Garry's Mod Catches Pirates the Fun Way

UgLyPuNk writes "A few hours ago, Garry Newman – the creator of Garry's Mod – asked, quite innocently, whether anyone was unable to shade polygon normals. He received a few comments, mostly jokes, but a quick look at Google suggests that there are indeed a few people who are experiencing problems with their game. You can hear Newman's chuckling from here — not the normal response to a wide-spread bug report, but this is no normal bug. It seems that the developer has deliberately enabled an error in GMod, which will only affect people who have pirated the game."

Not a new idea

[Anonymous Coward]

Back in the 80's, the developers of a submarine game called Silent Service built in a piracy check that would cause the sailor guy's pants to fly up over his head if your game failed the copy protection. They got quite a few phone calls from baffled pirates.

The article site sucks

[O('_')O_Bush]

It takes a couple minutes just to load the page banner, then once it does, it redirects to an advertisement page.

I like to RTFA, but you can be sure that I won't be visiting that site ever again.

WARNING - DON'T CLICK THE LINK

[Gordonjcp]

There's an incredibly loud auto-playing advert. Thanks for the warning, guys.

More advert submissions from the slashdot janitors...

Re:What's the point?

[AAWood]

It doesn't actually just stop shading, it makes the game crash out whilst giving a fake error message stating which says something about shading.

Re:Ultima III

[mark-t]

If you were able to buy it legally where you lived in the first place, there is no reason that I can think of that you would not have been able to get it replaced where you bought it. Did you even try?

Not that it matters now, being so many years ago, but there are sufficient details missing from that account that I'm not particularly inclined to empathize with your situation.