Spyro Had One of the Coolest Anti-Piracy Measures Ever | Tech Rules

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I originally learned all this from an article on The Cutting Room Floor. Check it out for more detailed information on some of the payloads!

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[TechRules]

Hey, everyone! Sorry if I sound a little weird in this video; I was recovering from being sick at the time of recording, but I didn't want to delay the video any longer than I already did. Feel free to correct me on anything I messed up on, and I'll add it to this comment!

EDIT: Proto pointed out to me that the random crashes were actually a problem on my end, not the crack protection. Sorry about that!

(And yes, I accidentally called the immortal scorpion an unkillable crab demon. Fight me.)

[ChannelForRandomStuff]

That final bit of anti-piracy is so brilliant though... “The Adventure Continues” as it wipes your game. Oh yes, the adventure never ends.

[kinnikuchu]

That's why I never finished Spyro. Had a copy like this and never understood why the eggs kept disappearing. Then I reached the final boss and boom... all eggs were gone and my save file erased. Never tried Spyro again.

[Existent]

"I would enter a stage and end up in a comepletely different world"
OHHHH, SO THAT'S WHY THAT HAPPENED. MY MOM GOT ME A PIRATED GAME

[RiggeeD]

My dad used to crack games for me as a kid. Spyro was the only one that was store-bought and I can finally understand why.

[FelipeDermann]

I was one of the victims, I did not have access to a legit copy of this game whe I was a kid, literally all retails around my region had the cursed Paradox version and I had to push through all of the game's copy protection during gameplay while blaming the stores for making "low quality copies" as I'd call them. Unbeknownst to me was the fact that the game itself was trolling me all those years.


I remember clearly speaking to Zoe and seeing that dreaded text that I was playing an illegal copy of the game and that really scared me at the time, to hear a videogame character get out of role and break the fourth wall as if it knew what was happening in the outside world. Missing eggs, missing gems, having to rebuy characters or stuff to be able to access previous stages.... I never experienced the language switching problem though.


Oh boy so many things went wrong and I persisted every time just to have a shot at the final boss, see if I could beat her before the game decides to pull the plug and erase all my data. I used to remove the memory card when attempting the fight so that my save wouldn't get overwritten. But when I tried to load the save again there'd always be several things missing, including the freaking vehicle that you need to get across the other worlds would randomly disappear and I'd have to redo stages and hope that I could get it back.


I'll never forget when I somehow managed to glitch the game to send me into the super bonus stage, the final level you can go to when you beat the game 100%. I was never able to 100% the game due to the anti-piracy stuff so I really have no idea how I entered that place, but I only managed to do that once. When I turned the game off and loaded the other day I couldn't get back and again lost a bunch of progress.


My kid self deserves a medal for all of the persistence I had to go through all of this shit.
It was very rewarding when I played this game again years later with an actual working copy this time, I beat it 100% and closed this case forever. That shit felt like my greatest achievement in gaming history.

[Synfinate]

Yes, the rocket crashed in into the balloon. Took me years but I finally figured out that my parents bought me a cracked version

[ysquaredyobozo]

10:15 the "saved successfully" is probably the biggest middle finger they could have given

[TheRedfieldWay]

I'm just surprised that Zoe actually voiced the hack warning. the devs took this piracy very seriously

[blastoff]

**adds pirate protection to discourage pirates**

**More people pirate the game because the pirate protection is so cool**

[Chubbasaurus]

Imagine a young kid's confusion when they got this game for Christmas, having no real idea what piracy and chipped consoles really were, and all this started happening.

Yup. That's what happened to me.

[nalinea]

”They even thanked the coders for giving them such a difficult challenge.”

I have to hand it to Paradox: they’re some polite pirates.

[robibofbankshire]

The final reset has the same energy as when I once played a modded Skyrim, a random encounter had a mage challenge me to a wizard battle, and he said the phrase, "You call that magic? I'll show you real magic!" and then proceeded to CTD me and that save was now corrupted. It was by far the strongest mage I have ever seen. He rewrote the player out of existence as if I was someone in Yugioh GX season 4.

[dubstepmonsters]

“Pirates at bay” is the most underrated line in this whole video

[redouble_]

everybody gangsta til the penguin starts speaking German

[justawanderingoldman]

Aaah.... so it's an anti piracy system... I remember when was I still a kid, I bought this Spyro game from one of a big PS game store. I and my big bro love Spyro games. So we bought it instantly without thinking too much. That time, I was still a pure little kid who didn't know that pirated disc exist. After a long fun run, the game reset itself around the endgame part. But what i did that time? Together with my brother, we *did it all over again* . We thought it just how the game supposed to run. We keep trying it again and again. More reset happened, and we gave it another run. I remember that we even reached a stage when we could complete the early to mid game part in just some hours.The loop continued until one day, our PS broke and we ere forced to stop. So yeah... we never finished it lol. More than 10 years passed, I got my hand on a PSX emulator. I downloaded the Spyro 3 iso, and challenged it with my emulator. And that time, I cleared it (since it's cracked properly lol). Sadly my big bro died from illness several years after our PSX broke. So I, alone, finished our revenge to the "Impossible to complete" game. You can rest in peace brother... I defeated our enemy!

[GraysonAndBlue]

"Unfortunately the final boss contains the most evil trick of all.."

YouTube hits me with an ad lol. Nice timing

[sebtile]

meanwhile in the UK...
"hey look that guy has a quest for me!"


"Вы украли эту копию, так что теперь я вырву ваши глазные яблоки.."

[B_dev]

there should be a speedrunning category for this

[honey-bun]

This is gonna sound really dumb, but I've always been a little bit scared of these types of things. Like not SCARED, scared, but it's kinda spooky to me