Anti-piracy measures, as a rule, suck. But when they’re funny, they get a pass. That appears to be the case for the Nintendo 64’s Super Smash Bros., which as revealed by Supper Mario Broth (thanks GamesRadar) will lock you in to being able to play only a single character, but only after you’ve played the game 69 times. Dude.
I’m so adorably naive that I didn’t even realize pirating N64 games was an option back in the day. Of course, in 1996 when dial-up internet was a new-born baby, this wasn’t a case of downloading ROMs from the internet, but rather buying knock-off N64 cartridges from that dodgy-looking stall at the mall. As a rule, when the game’s name was written on the cartridge in Sharpie, or it featured a black-and-white version of the sticker but with the writing in German, it probably wasn’t wholly legit. And it seems that if that’s the version of Super Smash Bros. you bought in ’99, it was trapped.
As Supper Mario Broth puts it, the anti-piracy measure here was “delayed action,” allowing the player to boot the game an enormous 68 times before anything would happen. Then, on the 69th time of playing, you’d suddenly find yourself locked in to only being able to play as Mario. Anything else would, the social media account reports, erase all your save data.
It truly is the most mild of punishments. If you loved that game enough to play it almost 70 times, you’d eventually be stuck, er, still able to play the game in two-player, and limited to one character for single-player matches.
Funnily enough, Nintendo’s devilish trick here gets close to one of the very few actually effective anti-piracy measures to have been used: when a game lets you play it for so long before popping up a message saying, “Hey, you pirated this! We hope you enjoyed it so far, and if you want to carry on, buy a copy here.” Treating pirates as potential customers has proven lucrative for many indie projects over the years, while draconian systems based on hardware locks, disc requirements, and game-slowing software used by AAA publishers have only ever punished legitimate purchasers, all such restrictions inevitably removed from the pirated versions.
And yes, it’s very unlikely Nintendo picked 69 for comedy reasons, but I still like to believe.
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