Crime and Punishment

Copy protection

The Commodore 64 edition, maybe others, held a clever easter egg to trip up casual pirates (meaning, the consumers who used fancy clone programs to replicate commercial game disks, not the people who wrote such fancy programs). Since the fancy cloners were in a continuous arms race against the copy protection schemes of game makers, one could never assume the fresh copy would work without actually testing it. Typically, just running the copy for a few seconds was sufficient, as most games in this era would refuse to start up at all should their copy protection mechanism detect end-user duplication. But woe to the one who copied THIS game at a friend's house, only to take it home and discover that although the false clone would run just fine, it would only ever offer one case to judge: "software piracy," for which the correct answer was always "death penalty."