Developers have been creatively messing around with pirates for decades now. Serious Sam had that invincible scorpion. Talos Principle had an elevator that didn’t actually go anywhere after playing the game for several hours.
Dungeon Master: Chaos Strikes Back had phantom sector copy protection that the game would periodically check to make sure the reads were random. If the checks were always the same, after a while, it would kill off your party, and not give you the option to reload. (You could still reboot the computer and reload that way.) I remember playing this game as a kid, with a pirated copy, because we were poor, but had good pirate connections. I figured out how to fool the system by taking out the disk when it was trying to read it, and only putting the disk back in when it really needed to load, like when I’m going up or down stairs. According to the pirates that finally cracked the protection, it was the hardest challenge they ever had.