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Olden Lore

Hilariously Evil Anti-Piracy Protection in EarthBound [Video]

by James Plafke | 11:15 am, February 15th, 2011

Nowadays, piracy protection usually focuses on prevention rather than punishment, but back in The Day, before technology allowed constant Internet connections and horrible, system-degrading mechanisms, developers had to get creative with piracy protection. The above video shows one instance of how EarthBound, known as Mother in Japan, got clever and sneakily evil with their protection: At the boss fight with Giygas, the game freezes and forces the player to reset, and when they return to the saves menu, they discover the game erased their save file, causing them to lose all of their progress. EarthBound games are oldies, so the piracy protection focused on checking if the game was using a cartridge copier. At least back then, one could find humor in the ways developers dealt with piracy; now it’s all constant Internet connections and registry edits.

(via reddit)

  • Chaosritter

    People are still trying this kind of anti-piracy meassure now and then, but unfortunately, it causes more harm than anything else.

    Titan Quest for example lets the game crash when the checksums don’t match. Unfortunately for Iron Lore, people tried a leaked copy with a bad crack first and branded the game as buggy and unplayable, causing it to fail on the market. But I guess the fact that it was a boring Diablo II rip-off played a role as well.

    Drakensang would also delete all of your saves when it suspects you of using a pirated copy. Unfortunately, it worked a little too well and deleted the saves of legit customers as well until it got patched.

    In Divinity II, your dragon would randomly die when you use a pirate copy, but just as in Drakensang, it affected legit copies as well, causing quite a lot of drama.

    In 1701 A.D., the A.I. would refuse to trade with you and always threatens with total annihilation if you don’t call your (non-existent) battle ships back. For instance, this actually only affected pirate copies.

    This kind of protection worked for old consoles, but as soon as its possible to change hardware configurations and do software updates, its more likely to scare people away instead of making them buy a legit copy.

  • Irritated EarthBound Fan

    James Plafke, this is shoddy ‘journalism’ at its finest!
    Might wanna fact-check your stuff before posting it here (or anywhere else on the web).

    Earthbound ‘Zero’ (unreleased) for NES = Mother 1 on Japanese Famicom
    Earthbound for SNES = Mother 2 on Japanese Super Famicom
    Fan-translated ROM patch = Mother 3 in Japan

    Earthbound for SNES is NOT ‘Mother’, rather it is MOTHER 2!!!
    Get your shit straight or just don’t bother posting stuff.


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