Devs make cracked game impossible to win
kottke.org
kottke.org
Delayed flags with adverse consequences, subtly changing CAD points or musical note timings or slowly corrupting user data if a dongle has bad wiring. Deliberate hardware damage, from the C64 disk drive happily being made to chew on its own heads to (arguably) setting counterfeit USB serial interface chips to a PID of 0. I've even seen one which quietly dropped to desktop with a virus when tripped (in fact this was the origin of that particular bootsector virus, which achieved an unexpectedly wide spread on its platform, and its own payload had a generation counter attached so you wouldn't notice for quite a while).
This one is curiously poetic. Very meta. But still a logic bomb.
Don't booby-trap your code. It's incredibly unethical and stupid. Logic bombs misfire. Frequently.
However, in this case they didn't booby-trap the real product. They released a special "pirate edition" torrent with the "piracy logic".
I'd consider it a kind of "collector's edition" ;)
http://www.greenheartgames.com/2013/04/29/what-happens-when-...
http://www.amazon.com/Surreptitious-Software-Obfuscation-Wat...
Now, EarthBound had a hook like that one [2], where the game would first make it much more annoying to get through the game (by churning out extra random encounters), and then when you get partway through the final boss the game will freeze and delete your save game.
[1] http://forums.eidosgames.com/showthread.php?t=95030
[2] http://earthboundcentral.com/2011/05/earthbounds-copy-protec...