A sneaky surprise for players sailing across the seas with a skull across their flags, resurfaced a shocking 25 years later to the amusement – and slight horror – of Super Smash Bros fans.
Nintendo’s approach to fan-made mods might be slightly stingy amid ongoing legal battles, but there is no doubting the creativity of this anti-piracy measure.
The game doesn’t crash the game or even wipe your save data, no – it slowly lulls the pirating player into a false sense of security, before pranking them into oblivion; you’re now officially locked into playing Mario permanently, after exactly 69 playthroughs of your illegally acquired copy of Super Smash Bros.
How Did the Super Smash Bros Piracy Trap Actually Work?
We’ve seen many anti-piracy features employed by disgruntled developers in our time as a gamer, but many of them were simply blunt instruments designed to make games unplayable and punish the pirate that way. This time though, Nintendo took a different route, by literally locking 90% of the content for you after the 69th try.
That is according to according to Mario trivia aggregator Supper Mario Broth on Bluesky, who claims after the 69th try the trap would spring and no matter which of the various, colorful characters you’d tried to select, the game forced you back into playing the Italian plumber. Forever.
While sure, Mario is the face of Nintendo, but being locked into his oversized plumbing pants for eternity stripped away the variety and replayability that made Smash Bros into the classic it is today.
There’s More Nintendo Anti-Piracy Stories to Be Told
If you thought that the hearts and minds at Nintendo pranked players and showed unconventional tactics to combat piracy. Sometimes you’d be faced with corrupted save files, unbeatable bosses, or deliberately bugged gameplay for those cheeky fellows running a pirated copy of a classic Nintendo game.
The goal here wasn’t to stop piracy, although it was that too – it was more to frustrate those who even attempted it. In that case, the Smash Bros trick stands out, because of the false sense of security one felt when falling into this trap.
The delayed execution made this punishment sting even more and is just as psychological as when Spyro the Dragon did it – by randomly removing hard-earned collectibles and even more spontaneously teleporting the little fire-breather, basically making the game unplayable after a certain time.
