The Horror Of Anti-Piracy Screens 

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There was a really cool piracy screen in 'Just shapes and beats' for a bit where a little photo of the developer would pop up and basically say "I get it, i played pirates games too, but if you like the game please help spread the word about it so other people might buy it" - thought it was a different and pretty cool approach

The scary part about anti piracy screens is the 4th wall break. You're the one that's supposed to be observing, but when it suddenly begins observing you, then it's chilling

As a little kid the "FBI it's illegal to make copies of movies" screen before all movies used to scare me so bad, I was so worried I'd copy a movie on accident and go to prison

as a gamedev, you've gotta remember that us gamedevs want people to buy their games, not to traumatize people. I'm working on a joke ms-paint looking visual novel / point and click game about shopping in a store and hijinks ensue, and i have heavy anxiety over game ERRORS, let alone piracy screens, so for the full game the piracy screen will be a version of the game where the real store would be replaced with a party city and when you get the only possible ending there it pops up a message saying "enjoying the party? download the game!" with a website link. I'm trying to create something that would make me laugh when i was 7, not cry.

Just getting error screens about actual game errors scared the shit out of me.

The fanmade Ace Attorney one where they have a court case convicting the player for pirating the game will always live in my memories. Really made me feel guilty even though I didn't even pirate it.

Pokemon Black's anti piracy is one I find fairly chilling, in it's extreme subtlety. It just doesn't give you any exp from battles. You don't even notice it for a while, which is why it's suddenly pretty scary when you get that "hold on, something is wrong" revelation.

The Izzzy anti piracy screen at 8:53 being followed immediately by a jc penny ad was one of the most severe tonal whiplashes I've ever experienced

I was shitting bricks whenever I saw the "Viewer Discretion is advised" screen on TV. If I saw an anti-piracy screen as a kid, I'd never sleep again.

I don't think I ever encountered any anti piracy screens myself, but as a kid I loved the game Theme Hospital. Some of the later levels were a bit tricky for me back then so I tried entering a cheat code, which caused the hospital intercom lady to say "THE HOSPITAL ADMINISTRATOR IS TRYING TO CHEAT" or something along those lines, it did catch me by surprise but I could laugh about it 😅

There's a game that has a small community called just shapes and beats, and there's a legitimate anti piracy screen that actually is extremely nice. The main dev who worked on the game explains how he's not angry in the message, and how he used to pirate games as a kid as well. It doesn't let you play on, but it's a subtle reminder that it is a crime, even if it's common to do as a child since you don't know any better. It's a simple "hey, I did this too when I was your age, but you should know that this is something that can get you into big trouble. As much as you want to play this game I can't let you because it would be a crime" instead of something that scares you out of it. One of the best possible ways to execute it imo.

personally, ive always been extremely creeped out whenever pbs would thank me for watching a program. so i think i would’ve died on the spot if i ever got an anti piracy screen

i have a terrible fear of still images on a screen where there is supposed to be a video (don’t ask why, it’s so hard to explain, it’s so unsettling to me) so stuff like this scares me shitless

To be honest, the only thing about anti piracy measures that have ever spooked me was false positives. Being locked out of legitimate copies of games because something broke or it's just old is something that I would not want to happen

“You’ll be making Lasagna in prison for the rest of your life, Garfield!” needs to be an anti-piracy screen.

When I was younger in about 2011, I had a friend at my house and we where playing in my bedroom. We had our DSs and where just messing with the voice recording game. I had the radio on and we started recording 5 second clips of the songs on the radio so we could put voice effects ontop of the singing. We thought it was hilarious. Then the music ended and the radio started reading out the news. There was the usual news stories and then a short message from the radio station saying it's illegal to pirate music off the radio and recording songs is a serious crime. My friend and I both freaked out and ran downstairs to tell our mum's, who where in the kitchen. We where apologising because we where scared the police where going to come to my house to arrest us. Our mum's just laughed.

i feel like the scariest part about anti-piracy screens (at least as an adult, im 21) has to be the eerie music or even the lack of music. i would probably be shit scared seeing any of these as a child no matter what sounds they played but even as a grown-up these certainly are uncanny

The way that anti-piracy screens are unnerving reminds me of the way emergency alerts are unnerving. I can’t explain it, but it triggers similar emotions in me.

The baldi one REALLY got me. That one was really high on the trauma scale. Anyway i was like 11 at the time, it was like 3am, everyone else in the house was asleep, and i was in bed watching disney channel, and out of nowhere the screen goes black and theres a red line with moving text on the screen that says "weekly test" or whatever. The alert sound started and mind you the volume was loud. Hysterical as i was, i plugged my ears the best i could, and ran to the tv to turn it off. I couldnt sleep after that.

I think the creepiest one I’ve encountered which is also real, is one from the game La Abadia Del Crimen. When you walk into this church, it begins playing choir music like usual, but then the game gets stuck, and you hear this bit-crushed voice repeat “PIRATA” while the voice gets deeper and slower with every repeat, until it finally crashes

Fun fact: Game Dev Tycoon's "piracy mode" also inspired people to pirate it just to see it/attempt to beat it, which lead to the game adding it as a sort of super hard/challenge mode to legitimate copies.

That Nintendogs one is the most fucked up to me. Like you get a short time to love your new pup, grow attached to it, only to have it suddenly die, and show you its grave. Kinda reminds me of that game Can Your Pet? It's dark, it's upsetting, and it's the most effective (albeit fake) antipiracy measure.

Honestly, disk-reading error messages still terrify me to this day.

i think the thing that scared me most, and still scares me now, is red text. still, i find red text just so eerie, even if it is something as simple as an error, like a disc not being read, or something disconnecting. it is just so scary, no idea why haha

i was always pretty confused about the whole ''scary anti-piracy'' thing because as someone whos dad wouldnt spend a single penny on a videogame when i was a child and the minute i asked my dad to get me a game he'd go on a certain filehosting site with ALOT of pirated content i ran into these quite alot and was basically desensitized to anti piracy screens

These have often scared me more than any actual horror game

I got a false positive on Spyro 3 and ended up with Zoe warning me about my supposed piracy when I was around 8 years old. I remember it terrifying me - I was the ultimate goody two-shoes kid, always trying to be on everyone's good side and never breaking any rules out of fear, and the sudden mention that I was somehow breaking the law was so scary. I didn't know how anti-piracy screens worked at that age, so although I knew they were just characters in a video game, it felt like whoever ran the company somehow knew who and where I was and they were going to track me down and arrest me. Even as an 8 year old I knew that sometimes innocent people are assumed guilty by the police so I remember laying in bed crying about how I didn't want to go to jail lol

I would laugh my ass off at the goofy "You wouldn't steal a house" anti-piracy warnings on DVDs. These, on the other hand, would have scared the hell out of me as a 12/13 year old.

honestly real piracy screens are much more eery than these creepypasta ones to me. just the fact that music cuts out and all that's left is a blunt message is pretty creepy espiecially if it was encountered alone or at night

These developers took the phrase 'scare them straight' and ran a marathon with it.

"Scurvy" is actually much more clever than you think. Sailors would get scurvy if they stayed out to sea for too long (or, pirates), since they didn't have a sufficient source of Vitamin C. It makes your bones soft, and it is (obviously) fatal. It takes a long time for someone to die from scurvy, but it's not really known if it's painful or not.

This really reminded me of Emergency Alert System scenarios for some reason, I think you should look into it! It's similar in the same "analog horror" way as anti-piracy

I remember there was an anti-piracy ad that would play on Australian DVDs where a picture of a movie, usually happy feet, would be set on fire as it said something like "when you pirate movies you're destroying cinema". That ad scared me so much as a kid that I had panic attacks everytime I saw the ad, and eventually every time I saw a happy feet DVD case. I don't know why it affected me as much as it did but jesus I still sometimes struggle if I see anything that reminds me of happy feet or the ad

It sorta reminds me of those warnings before movies on vhs/dvd that'd like "Do not copy this tape, it's a crime, and you can face up to 6 years in jail." Those always scared me despite being 8 and not trying to pirate Rugrats

Dude, the Nintendogs one BROKE me when I first saw it. I'm both relieved and a little disappointed it's fake. It's a sickly genius way to traumatize kids into never pirating games again. Lest the characters in those games get inflicted with "scurvy" too. I bet it would have been very effective.

This video was so satisfying. I thought I was always so silly for getting nervous and plain scared by anti piracy screens or warnings. Although this is for movies, I would always dread the anti piracy warnings on DVD I would see before watching childhood movies like Aladdin with my family during movie night. We would click play on the title screen, I was cuddled next to my mom with a blanket and ice cream. But what I knew was coming was a dark screen, no sound, and words like “FBI,” “prison,” “crime,” etc. It felt wrong to see. It felt too touching. So when you said these screens make us feel vulnerable, especially as it breaks the fourth wall, you got it right on the money. And after that, the movie would play, but my nerves still haven’t settled. I sincerely hated the precautionary piracy warnings as a kid it was an unnatural fear 😭

I actually beat the final boss on a pirated earthbound. Was playing through on an SNES emulator, which has reloadable save states. Every time the game would freeze I would reload the previous save state and each time I did it I was able to progress a little further into the fight, which I would save and reload to. Took like three hours. Interestingly, once the battle ends so does the anti piracy measure and it lets you watch the final cutscene uninterrupted.

when i used to obsessively play moshi monsters i remember one time i typed a gift code wrong and the moshi monster that would 'eat' the code and throw up the gift would just make a weird noise and spit the code out if you put an invalid one. absolutely terrified me and ever since that moment i would leave the room when entering codes in case i typed them wrong because i didnt want to hear that sound 😭 if i ever saw an anti piracy screen i think i wouldve collapsed.

I’ll never forget one day when I was on RU-vid and I stumbled across a n “ace attorney anti piracy screen.” It played out like a normal level, but had the player on trial for piracy, and ended up being convicted. I was much younger at the time, and the video gave me nightmares. Surprisingly though, it ended up motivating me to wishlist Ace Attorney on Steam, and I ended up getting it.

My favorite anti-piracy measures are in Persona 4 and Persona 5. Towards the very beginning of the game, it cuts to a HUGE spoiler; a confrontation between the MC and the main villain. There are fully voice-acted lines of the villain(s) calling you out for piracy. Its a creative way to keep people from pirating- nobody wants end-of-game spoilers.

Love the concept of people pirating Friday Night Funkin instead of just going to Newgrounds to play it for free, and it being such a problem that they had to make special anti-piracy measures

"why are you in here?" "i killed several men. you?" "i pirated undertale" "stay the fuck away from me"

Never came across anti-piracy screens, but these scary fake ones reminded me of real emergency alert messages that would pop up in the middle of your Saturday morning cartoons. When I was a kid, I couldn't help but panic when the familiar and unsettling emergency alert screen came on in the middle of my show. I got so scared to the point I was in tears. The buzz sound made it even worse. Amber alerts are also terrifying to me, even as an older teen

I love everyone sharing their strange mid 2000s early online horror experiences. All of us kids who were in the transition and grew up online but right before the cut off. I wish there were more support groups to talk about 2007-2012. My heart aches.

The image of the Mario characters locked behind bars in the Mario Party DS anti-piracy screen is actually in the game. It appears in the story mode, where Bowser locks all the characters behind bars and then shrinks their size down. I've seen some confusion where people think that the image is fake along with the rest of the screen, but it's as real as mayonaise

The Earthbound anti piracy measure is hilariously harsh. Imagine thinking you got away with it, made it to the end of the game, and then the whole thing just crashed while you lost your save. Like damn, ice cold 😂.

Not an anti-piracy screen, but one of the games i play has a screen that will pop up if you type language it deems “inappropriate”. It just says “please do not use inappropriate language” but it fades on and off the screen. It’s always creeped me out since the first time it went onto my screen

When I was 7 I got an anti-piracy screen on my Nintendo DS in a Tinkerbell game, so, my parents called the numer in the manual the game card came in. It turns out that it was a legitimate game and somehow a false screen was triggered. As a kid I was really freaked out and came crying to my parents. If I remember correctly, Tinkerbell was trapped behind wooden bars with a disappointed queen on the bottom screen flashing "Power off and eject game card" while the top screen talked about how it was a serious crime and also gave instructions.

The eerie sounds or silence of an Anti-piracy screen makes it feel like you got yourself into a huge trouble. Like someone or something is coming to get you. Like you unleashed something. Plus, it's very immersion breaking and takes you out of the game sometimes just to call you out. It's pretty cool and creepy.

I never got an anti piracy screen, but as a kid playing Sims 2 on DS I changed the time to get around a morning/night based element and triggered something where aliens invade your town due to time travelling and you can’t continue your game, they just continually make you faint until you go back to an old save. The idea of a game having self awareness, that it could tell what I did to the hardware, scared me so much I had nightmares hahah

Not exactly a pirate screen, but I was playing a newer Indie dating game called Curtain Call. I played through all of the short routes, and I saw someone mention that there was a secret ending. Being somebody who likes to see that kind of thing, I started trying to figure it out. None of the routes were creepy or even remotely unnerving. I get to a screen that seems to be pushing a limit with a character and think “oh maybe this will give me like a bad ending?” And out of nowhere the character just says “you thought wrong” and the screen and her character glitch out with a static sound cue. No pop up, but I was definitely not expecting it. It scared the absolute garbage out of me and I instantly got off the game. Especially considering it’s not well known and there was very little information about the game, it felt super isolating, with no comforts about people even getting that cutscene. It wasn’t really a jump scare, just felt like a genuine callout directly to me for overstepping a boundary

I always say I’m not scared of anything..... but this. And any error screens. Even seeing the words “serious crime” or “power off your console NOW” or seeing my favorite character sitting there staring at the screen as a kid I would be traumatized. I’m even scared of amber and weather alerts. Even a little glitch in the game. If honestly say it’s my worst fear

That intro was so cool, fits the retro arcade game aesthetic perfectly.

There's just this spooky surrealism to playing a game as you normally would just to be interrupted by a screen or dialogue telling you the game is pirated. That's the main thing for me.

When i was 8 i got a legitimate copy of the sims 2, without a code. Im not american, and when my dad called some people and got an email to get the code, it took like 3 days. Then we got a new computer and my dad lost the email and thought nothing of it, i was like 10 and had to call the company myself. I was on the phone on and off for about 5 hours with the same guy who wanted tk do everything but help me, called me names, was super rude and told me to get my parents many times even though i told him i was home alone. I called him about 4 times, but on the second time i told him that the guy i talked to before was super rude and im just a 10 year old trying to get a code for a video game, and he just told me its him and hung up on me. I kept calling and annoying him, and still got no help. My dad contacted them a few days later and a really nice lady answered and solved our problem in a few days. Nowdays I have severe anxiety from calling people i dont know, whether its ordering a pizza or looking for a doctor or something. Im so happy they stopped using these codes

i think that people tend to dismiss these things just because they're fake, but they're, jus like you said, pieces of art. The creativity that comes into making a spooky, yet subtle screen like this is endless, and that should be applauded on its own

For me personally, I always found the piracy screens really goofy, even as a kid. "oh what, Sonic is going to try to shame me for committing a crime? what do you know? you're a hedgehog!" idk, the sudden tone shift and fourth wall break was jarring but in a way that just made the entire situation seem silly.

To me, one of the reasons why they're scary is because it's calling you out for something you actually did. Like a guilt trip in a Undertale genocide run, you feel horrible because you know you. Or if it's a false positive, then it's changed to a fear you might feel when being wrongfully arrested. Also, I watched this video about 4th wall breaks in video games and how that in and of itself can be scary because it's popping that comfortable bubble of being anonymous and inconspicuous, to being known and very much conspicuous. The same video also said what if Undertale had pulled a Psycho Mantis and during the genocide route Sans said something like, "Why don't you go play Overwatch so you can let them down instead?" And simply reading that in the video hurt.

I always had a mini-fear of piracy warning screens. Even though I never had any pirated copies of anything, I still found the warning screens on my Thomas DVDs about copyright and FBI piracy crime to be very unnerving and unsettling, especially as a young child

My favorite anti-piracy was a greentext about a guy who downloaded a sketchy copy of a game and his printer printed a piece of paper 100% black front and back. idc if it's fake or not it's just so funny

Probably my only experience with this is stealing from a shop in Zelda-they changed my name to THIEF for the rest of the game (it even shows up on the save file) 😭 If that's not anti-piracy I don't know what is

also, story: not anti-piracy, but the linked fear of a loud/repeating noise glitch. i was little, playing indiana jones wii with my mom, and suddenly the game stopped and glitched. it repeated the same noise over and over and i was petrified

the idea of seeking refuge in a game as a kid, only to be jolted back to the harsh reality with themes of CRIME SHAME and LAW popping into your mind. i think its the contrast of the two oposites that make these so intimidating, feels like being caught with your pants around your ankles.

Kids take things like this so seriously. I remember reading a standard epilepsy warning on one of my games as a child and running to my mom asking her if I were going to have a seizure now. 😅

my favourite DRM is definitely from a game called ''la abadia del crimen'', where after a specific part of the game, there is a loud voice getting deeper and slower, and calling you ''pirate'' alongside of an ear-scratching glitch noise. the game then shuts down and deletes the save. i think it's so much scarier than the fake ones

The funniest part of DRM is that it basically only protects the first few months of sales. Companies normally invest a lot of money on good DRM because those first sales are the ones that allow them to make their money back, but even good DRM eventually tends to get cracked anyway.

The thing is, they’re not supposed to be scary per say. They’re just supposed to inform you about the crime you could unknowingly be committing. But, that black screen staring back at you is just… creepy.

8:34 I love how she put her own anti-piracy screen in the video. 😆

i fell for the Earthbound anti piracy measures when i was a child and for a long time i would think Earthbound was this extremely hard game and people who liked it were insane

I get pretty creeped out by some old technology stuff. Especially error screens because a lot of the old ones were very unsettling if you weren’t expecting them. A lot of those Nintendo ones talking about serious crimes would have scared the hell out of me lol

This video made me remember a recent thing that happened. I was wonder trading a bunch of contrary snivys I hatched while shiny hunting in Ultra Moon (surprisingly, plenty of people still trade on those games) and I got traded an obviously hacked shiny Celebi. Didn't feel like leaving the plaza to release it just yet, since I still had like 20 snivys left, so I kept trading. All of a sudden, while looking for a trade, the game cut to the generic blue shape background used when trading, with a message that said something like "A communication error has occurred. Power off the game now." I knew why it happened, and I knew nothing bad would happen to my save as I've gotten this exact message before with no repercussions, but for some reason it freaked me the hell out. So I just shut off the game, put away my ds, and played Legends: Arceus instead. Haven't turned it back on since. Might do that soon.

I feel this way too. Some of my favorite fakes are the animal crossing new horizons ones from your thumbnail. The one where you wake up and the entire island is completely empty really creeps me out.

The funniest part is; I've only ever played pirated copies of games for like, my whole life. We don't really have much money in my family, so playing videogames is something we could never afford, yet I always loved. And in my whole life of playing any pirated game I want, I've never seen an anti-piracy screen at all lol I'm guessing the people that make the copies actually take the time to get rid of those screens or weird methods to kinda lock you out of the game, so yeah, I guess they don't serve much of a purpose other than making "pirates" work a little harder, probably so the copies take more time to come out and the game gets a good amount of sales before that happens.

I recently saw a fake anti piracy thing for Animal Crossing New Horizons where a new character appears and kidnaps one of your villagers and I’m just genuinely fascinated and confused about how you would make that. The character looked exactly like they would be in the game, everything looked right and I just have absolutely no idea how you would achieve that.

i had a pirated copy of spyro 3 as a kid and i was traumatized by zoey breaking character like that, it was literally like past my bedtime, parents were asleep, that happened, and i went to wake up my mom because i was so scared that something was wrong lol

The piracy screens I always feared where the characters themselves call you out. Like a real Wreck It Ralph kinda situation where they just break character

Mario Party DS Anti-Piracy was wild. Just the sheer insanity of the escalation from Bowser saying he doesn't party with criminals, to the game somehow calling 911 through your DS and telling you to turn yourself in, to a completely original boss fight mini-game with a banging remix of the original video's music. Also, if you translated the Japanese developer notes in the videos, most of them were along the lines of "TO HUDSON SOFT: _Please_ fire the programmer who keeps sending us builds with all this weird anti-piracy shit. -Nintendo"

IMO what makes these anti piracy screens and analog horror so effective is that it makes you the main character of the story. You aren’t reading about creepy occurrences happening from a characters perspective, it’s happening to you.

My favorite anti piracy screens personally are the ACNL ones. Since Animal Crossing is such a peaceful game, the sudden anti piracy screen scare that accuses you of being a thief is just jarring and scary.

Breaking through the fourth wall, that summarizes it exactly! I remember as a kid, being scared when the TV stations would close down at night because it felt like the announcer was talking to me and looking at me, scolding me for not being asleep yet like a good kid should be. Also I love your hair and hat in this video, very cute colors.

The Elmo with a knife one made me actually laugh out loud. I live for chaotic Elmo

Btw, "game developers" weren't pissed that people used to be able to pirate games easily. There is a class line here. The game developers aren't the ones making money off the sale of the game, they are only paid for their labor in making the game. The owners of the company are the ones who lose profit if the game is pirated

The anti-piracy screen thing reminds me of this dream i had.. I was trying to play a game on my Nintendo 3DS but it wouldnt let me open the game. It just showed a grayscale picture of Luigi's face (it was kind of similar to the uncanny Mr. Incredible meme, which I hadnt seen before at the time). The picture showed up on my family's 3DS screens too. It still creeps me out. I thought I was weird for being creeped out by a gray picture of Luigi but then I saw this video.. lol I havent even heard of anti-piracy screens until now (Im very uneducated when it comes to video games) but it gives me the same vibes as the Luigi thing. Edit: lol I got an ad when you did the anti-piracy thing (8:46-8:57)

When it started to glitch a ad came up lmao 8:37

Dang, the whole talk about activation codes sent me back! I remember all my pc games needing you to enter the activation codes in order to install the game. My family had an old computer, so we would only have a few games installed at a time, then uninstall and re-install if we wanted to play them again. You’re 100% right about them being a pain for regular users, because I definitely lost access to some of my games because the code would get lost. And this was also back when my family didn’t have any internet at all, not that anyone would know or think to try to look up codes online just so I could play Disney Animated Storybook Mulan. Lol In general, there is something just extremely unsettling about piracy screens. I’m glad I never ran into one as a kid, cause they would’ve scared the bejeezus out of me. A lot of the scare factor is definitely feeling vulnerable and watched, but I think another thing about them that frightens me is the broken trust between player and dev/company, and that they want revenge on you. Like, a game is supposed to be an escapist activity, something fun and then to suddenly be reminded that this game is a product made for profit first and foremost is just kinda? And that feeling that these people who made a thing you enjoy now hate your guts or something. Idk, it always creeps me out.

The anti-piracy measures being so inconvenient for people who just bought the legal copies is such a fail imo - not to mention that it can make it impossible to keep your ownership of the game longterm, like you said you can just lose the activation codes. When I tried installing my Sims 2 discs recently, I found out EA games let the licence expire, so even though I had paid for the games, and taken good care not to lose the stupid booklets, I had to "hack" my own PC to make it stop checking for licences because otherwise it just wouldn't install these games I genuinely paid for. aaaaaaargh!

honestly if all the fake creepy pasta anti piracy screens were real, i feel like piracy would be very unpopular.

This reminds me of one of my earliest memories. I had a Barney VHS and when it got to the end of the tape there was a blue splash screen with the production company (the Lyons group I think) and Barney's voice narrating cheerfully, "Copyright 1993 (or whatever year it was), the Lyons group!" For some reason that scared the FUCK out of me as a toddler.

I'm surprised you didn't mention "BAD EGG". it was a very well known anti cheating measure for Pokemon games. I remember kids at school would spread the news about it, warning everyone to beware of the "BAD EGG". it's a glitch that happens when you use cheat codes. it takes the 1st pokemon in your party and permanently traps them into a "BAD EGG" and this egg is also locked into your party, so you are unable to get rid of it. but otherwise, you can continue to play the full game as usual. this glitch never happened to me personally, but it did unfortunately happen to my sister. we had a Game Shark (a device that contains a huge database of cheat codes for just about every game you could imagine and you'd connect it directly to your console) and we used it a lot. I gave myself unlimited rare candies, unlimited master balls, unlimited max potions, and so on. I even gave myself rare shiny pokemon, even legendaries. I was undefeatable. however, I never received any punishment for it. unfortunately, my sister used the Game Shark device and ended up with the "BAD EGG". she was extremely upset, because the egg had taken over her Kyogre. not only was this one of her favorite pokemon, but she had captured it fair and square on a legitimate game that she purchased. it's still trapped inside the "BAD EGG" to this day. why she got punished for using cheat codes but I never did, we'll never know.

While not quiet an anti-piracy measure, I remember playing Animal Crossing for the GameCube back in the day, traveling to a friends neighborhood on a second memory card, and all of the weird stuff that could happen there. The developers included an "easter egg" that occurs when you turn the game off in another player's neighborhood. You would lose all the items in your inventory and your character's face would be replaced by two empty eye sockets and a gaping circular mouth. It terrified the hell out of me as a kid. I basically quit Animal Crossing for several years after that. It's hilarious in retrospect, but man, I chucked my game across the room when it happened.

i’ve seen a lot of people shit on the obvious scary and fake screens but i honestly really like them along with the believable ones. i like how goofy, creative, and fun they can be sometimes :]

23:05 one my my favorite 4th wall breaks was when flowey talks to you, the player in undertale genocide route

Gotta admit, I was a little scared of watching this lol. I thought you were gonna show an image from Sonic CD that absolutely terrified me when I saw it in a video at age 11. But since you didn’t mention it I felt the need to google it. Turns out that 1: the image is real and not a creepypasta 2: it’s not an anti piracy function but a hidden message from Masato Nishimura who worked on the game and 3: it’s not as scary as I remembered, it’s just pixel art of Sonic with a laughing human face and a moustache

when i was a kid there was this anti-piracy ad that played before brazilian dvds where a mom bought a pirated dvd for her kid and then a bunch of armed men showed up and started shooting the air and thanking her for the money, it was... an experience

18:41 this one makes me nervous and teary eyed cus my tea cup chihuahuas name is Zeus lol

Not quite the same, but I remember as a kid we had an attachment for our gamecube that let you play gameboy games on it, and if the cartridge was loose or pulled out, a loud noise would play and a big red message would appear on the screen telling you to shut off the console and put the game back in properly. The first time my sisters and I witnessed it was late at night with all the lights off, and it scared the absolute shit out of all of us.

I know these became a big creepypasta staple recently, but the thing is... I'm not sure they were ever really... A thing? Like, yeah, I guess I have some very vague images of a generic screen identifying a game file as illegitimate in my memory if you really press me, but 99 times out of 100 what a game would do is just let you play for a while and then silently lock you out of progressing any further.

There was a German one for movies where a family of two kids and their mom where singing happy birthday at a prison, and when one of the girls ask “mommy when is daddy coming back” she goes “after we sing four more times”. The implication is that the dad distributed illegal copies and is now in prison for five years. The warning was mostly on children’s movies, so I think it was to scare parents by using children, while the kids themselves wouldn’t really get it.

It's always morally correct to pirate a triple A game and save the money for indie games