Since the dawn of time (well, the 1980s) copy protections have had booby-trap/fail pits. Some of those fail routines have been remarkably creative (and occasionally ridiculously destructive).<p>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).<p>This one is curiously poetic. Very meta. But still a logic bomb.<p><i>Don't</i> booby-trap your code. It's incredibly unethical and stupid. Logic bombs misfire. Frequently.
Here is the original source with more details:<p><a href="http://www.greenheartgames.com/2013/04/29/what-happens-when-pirates-play-a-game-development-simulator-and-then-go-bankrupt-because-of-piracy/" rel="nofollow">http://www.greenheartgames.com/2013/04/29/what-happens-when-...</a>
My immediate thought was about this interesting sounding book [1]<p><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Surreptitious-Software-Obfuscation-Watermarking-Tamperproofing/dp/0321549252" rel="nofollow">http://www.amazon.com/Surreptitious-Software-Obfuscation-Wat...</a>
Although amusing at first, if this practice would become widespread everyone would just wait for cracked release of proper version from respectable cracker team. This game is in unique position though because it is itself about making games.