'Mario Party DS' And The Art Of The Fake Anti-Piracy Screen

In October 2020, footage of a never-before-seen anti-piracy screen from Mario Party DS surfaced on YouTube after YouTuber Joey Perleoni shared it to his channel.

The video starts off as usual with a player making their way through a game of Mario Party DS, when suddenly, a message pops up on the screen and tells him he’s a criminal, playing an illegal copy of the game. After an unsettling exchange of dialogue, the screen then cuts away to an image of the whole Mario crew behind bars as an eerie song plays in the background, along with a message telling the player they've committed a serious crime and to report it to Nintendo.

The video gained millions of views as it was shared around the web, with many convinced that it was 100 percent authentic. The video seriously creeped a lot of people out, particularly creepypasta fans who have been reading about things like this for years.

It would soon come out that the anti-piracy screen was fake due to subsequent uploads from Perleoni and general cyber sleuthing, but Perleoni's video opened the door to a hidden genre on YouTube: fake anti-piracy screens.

Searching for “anti-piracy screen” on YouTube now gives thousands of videos of both real and fake anti-piracy screens from a huge variety of retro and modern games. One of the earliest videos in the genre was uploaded in June 2020 to the channel Super Mario 64 Beta Archive, which claims to post unseen footage from a beta version of Super Mario 64, but instead posts fake, creepy footage from modded versions of the game, creating something of a YouTube creepypasta in the process.

The anti-piracy screen is by far the most popular video on the channel with over 1.7 million views. Ultimately, it helped begin the fake anti-piracy screen trend, with Perleoni's Mario Party DS screen adding much-needed fuel to the fire.

Perleoni's video shares a lot in common stylistically with the Mario 64 beta video, and that's not a coincidence. According to Perleoni, creator of the now-infamous Mario Party DS anti-piracy screen, there’s an art form to making a successful fake that's still convincing. We reached out to Perleoni to ask him about the origins of his fake anti-piracy screen and to learn what makes it so successful. As it turns out, the idea came to Perleoni in a fittingly nightmarish way.

"[The idea came from] a dream I had. I was playing this nonexistent minigame where I was spinning Luigi around, then I got the two error pop-ups and my DS called the police. After that, I woke up. I started out just trying to recreate the dream, as exactly as I could. I used footage of Cherry-Go-Round since that was closest to the fake Luigi game. The error popups are the save dialog from the game with the piracy text overlaid. The screen itself was something I came up with on the spot and is 100 percent video editing (a lot of people think it’s a ROM hack). I almost left the video where the game just crashes, but I felt like that wasn’t enough. I remembered the story mode of MPDS where all the characters are in jail and thought that would be a fitting image to use as a backdrop. For the warning, I remembered what Nintendo had written in their past AP screens and based it on that. The music I made was inspired by other AP screens (especially Sonic CD) and video game creepypastas, as was the 'POWER OFF NOW' text."

The authenticity of Perleoni's anti-piracy screen is a major reason why it works so well, and Perleoni was eager to talk about that fact with us.

"There are a couple of keys that play into [the success of a fake anti-piracy video]. First, the unexpectedness of it all. The viewer doesn’t know exactly what’s going to happen right away, since the game is going as normal. But when the anti-piracy kicks in, and the game is acting differently, that unknown aspect can be unsettling. This goes with number two, which is subtleness. A lot of people making piracy screens would go out of their way to make them scary — blood, violence, bad messages, etc. While these may be scary in their own way, they immediately give the video away. Nintendo would never include these things in their games. I was very careful to write dialogs in the Mario Party style and avoid going over the top right at the beginning. People know Nintendo’s image and style very well, and it’s important to adhere to that."

The video is represented as raw gameplay footage, working on the same premise as found-footage horror movies. When The Blair Witch Project, one of the first mainstream found-footage movies, was released in theatres, many moviegoers thought it was real, quickly solidifying the movie as a horror classic.

The film itself is devoid of any major jump scares, and instead finds success through a slow build-up, tense atmosphere and authentic overall quality. Even during the climax of the film, the witch is never seen. We don't get some CGI monster or any over-the-top visual representation of it at all, and it's for the benefit of the film. It keeps the film from feeling dated, and it keeps it in the realm of realism, allowing the viewer to more easily step into the shoes of the characters experiencing the horror.

Perleoni's anti-piracy video (as well as others in the genre) fall more into the category of "creepypasta" than it does "horror film" though, taking a lot of inspiration from them, as well as from real anti-piracy screens of the past like you might see in pirated (or simply dusty) versions of Donkey Kong Country 3, or Banjo-Kazooie.

"I’ve always loved creepy internet legends, and anti-piracy screens are part of that. When I was younger, I was terrified watching all the videos of real AP screens. The SM64 screen was probably the first fan-made one and is definitely part of the reason for that dream I had."

The official Nintendo anti-piracy screens (notably the Donkey Kong Country 3 one) are fairly unsettling, especially if you consider the natural way they're meant to be found. Imagine sitting down one day as a child to play Donkey Kong Country and getting an error message like that. Many would immediately feel like a criminal, coupled with a feeling of guilt as you stare at an image of DK Jr. and Dixie Kong behind bars as a repetitive, menacing tune plays in the background.

The best in the fake anti-piracy screen genre doesn't just look like authentic gameplay footage, they also look like authentic anti-piracy screens as evidenced by previous real screens. It's even gotten to the point where it's hard to tell some fake ones from real ones, making for a fantastic rabbit-hole or first-time viewers to jump down.

"I never expected the video to gain as much traction as it did. So in that regard, my hope for the few people who saw it would be for them to think it was real with a grain of salt, like with all internet rumors. Of course, it blew up waaay beyond my expectations, and seeing all the speculation, the fan creations and the spin-offs made me super happy. When people started trying to figure out if there was a “message,” I knew I had to keep making more."

Perleoni has continued the series since, including more fake anti-piracy screens surrounding Mario Party DS and expanding the narrative around them. New fake anti-piracy screens go up on YouTube nearly every day, making it harder and harder to determine what's real and what's fake, which ramps up that level of uncertainty that continues to strike fear in those who delve deeper. There's a real art to successful fake anti-piracy screens, and if anyone's mastered it, it's Perleoni.

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