Anyway: since I played some old games quite a lot (using DOSBox), I encountered the anti-pirate checks with the manual quite often. One of my favorite games, the old Master of Orion 1, had a colorful list of all spaceships in the game, and each had its own name (though you could give your ships any name you wanted). The game always wanted you to "identify" a ship it displayed on the screen -- you had to choose the correct name from 6 choices.

(And by the way, maybe some sort of it persists even to this day. I guess there are still people who would take the question "How to fly?" in MM's as a "Proof-of-No-Purchase" .)