It’s Halloween Week on Unsung, where we’re sharing scary, spooky, and creepy stories.

Early home computer games came with awkward anti-piracy schemes: “grab a word from the instruction manual” prompts, code wheels, or other mechanical gizmos. Not knowing the answer meant no play.

Later on, as we’ve talked about before, some games tried to be more sneaky, or cute, or gaslighty, depending on your point of view. Instead of closing the door outright on you trying to play a pirated copy, they would pretend everything was okay – and then quietly the game would mess itself up, taking away some of your enjoyment, or preventing you from winning altogether.

It’s perhaps not a surprise that this in turn inspired some people to invent fake, creepy DRM schemes. A lot of them.

This 2022 video from Izzzyzzz covers that story:

The video is from four years ago and I will admit that this – the creepypasta, the Slendermans, the Backrooms, the Five Night At Freddy’s of it all – is the part of the internet I don’t fully understand. I didn’t dig deeper into more videos covering efforts like this, but it was at least interesting to see what people did with those and that point in time. And, it sure as hell – no pun intended – it felt like it belonged in Halloween Week.

If you don’t feel like this is your kind of video, I screenshotted some of the games from the video. But I won’t tell you which ones of these were real anti-piracy screens, and which the strange internet art that blew up in the early 2020s: