Anti-piracy measures, as a rule, suck. But when they’re funny, they get a pass. Super Smash Bros. for the Nintendo 64 falls into the latter category. As revealed by chronicler of Mario-related oddities Supper Mario Broth (thanks GamesRadar), the game will eventually lock you into 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 newborn 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 flea market. 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.
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, with 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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