Many years ago, I worked on a product that provided a bunch of old emulated games. We properly licensed them, but many of the license holders no longer had the original ROMs, ripping the game data off of some of the really old consoles was quite difficult, and the only ROMs available publicly were cracked copies with demo's added. That was the birth of the demoscene, which was awesome, but bad for us trying to legitimately provide these games. So we ended up cheating. We used the cracked versions of these games, but we always loaded the games from a state just past when the demo would play, making them look normal and legit. Thank God all those early cracks put their demos only at the start and not, like, between levels 1 and 2, or we'd've been screwed.
This is more common than you might expect.<p>The Windows port of Marc Ecko's Getting Up: Contents under Pressure being sold on Steam is the DEViANCE crack.<p>Open the game's exe in a hex editor and you can plainly see "DEViANCE".
> This explains the myth of the retail MC2 crashing on Vista - the game is most likely innocent, as the demo works great out of the box. IT WAS AGAIN THE CRACK breaking it.<p>Myth? Innocent? That game was totally unplayable when it first came out (for 98/ME?) so I doubt Razor made anything worse. I'd get most of the way through any race before the game randomly crashed.<p>It would be funnier if it weren't so absurd, since I'd have to go through finding the opponent in the world, chasing them to the starting line <i>and</i> doing the race itself each time.
Related story, I remember years ago as a kid I bought a Prince of Persia PC game at a yardsale (on a CD), but early on in the game there was a riddle where you needed a password to get through this door, it was some cryptic message of a few numbers.<p>I don't remember the exact format but it turned out the riddle was instructing me to go to page X, line Y and character Z of the manual for the game!<p>I remember being so sad that I couldn't play anymore because I didn't have the manual but in retrospect I wonder if this was an anti-piracy strategy
Note that, as mentioned later in the twitter thread, the executable in the screenshots (testapp.exe) is not used. It was briefly used like a decade ago but has since been replaced; they just haven't removed it from the distribution, for some reason.
This is not new: <a href="https://torrentfreak.com/ubisofts-no-cd-answer-to-drm-080718/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://torrentfreak.com/ubisofts-no-cd-answer-to-drm-080718...</a>
<a href="https://nitter.unixfox.eu/__silent_/status/1698345924840296801" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://nitter.unixfox.eu/__silent_/status/16983459248402968...</a><p>Who could have thought what a company with billions of revenue would use the cracks from RAZOR1911 for IP they are <i>selling</i> to the end users?<p>Shocking!
It's actually kind of like a bizarro version of open source: someone or some group may be the initiator of a project but some of the community that grows around the project also contribute back to it, making it a symbiotic relationship. Just, in the bizarro version, there's an even more complex ecosystem filled with people who get to play a game where they hunt down some of the members of this community and make angry faces at them and sometimes put them in jail.
Razor 1911 ! I had completely forgotten about them. They cracked games in the 1990s, and if memory serves well, there was a nice ascii art logo that came with games.<p>Apparently they’ve been active again since 2010, but in my ( much older ) mind, steam has made piracy mostly obsolete.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Razor_1911?wprov=sfti1" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Razor_1911?wprov=sfti1</a>
Maybe Rockstar has former, maybe even current members of Razor 1911 among their staff.<p>I mean, the scene is not a reliable way to pay the bills. You need to find a "real job" at some point, and the skills you get by cracking software and making demos could find good use in the video game industry.
The copy protection wars were a blast back in the day. A decent number of games had methods of copy protection that were more interesting than the games themselves. I still remember the Wizardy IV copy protection (Mordor Charge Card). The game came with a book of thousands and thousands numbers printed on very dark brown pages that were difficult, if not impossible, to legibly photocopy on the machines of the day. I still have the book, and it takes a very bright light and (in my old age) a magnifying glass to make out the numbers for the copy protection challenges (which only come after completing a somewhat challenging first level).
This reminds me of a (popular) iOS game that had a little bug. I reported it hoping for a quick fix and they replied that the developer was no longer available to fix it, but they can refund me the app price..
Honestly, it's fair game. I don't expect every studio to have the source code handy and someone who knows how to build and modify the game anymore. If the crack does the job, I can empathize.<p>Inversely, it's not like the crack was made just out of educational curiosity. At one point it might have hurt sales... now somehow it helps.<p>Not like the group would have a moral high ground to claim their copyright was violated. Though the idea is fun.
Rockstar owns the copyright, they can do whatever they want with their games.<p>It is rather odd however, and paints Rockstar in a very negative light as a trustworthy purveyor of binary distributed software. Do you want to receive l33t warez when paying for software?<p>I expect reproducible binaries produced by a controlled toolchain from a responsible developer. Linux distributions have higher standards for binaries they distribute for <i>free</i> ffs.
30 years ago, when I worked at a computer shop, the manager had an original Atari ST game with a bad disk. He didn't want to throw it away, so I reformatted the disk and copied a cracked version of the game onto it using XCopy on Amiga. The cracked version didn't have any intro btw... lolz
Wouldn't it be just easier for everyone not to include DRM in the first place? Waste of money, vast majority of zoomers dont use cracks anyway.<p>(I am talking with the context of current games using denuvo, not this specific case)
Does this mean, then, that their integration to Steamworks or whatever client-ensuring integration... is missing?<p>One could presumably then archive the directory and go DRM-free
While not too big a deal on its own, if the binary was doing something it wasn't supposed to (which was/is common with cracked games from untrustworthy sources) it would open Rockstar up to a mountain of liability.<p>I'm guessing this is some subcontractor taking shortcuts rather than an official company policy approved by legal.
Why is this hex dump being used as a verification rather than just showing the two (supposedly the same) hashes of the entire executable themselves? Should be a quick 20 minute job for whoever call themselves "journalists" today.<p>I suppose it's possible for that particular string to get into the binary by some other means. Maybe failed anti-circumvention that checks for known strings in its own directory or something similar?