Carmack's piracy protection was bleeding-edge stuff, back then!
https://github.com/keendreams/keen/blob/master/kd_main.c#L39...
https://github.com/keendreams/keen/blob/master/kd_main.c#L39...
For the confused. The piracy.h and those two lines were removed.
Since VGA text mode used one byte to select the character (from a font of 256 entries), and one byte to describe the character's attributes (16 colors aka 4 bits, bold, strikeout, reverse), the resulting buffer for an 80x25 display was 80x25x2 bytes, aka. 4000
When that's done, it waits for the user to acknowledge the anti-piracy message by pressing enter.
This is basically the early 90s equivalent of the "you wouldn't download a car" advert
Edit: Corrected "not"