if the game detects that the player is using a pirated copy, checkpoints will activate within the game. These checkpoints will start to affect Faith's running. She will gradually start to slow down once she reaches a ledge, making it impossible for her complete a jump. Because the first few sections of the game require Faith to parkour through the level, it is impossible for the player to advance any further thus making the game unbeatable.
If the game detects that the game is pirated, a pitch-shifted and reversed version of the main theme song will play on the title screen. When this song is plugged into a spectrogram, the end of the song will form The Devil in the 3 forms of his boss fight - Regular, skeletal and giant face.
There is anti-piracy protection within the Dreamcast version of the game. If the console detects that the game is running from a copied disc and not an official GD-ROM, Eggman will be locked in death cycle at the start of his section in Cannon's Core. He'll immediately start falling through the floor, dying and respawning in the same position repeatedly. It's still possible to reach the end of the level, but visual glitches and a fixed improper camera angle will hinder the player's attempts to navigate the level.
The Action Gamemaster was a 16-bit portable game console announced by Active Enterprises, infamous for Action 52, in 1994 - it would've had a slot for games designed for it, as well as adapters that would allow it to play SNES, Genesis, NES, and CD-ROM games, alongside adaptors that served as a TV tuner and cigarette lighter.
The original Japanese version of Gimmick contains a unique anti-piracy response where, if the opening cutscene is tampered with, the player will not be able to access the secret final level and it will instead cut to a black screen saying "BLACK HOLE" in reference to the game Atlantis no Nazo. Contrary to popular belief, this was not intended as an anti-piracy method, but rather a failed attempt by game designer Tomomi Sakae to prevent his name from being removed from the opening credits. This trigger was neatly edited around its intended purpose, and was eventually removed in the Scandinavian release of the game, though Sakae's name was reinstated as an unused line of intro text.
The game will detect for any piracy activity during most screen transitions in three different ways: by saving, by writing to read-only memory, and by checking if the game is played on a PAL-region console. Should the game detect itself as a pirated copy, the game will display a black screen with the Japanese katakana word "ビデオ" ("Video") on the top right corner of the screen, imitating the video input channel display on common television sets at the time. The text then proceeds to behave erratically, as if the TV had glitched. Presumably, this screen was designed to taunt pirates for playing an unauthorized copy of the game.
If the game detects the copy you are playing is pirated, all dialogue text will be replaced with the Borginian "language" font from Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney, making all the dialogue in the game unreadable, as the characters are swapped randomly. The game is still playable, but playing a visual novel without being able to understand the majority of the text is not intended for the genre. Various button labels, character names and evidence you collect have their text values intact, but the Organizer descriptions on the Touch Screen are replaced with several X's.
If the game detects that its cartridge is a pirated copy, Zelda's hair will turn into a giant pentagon in cutscenes, fishing will always result in a hooked fish escaping after 51 frames of animation, and Spoiler:the exit to Ganon's Castle during the escape sequence will be blocked off to Link, as Zelda will run right through the bars, leaving Link behind and making the game impossible to finish.
If the game detects that the game is pirated, a pitch-shifted and reversed version of the main theme song will play on the title screen. When this song is plugged into a spectrogram, the end of the song will form The Devil in the 3 forms of his boss fight - Regular, skeletal and giant face.
