The folks over at Rockstar probably aren’t too happy about this, but it seems that a cracked version of Max Payne 2 was distributed through Steam for a short period of time. While we do know that Rockstar was thinking of removing the DRM from this game, it’s still unclear whether the reason the crack was distributed was due to laziness to fix the code, or if it’s some developer’s version of a joke. When you peek into the details of the executable file, you can see the rather obvious ACSII art depicting “Myth”, which is a group of crackers that are responsible for many no-CD game patches. After the news broke, the cracked version was pulled from the Steam store and replaced with a genuine copy, though it seems the new version is v1.0.98, older than the previous cracked 1.1.102 version. Aside from this gaffe, it seems that even though Rockstar fixed this issue, the Myth logo is still visible is another binary bundled with the official download. So are game companies defeating their own copyright protection via third party hacks nowadays? What do you make of this?
Filed in . Read more about Crack, Max Payne, Rockstar and Steam (Valve).