"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."
"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."
Nintendo used a delayed-action anti-piracy trap in some Super Smash Bros. N64 cartridges that allowed 68 successful boots before activating a restriction. On the 69th play the game locked single-player matches to Mario and could erase other save data or character selections. The measure primarily affected knock-off or pirated cartridges commonly sold in physical markets in the late 1990s. The punishment remained mild because two-player functionality persisted and single-character play was still available. Allowing extended play before enforcing restrictions can treat pirates as potential customers and can be an effective anti-piracy approach for some developers.
Read at Kotaku
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