“R.I.P. Zeus 2020–2020”

(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…