[JeanMarcS]

Well, in the 80's I had an Amstrad CPC, and there was a game named "Le passager du temps" ("Passenger of time") [1]. It was a text adventure game with some graphism in it. The goal was to explore the house of your uncle and find out where he was.

After a while, you found a machine and when you finally assemble everything and start it....the game stop working and loop in a "we're tired of hacking" message ! Of course, with the cracked version.

And it was clever, because

1) you tried the game and enjoyed it. And now you're frustrated and want to play it, so you might actually buy it

2) the anticopy test was late in the game, so everyone who copied it thought the copy was ok and spreaded it.

A sort of shareware.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AWqnM-yyfPQ