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Old-style DRM used to use game manuals. You'd have to input a specific code from the manual to progress at a certain point. Arena had that at the end of the starting dungeon. Good luck if you don't have the manual.

GTA4's main gameplay consisted of getting the bleeding thing working, consulting with R* help desk. And funnily enough that was more fun than the actual digital part.

Arkham Asylum had pirated copies where Batman's cape didn't work for gliding (it had holes in it). There were loads of posts on Rocksteady's forums asking about it, where people inadvertently revealed themselves as pirates.

There's also the pirate version of this game development game, where eventually your company goes under after you release your game because everyone is pirating it.

Some Sierra-on-line adventures required the manual in order to know the proper procedures your character was supposed to follow (protocol to board a ship in "Iceman", for instance, maybe some police things in "Police Quest" too).

Some LucasArts had a similar thing. The manual was required in order to open a safe door in "Maniac Mansion", or to fly the plane and to identify the Grail in "Last Crusade".

Opening the hatch in "Infestation" (an interesting Amiga game) required to know the main character's name, which was only mentionned in the manual.

And "Wasteland" (as well as some other game from the same company) required some descriptions paragraphs to be read from the manual.

So yeah, all the exemple that come to mind are questions about the manual, more or less well integrated into the game's story. Sometimes it was a bit more heavy-handed, like a character asking you for the first letter of the fifth line of page 28, under one pretext or another.

Ah also the manual was required for the magic recipes in "Ultima IV", so, there's that sort of documentation-based protection.

(And just remembered that "Rocket Ranger" travels by filling your rocket with the exact amount of fuel needed between two countries. The amounts were listed in a table in the game's documentation.)

In Crysis the guns will shoot chickens, if the game detected a pirated copy.

That's hilarious. :D

Why, what did the chickens do to deserve being shot?

Think there's a game where pirated copies will spawn an unkillable beast that tracks you down and tears you up.

In the game, that is.

i thought that was Doom.

And just BTW, the chickens would make the game MUCH better.
I should have gone with a pirated copy. :P

and EDIT. I just checked. It is Crysis.
Wonder why I thought Doom.
Serious Sam 3

It's a giant Scorpion.
http://www.cracked.com/article_20482_5-hilarious-ways-game-designers-are-messing-with-pirates.html

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https://www.pcgamer.com/the-best-in-game-piracy-punishments/

https://www.inverse.com/article/12807-the-13-most-hilarious-anti-piracy-traps-in-video-games

https://www.thegamer.com/15-games-that-punish-you-for-pirating-them/

https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/2n34s6/the_best_ingame_piracy_punishments/

Hyperdimension Neptunia Re;Birth is about personified game consoles, publishers, and developers. The 2nd game (Sisters Generation) lays on the pro-DRM, anti-mod, etc. message pretty thickly. Pretty funny (well, actually, mind-numbingly stupid), given it's a DRM-free game on gog.

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