Anti-Piracy: the Fake, the Creepy, and the Downright Malicious | Tech Rules 

The first 100 people to go to www.blinkist.com/techrules are going to get unlimited access for 1 week to try it out. You'll also get 25% off if you want the full membership. Hey everyone! So, for clarification: This video was being worked on right about when that Mario Party DS video was gaining traction, before the fake anti-piracy trend even kicked off. That's why I talk about it like some strange, foreign thing that magically appeared one day. (Which, let's be honest, it kind of is.) Thankfully, I opted not to make it a big focus in the video, so the finished product still holds up just fine! If anything, it might even be more relevant! Also, big news: The first ever Tech Rules livestream will be happening this month, on the 15th! We'll be doing some sort of randomizer. I have a few good ones in mind, and I'm gonna make a poll for which game we'll do a day or two after this video's release. If you want to weigh in on that, keep an eye on the community tab! The stream itself should start some time in the evening. Well, evening in the Eastern time zone. Hope to see you there! EDIT: Okay, so it's not technically correction time yet (although I'm sure you all will find SOMETHING I screwed up on) a lot of people are mentioning that the "unused" Cuphead track actually plays in the game's bad ending. That's...partially true. While the unused track starts the same way, I'm pretty sure it goes on for a bit longer, and there aren't any hidden images in it. My bad, should've mentioned that! Also, it seems a lot of you are missing the original Tech Rules title card animation? I figured I would just try shortening it a bit, since I'm working on making my videos a little less bulky. If everyone wants it back, though, I'll bring it back. Just let me know!

I pirated yoshi island and in the middle of the game Yoshi turned to the camera and stated my full name, my social security number, and my deepest fear

Rumor has it Doki Doki Literature Club's anti-piracy removes all the horror and turns it into a normal visual novel

Dude caught you pirating his game but isnt mad, admits guilt, gives insight, shares constructive criticism and affirms you're the best in the end? What an absolute legend!!

Fun fact. The PIRATA sound effect actually took up more storage space than the game itself. Think about that. The anti piracy protection was a bigger file size than the game itself.

That last anti-piracy thing reminds me of the story I heard about the guy who pirated Shovel Knight and later met the devs at a con and just straight up gave them 20 bucks

A dusty cardridge could trigger an anti piracy. Maybe the dirty pins cause it to write to the wrong adress in sram, wich would cause it to actually work.

the dev talking to the player about piracy and forgiving them and thanking them for playing just touches my heart. instead of the game being like, hey shut off your computer now; the guy who made the game thanks you and tells you other ways you can support them. that’s life changing, really.

My personal favorite example of anti-piracy was a pirated version of BeamNG Drive. Upon starting the game I was greeted with "Ahoy there matey, we hope you enjoy your time with our game and support the official release when you can!" Affer playing for a few hours and absolutely loving it, I purchased it just a few days later.

Here's another reason why so few games include creepy/disturbing anti-piracy measures: creepy/disturbing anti-piracy measures are interesting, and would actually encourage people to pirate the game. If a game developer is going to put time and effort into designing something truly bizarre and creepy to "punish" pirates, they might as well put that time and effort into actually developing the game.

Anti piracy screens are like when you are watching Cartoon Network as a kid and adult swim starts

Before this, I was watching compilations of fake anti-piracy screens and it slowly evolved into nothing but cheap scares. Most of the Mario ones end with Mario screaming "MMMMMMMMAAAAAAAAAAMMMMMMMMMMAAAAAA" and it got really REALLY annoying. After watching this video and seeing the Just Shapes and Beats anti-piracy, it felt very satisfying.

Can confirm scary anti piracy once. I was playing Geometry Dash and the game suddenly crashed, my phone levitated out of my hand, spilled my coffee, and went on a rampage screaming "DONT COMMIT CRIMES" and killing everyone in the house. I now live in a pile of ash and no longer have a phone

Yeah, I accidentally triggered the Super Mario World anti piracy. I tried to boot it up, and suddenly Mario came out of the Tv, screamed something about serious crimes and punched me in the face. Then he ate everything in our house and jumped back in the tv while showing us the middle finger.

Gmods antipiracy was skipped over entirely, so I will comment it here: when the game detected you were pirating the game, it would give you an error (failed to shade polygons or sumt like that) that you could not get due to an actual error, so the people who pirated the game would post the error code and ask for a fix, thus exposing themselves as pirates

I think another reason it feels so scary is that As a kid the idea of being accused of something you didn’t do is part of what makes it so terrifying too… Almost everyone has had some experience with a parent or teacher punishing you for something you didn’t do but being helpless to defend yourself. Imagine that but it’s yo

Ive forgotten a few times the name of this game, but when I was really young I had a game with a "feelie" where you had to type something in from the manual. Being like 5 I didn't understand and when I couldn't figure it out, the character called me a liar, the game would crash with a dialog box saying my character was devoured by rats. I remember crying.

"shameless plug, but hey you're playing illegally"

I booted up a legitimate copy of five nights of freddy’s and Freddy entered my home and ate my newborn brother and hit my shins with a scooter

I recall Scott Cawthon specifically mentioning that he didn't mind if people pirated FNaF, and went so far as to add his own version of the game to piratebay. That version would play completely normally, until exiting, upon which Golden Freddy would jumpscare you. It's possible that this was just something that someone attributed to him. However, if I recall, that's how the FNaF anti-piracy story began.

It's one of the common examples, but I'm fond of Skullgirls-style anti-piracy that doesn't actually disrupt the game, just does something weird that tricks pirates into outing themselves

Fun fact: If you pirate Wii Sports Resort, Matt comes to your house and curb stomps you

"GTA 4 turns you into dangerous alcoholic with a unstoppable need for speed" nah that's just normal gameplay

My favorite one is the sims 4 anti piracy where everytime your sim bathes, showers, uses the toilet, or otherwise is nude, the pixelation gets bigger and bigger until it covers your entire screen

My favorite anti-piracy measure will always be Batman Arkham Asylum, simply because some guy complained on twitter at the devs that he couldn't get out of the starting area (the measure disabled Batman's gliding ability). Needless to say the devs pointed out what was happening.

Imagine the undertale anti-piracy just makes the sans fight go on forever.

The Pokemon character who said “Buy it or die!” Wasn’t an anti-piracy NPC, he was just from New Hampshire!

When I was very young my dad had a few pirated and fake copies of games that I wasn’t really aware were fake (it wasn’t really something I was old enough to understand) so encountering any of these measures was always weird and jarring to me and I can imagine that’s the root of many (not all) people talking abt how they were freaked out by these…their parents or siblings had fake copies, they didn’t know or understand, game feels like it’s accusing you directly of sin

I remember being a kid back in 1982, and when I was playing the first ever Mario. I triggered the anti piracy by licking the cartridge every day. The game.wouldnt boot up and kept showing swears

The JSaB one is really wholesome actually, as much as I get a kick out of the creepy stuff, that was cool to see.

My favourite anti-piracy isn't even really anti-piracy. In each game of the Rhythm Heaven series, the developers leave a message in the "Read Something" section of the cafe, saying something like "Hi, thank you for buying Rhythm Heaven, we hope you enjoy" and it fills my heart with sadness and guilt knowing that their gratitude is being wasted on a pirate.

As far as I'm aware, my favorite Anti-Piracy is in Batman Arkham Asylum where it disables the cape and you need to glide pretty early on so you can't progress.

8:23 This track is actually used in Cuphead, as before the final boss fight you have an option to turn in the soul contracts to the devil. If you choose to do so, you become the devil's minions, and after a short cutscene it sends you to the title screen, where said music plays.

I love Skullgirls' anti-piracy method of putting an intentionally-strange message onscreen for people to, inevitably, post about online because they didn't know what it meant. Once they did, they were outed as a pirate because the message only appears for people who cracked the game.

That last one is so freaking wholesome. No judgement, no halting progress, no malice. Just the dev kindly making a simple request that even ends with him still saying “you are the best.”

I think the reason people remember anti piracy screens isn’t because of video games, but because of movies. A lot of vhs and dvds would start with an anti piracy screen that can feel upsetting and confusing to kids

That malicious one made me think of that one sonic fangame anticheat that made it pretty much malware. It's more or less the creepy pasta antipiracies made real

"Why a giant portion of my viewers are suddenly REALLY REALLY interested in Mario party D.S." That's extremely funny for some reason

It's crazy that the piracy message on just shapes and beats ends with "you're the best!" The fact that the creator can show players that are playing illegally respect and trying to teach them how to support their favourite creators while not spending money is just very heart warming

I think these scare tactics are actually pretty effective, but scaring someone out of purchasing the actual game is risky. But really love the fanmade ones!

Real anti-piracy is MILES scarier than these fake ones. With the real ones you can imagine being a kid in a basement grinding a game solo after your friend gave you the disk for free, and then just out of nowhere being told you’re a criminal while the games characters stare at you with disdain and slow, creepy music and audio. You’d feel like someone, or something, is actively coming to get you.

That last part was actually very wholesome and would make me want to buy the game even more compared to other anti-piracy solutions.

My personal favorite video game thing related to piracy is from Darkwood, the developer got a message from someone who was couldn’t afford to buy the game and in response the devs put a full real rom of it on the Pirate Bay, with an official message from them saying this is for people who want to play the game but aren’t sure if they’ll like it or might not be able to afford it. Then it had a link the where you could officially buy the game and just asked people to buy it officially if they liked it or when they had enough money.

19:44 “Shameless plug, but hey! You’re playing illegally. Lets call it quits.” LMFAO

The original Alone in the Dark for early PCs came with a little code booklet. The this was TINY and would fit in your palm. When you booted up the game it told you a random page to turn to in the code book. On that page was a series of images (items from the game that could be in your inventory). You would select those images on that page's code into the game. We lost the book once and couldn't play it for months until we found it again.

Apparently the “pirata” sound file in La Abadia Del Crimen is larger than the actual game itself

Yeah, I saw the anti-piracy stuff sometimes. Once, while playing Super Metroid, the game crashed and Ridley came out and killed my parents and I had to be adopted by bird people.

Anti-piracy is dumb for two reasons: the first is that 90% of pirates will never buy your product. They just won't. Either they don't want to give you money, or they can't. If you remove the ability to access that content without the pay, you will not suddenly get more money (or if you will, it has never been shown to be signficant enough to bother). It is essentially, just spite. Second: any half decent pirate is an expert at finding and removing anti-piracy measures anyway. You're only catching the sloppiest of pirates with your anti-piracy measure, and all the downsides like extra disc space, glitches, slow loading, or accidental triggers affect everyone except the people who are the pirates that deactivated your anti-piracy. This quite literally has historically caused some games to be pirated simply because 'it's a much better gaming experience this way'. (one infamous example was when pirates removed the requirement to be online for SimCity, a single player game) When you consider the fact that, say, 10% of all pirates would otherwise pay for your game, and *at best* only 50% of pirates are affected by your anti-piracy measures (and tbh it's probably more like 10-30% if we're being generous) you are effectively protecting yourself from a 5% profit loss at the expense of all of the dev time you put into making your anti-piracy measures, maintaining them, repairing them when they inevitably glitch out, and however many sales you lose from people who just don't want to deal with your anti-piracy measures. Honestly, the only effective anti-piracy measure I've seen ever is the one at the end of this video: a simple recording of a person saying 'hey if you don't want to or can't pay for this game, consider supporting us in ways that aren't monetary'. It's probably far more effective at protecting the company's bottom line - with less investment - than anything else I've seen.

Other game companies: *make creepy ass anti-piracy screens* Dennaton Games: YAR HAR FIDDLE DE DEE

One time I booted up my copy of a Tech Rules video. For the first fee minutes, everything played out normally, but then all of a sudden, the audio got super distorted, to the point where it became unbearable to listen to. Then all of a sudden, Mario started staring at me with blood red eyes and told me in a raspy voice: “Piracy is no party.”

I like that the Ace Attorney one turns the language into a fictional language from two of Capcom's aeries

I can confirm about the "Thank you for playing" image that would pop out after 15min or so within CC Ring of Fates. It was one of the first anti-piracy screens I'd ever seen and I didn't understand what it meant at first

Fun fact! It is actually possible to trigger that cuphead sound effect. The way its done is: First go do the bad ending by offering your soul to the devil. This will make the title screen theme reversed but not reverb like the "piracy effect" after doing the bad ending, go into the title screen and punch in the Konami Code. This actualy makes that sound play. I'm geniuenly serious.

Once I tried pirating Yakuza 0. Majima came to my house and beat the shit out of me, screamed something in Japanese, and stole my money

I had this experience, one time when i was 3 months old i ended up accidentally stomping on the cartridge and shattering it into pieces. I put the shards into the console and it gave me an anti-piracy screen and then combusted into flames. I immediately died from the explosion.

My favorite anti-piracy is jsab (just shapes and beats), how the creator understands why you probably did it, but is still asks you to buy it, or have others do so, and try to support them in other ways. Edit: it's already at the end lmao

This just unlocked a core memory for me… wow. Once I bought a used copy of NHL 08 from a GameStop, and when I booted it up in the PS2 it was some samurai game that was completely in Japanese. I had no idea for literally almost 20 years how a NHL disc had a different game on it, but I feel like it might have been a pirated version. My little brother and I just assumed that the dragon on the guys chest on the cover of the game meant it was secretly a game about Samurai.. The funny thing is despite never understanding anything anyone said we ended up figuring everything out and beating the game. We ended up liking it way more than hockey. It was so strange.

My favorite Anti-Piracy system is the one of Enter the Gungeon, or rather Mod the Gungeon. If you have a pirated copy of the game and decide to install mod the gungeon, instead of starting a normal run it starts you in a room where you can only enter a boss arena. There 10 Lord of the jammed spawn (an unkillable enemy which only spawns when certain criteria are met) which almost instantly kill you due to their attack patterns. It doesnt even end there. After that the game crashes and opens two windows in your browser. These are the Steam page of Enter the Gungeon and the Lazy Town song of You are a Pirate

I remember that on zelda spirit tracks, the antipiracy would deactivate your train controls when going to the castle for the first time. Since you cannot whistle the pig out of the way, you hit it and cannot restart your train. I always found this one very elegant.

16:20 As I native Spanish speaker, I am honored to be the one with the privilegeth to translatedeth this for thou "Pirate" "Pirate" "Pirate" "Pirate" "Pirate" "Pirate" "Pirate" "Pirate" "Pirate" "Pirate" "Pirate" In the last repetition Tech Rules does something really sneaky, and changes the text on the screen to "Piñata", which sounds really similar to "Pirata" (in Spanish) but means.... well... "piñata"...

Oh I love the Rabi-Ribi one. My friend set that off on accident without knowing it was a thing a while back when he used a DLC unlocker to get the Orchestra Mode Music & Skin pack, though he just let it unlock everything and well... As soon as he loaded in I just saw him go offline on Discord and Steam and knew his PC overloaded lol

Actually for cuphead, that “spooky noise/song” is what plays when you choose (spoiler) to sell out to the devil. The next time you go to the title screen after getting that ending, that song will play.

There is actually a way to trigger the Cuphead "Anti-Piracy" reverse song, but it has nothing to do with piracy. If you get to the final boss fight against the Devil, before the start of the fight, there is a short cutscene in which you either hand over the contracts, or refuse to. If you hand the contracts over, you get the bad ending to the game, and the credits role. Once the credits are done, stick around on the title screen. That's where the reverse song can be heard. I'm not sure if it's the same one, but it's the closest thing to the supposed anti-piracy method that I know of.

What's really interesting about that soundtrack in Cuphead is like you said, it does exist in the game, it's just not an anti-piracy measure. It's triggered when the player agrees to the devil's terms and hands over the souls of the prior bosses.

The cup head “anti piracy” audio is just what plays if you say yes to the devil and re-open the game try it for yourself.

“Diddy Kong is in jail because he pirated a game.” Yoshi with tax fraud, Diddy with piracy

Yes, I would like you to talk about the Baldi's anti piracy.

I appreciate your use of real good and modified checksums for _The Flintstones: The Rescue of Dino & Hoppy_ on the NES at 13:37

13:50 yep, garbage is the only attack method in tetris too, but believe me, there is A Lot MORE of it in Tetris

Of course it makes sense Luigi would pirate stuff, he does absolutely nothing including not paying for stuff

7:53 fun fact: this audio actually ISN'T unused! It's used whenever the player goes through the "bad end" of the game (where you actually hand over the soul contracts to the devil instead of triggering the bossfight.) after the short cutscene, it will boot you back to the title screen and will play this audio file instead of the normal title screen audio (dunno why people made it into an antipiracy creepypasta)

17:58 As a developer, that is totally something I would do. It would be easy to implement and totally worth it for the lols.

Not sure if it was anti-piracy or just the disk being bad or some kind of soft/hardware issue, but I used to have a copy of MK: Double Dash and it always crashed on the third lap of Luigi Circuit, at almost the exact same time. I don't know if the game was borked or not, but that's a real thing that happened and I was genuinely concerned when I was young

“Shameless plug but you are playing illegally so we will call it quits” made me chuckle

I got an antipiracy screen on SMW when I was three months old, i cried, pee'd my pants and karate chopped my dad in the throat

Anti-Piracy measures scared the hell out of me as a kid despite the fact all the stuff i got was legit i was so scared some creepypasta-esque stuff would happen.

Ooh creepy anti-piracy myths, I wanna play! Ok how about this - In the early days of arcade games most developers were just focused on the game itself and distribution was difficult. As games gained popularity a way to get these games to the people was needed, so a company arose to facilitate this. It essentially provided a cookie cutter backend for arcade cabinet compatibility, which allowed these computer game developers to easily utilize the arcade hardware and distribute their product. One of the components of that backend api was an anti-piracy measure. Being a feature in arcade cabinets this anti-piracy measure would rarely trigger as the game player themselves doesn't have the opportunity to pirate arcade games. But if you found your way into a grey market arcade you might stumble across a machine that had detected its piracy, and triggered this feature. The feature, programmed into nearly every arcade cabinet but rarely seen, would circumvent starting the main game listed on the cabinet, and instead boot into a subversively psychologically manipulative game intended to reprogram the user into being averse to further piracy, but which led to unintended and largely undocumented changes to the minds of players. This game was titled "Polybius"

I believe the reverse title screen is used when instead of fighting the devil, you hand the souls over, and it boots you to the title screen with that playing

I once triggered anti-piracy on my Otamatone. It just played a “wah” sound whenever I touched it. No one believes me though!

A mistyped game genie code got the anti piracy screen when i was a kid. I'm pretty sure that's the most common cause of that happening. Likely, a decade or more later, they won't put together that the screen was triggered by a game genie code, just the game that they were playing

I bet the % of people who bought the game after seeing that wholesome "anti-piracy" screen in Just Shapes & Beats is way higher than the average "Piracy is a crime" screen or just crash...

Subnautica has an anti piracy feature that is on the pause menu that says “ if you enjoy playing our game please consider supporting us by purchasing a copy.”

I accidentally triggered earth’s anti-piracy and got chucked into the void. Edit: I GOT OUT!

One really malicious example I can think of was from a Japanese of Korean MMO title. When the game detected that it was pirated, it would crash to what seemed like a crash handler, and the pirate was asked to enter some personal details (Name + Email or Phone) so that the devs could "contact" the user in case they needed more info on the crash. After submitting, the game would launch again as usual (if the "crash handler" was closed on any other way, the game refused to re-launch). Now here's the twist: months after launch of the game, a new page appeared on the games website, that listed the details of every single user who had submitted this "crash handler". In essence, they publicly shamed every person who pirated the game 🤭

I remember one company released an update for their game with DRM as part of the update. This was when digital downloading of games was relatively new (mid 2000s). It turned out that the DRM required a code from the game box that the digital downloaders wouldn't have. When the company went to remove their DRM from the game...they discovered they couldn't. So they took a pirate crack from a pirate site and included it as the next update for the game. 🤣

As an anti-piracy buff myself, I'm intensely upset that there's so many fakes out there that are confusing newbies.

“Sorry I can’t speak English well” Literally is the man who said gibberish in ddlc without stuttering once

Your tone at 9:32 makes me laugh so hard 😭 it’s so accusatory

One screen I saw somebody make is for Sonic Adventure 2 with Sonic telling you that piracy is bad, but it wasn't a run of the mill creepypasta screen. That one was really cool and realistic

“Black and White stops your exp gain” Smallant: Pathetic.

why the hell did i start crying from that anti piracy message at the end he’s so understanding and supportive of the people who’re playing his game in any form

8:30 The first FNAF game was originally intended to be Scott Cawthon's final game before retiring from being a game dev. His previous games got very little attention or were just kinda forgettable. He was criticized by some people for having human characters that looked uncanny, almost like a Chuck E. Cheese animatronic, so he decided to play to his "strengths" and make an actual horror game revolving around animatronics. Then out of nowhere FNAF suddenly gained huge mainstream popularity shortly after it released, several sequels/prequels later... and here we are today. Do you really think Scott Cawthon cared about random people pirating his game while he was creating the first FNAF game? Considering that all of his previous games received very little attention, there was absolutely no reason for him to put anti-piracy measures into his game because he thought nobody would care about FNAF just like all of his previous games. Who would be there to pirate a game if nobody wants to play it anyways? And if the developer is already assuming nobody will play their game then why should they spend time and resources putting some sort of anti-piracy measure in there? Anybody who genuinely believed the first FNAF game had an anti-piracy easter egg in it either knows nothing about the game or is incredibly naive.

7:51 i love how you can just at the end of that word he just slowly cracks up

Can you imagine being in jail like: "So what are you in for?" prisoner: "i murdered 7 people, robbed 3 houses and a bank, and commited arson. What about you?" Pirate: "i was too poor for micheal jackson rhythm game" :'(

as a kid and even now, the scariest part of anti piracy protections was less so the imagery or tactics used, and more so the concept that the game was (or at least seemed) self aware. one that i particularly remember terrifying me though was the Rayman 2 antipiracy, which had a huge number of measures taken but the most notable is a giant sprite of the scary robots from the game covering your screen while a message tells you to insert the disc. what’s scarier for a kid is that it pops up abruptly and unexpectedly, and often for no reason as it happened so frequently as a bug that Ubisoft had to release a downloadable patch to prevent the anti piracy measures from triggering on unsuspecting (and undeserving), lawful players.

Closest thing I’ve found to an anti-piracy screen legitimately, was in drawn to life: the next chapter for DS where I was (for some reason) fiddling with the cartridge as I was booting up the game, and got an error screen I couldn’t trigger any other way that was in the games art style.

creepy anti-piracy screens make you cry as a kid. just shapes and beats' anti-piracy screen makes you cry as an adult

I like how the anti-piracy screen at the end just sounds like “pirating is illegal! but it’s okay, i did it too. you can pay me with exposure if you don’t have money!”

One of the best anti piracy's i have ever heard is for enter the gungeon. Not the game itself, but the addon, mod the gungeon. When loading the game, you will be instantly killed, and 2 tabs will be opened on your web browser, 1 is a steam page to buy enter the gungeon. And the second is music video you are a pirate from lazy town.

Just shapes and beats goes the whole other way, appreciating you and calling you the best