With the annoying noise of the plastic South African horns, the illegally copied game sounds more like a raucous soccer match than a Michael Jackson record.

“The development team worked this feature in as a creative way to discourage any tampering with the retail version of the game,” a representative of Ubisoft, the company that developed the game, told Wired.com in an e-mail Friday.

Piracy has become a major problem for Nintendo because of the ease with which copied games can be played on the handheld device. Unlike videogame consoles, which need to undergo elaborate hardware modifications to play copied software, the handheld DS is comparatively wide open. All one needs to do is to buy a cheap rewritable storage card, download an illegal copy from a file sharing site and load the card into the DS.

Games can be coded to have the the software check to see if it is running on a legitimate DS cartridge or if the code has been copied to a similar card. Ubisoft could not elaborate, as of press time, about the specific antipiracy mechanism in Michael Jackson: The Experience.

Battling pirates “has been like a game of cat and mouse,” Nintendo President Satoru Iwata told investors in October. He said that while Nintendo does not entirely attribute low software sales to piracy, the company is “beefing up” the copy protection for the Nintendo 3DS, which it will release next year.

The unique antipiracy measure coded into the Nintendo DS version of Michael Jackson: The Experience, which was released Nov. 23, is just the latest — and perhaps most hilarious — method used to fight illegal copying.

Many games have installed switches that detect pirated copies and act accordingly, like ending the user’s game after 20 minutes. Ubisoft has come under fire multiple times for what players have seen as highly restrictive antipiracy measures that annoy legitimate users as much or more so than pirates.

But some more mischievous developers have used tricks similar to the vuvuzela fanfare to mess with pirates.

Batman: Arkham Asylum lets unauthorized users play through the game as if it were a normal copy, with a single exception: Batman’s cape glide ability doesn’t work, rendering the game impossible to finish — although you might bash your head against it trying to make what are now impossible jumps.

If you pirate Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2, brace yourself for an explosion, as your entire base will detonate within 30 seconds of loading the game.

Similar methods of messing with pirates’ heads go back at least to the 1995 Super Nintendo role-playing game Earthbound. It had a slew of antipiracy gimmicks: In addition to filling copied games with an aggravatingly large amount of enemy encounters, it would freeze up just as the player was about to fight the final boss after 30 hours of adventuring, deleting every saved game on the disk.

Despite such measures, Alex Neuse, whose company Gaijin Games creates the Bit.Trip series for WiiWare, estimates that a whopping 70 percent of copies of his games are pirated.

“Piracy especially hurts small, independent developers who don’t command the sales figures/profits that the bigger companies do,” he said in a statement earlier this year.

See Also:

• Ubisoft Ditches Draconian DRM for Steamworks
• Live Blog: Ubisoft’s E3 Press Conference Gets Kinect’ed
• Michael Jackson Moonwalks Through Gamer History

Authors: Jason Schreier

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