SimCity had a hard to copy (at the time) red/black card with city populations, and during the game it would ask you for the population or name of cities based upon a graphical indicator lookup. If you failed the check it would inflict an unending series of disasters on your city.

There have been a couple of times even in modern games like Civ 6 where everything goes so wrong I wonder if somehow it erroneously flagged itself as pirated for some reason.