

Steam version of Max Payne 2 is a version cracked by pirate group Myth - aresant
http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1263556

======
angusgr
My guess, on no basis apart from outside knowledge of some other game
developer build systems, is that they couldn't actually build this game any
more.

I bet either their build system fell apart from disuse, or the one person who
understood it left, or it wasn't documented and people just forgot over the
years. It was all too time-consuming, manual, and complex compared to using
the cracked executable.

~~~
InclinedPlane
Seems the most likely, the software industry is pretty bad about maintaining
old tooling for this sort of thing.

~~~
mahmud
Sometimes tool vendors deliberately sabotage your maintenance efforts.

A friend of mine called me over to show me his codebase, which is diligently
maintained over 12 years using MS Visual Studio 6. As he booted the machine, a
.NET update dialog popped up and he clicked "OK". .NET was updated, along with
some important VS6 components, and when he fired up the IDE it told him it
need to upgrade VS. After upgrading VS, reluctantly, he was no longer able to
build the project.

~~~
roofone
To be pedantic, that's not MS deliberately sabotaging the project. That's
perhaps MS being reckless with their upgrades, resulting in (I would suspect),
an alienated customer.

My lesson from this comment and the story is that configuration management is
more important than I thought.

------
angusgr
The other scary thing is this isn't based on decompilation and analysis of the
instructions. It's based on Notepad.

Which implies that Rockstar not only used the crack, they didn't even verify
what the crack changed in their binary (otherwise I assume they would seen the
logo and at least blanked it out.)

This, in my opinion, crosses the line from "inventive, unethical and lazy" to
"extremely reckless, unethical and lazy."

~~~
romland
_Rockstar not only used the crack_

If I recall correctly Myth was not just a cracking group (as in ISO release),
they did ripping as well. This basically means that you remove some content
from the game (or by other means making the game smaller) in order to fit it
into whatever space is the current standard.

Unfortunately I can't find a .NFO regarding the release that lists Myth as the
cracker... But it makes me wonder if something was ripped here. :)

NB: Only searched here:
[http://www.nfohump.com/index.php?menu=quicknav&item=sear...](http://www.nfohump.com/index.php?menu=quicknav&item=search)
\-- enter Myth into "Group" field if you are curious about what else they were
up to.

 _Edit_ This was Myth's farewell note:
<http://www.defacto2.net/groups/myth/mythbye.nfo> which states that they did
ripping:

    
    
         We believe that the rip scene is one of incredible skill. Not only 
         is there the cracking talent needed to be successful like that of ISO,
         you must have dedicated coders and rippers to fully complete the task. 
         Much time is needed to perfect a rip like that of Neverwinter Nights. 
         (We'll never forget you old friend)
    

A bit later on in that same paragraph they continue with saying "We see groups
throw out games now with stolen cracks...". Now, who would have thought that
Rockstar...

That said, I am not 100% convinced that this was actually a stolen crack. I'll
wait for Rockstar to confirm or deny this (or if someone actually has the
original release and does a full diff). I base this mainly on three things:

1) I could not find any release information stating Myth as the release group
of MP2. This does not mean much, however. And it was just a quick search.

2) It could actually be a joke by Rockstar. I mean, imagine you sit there with
the task to _remove the copy protection_ of the game, you bounce it with your
boss he laughs and nods and you throw in that Myth logo.

3) It's also not completely unlikely that the guy recompiling the game had
some connection with Myth once upon a time. Back in the day (teenager, very
long ago <sigh>) we were a bunch of people cracking games for the fun and the
race and the majority of them actually went on to work in the gaming industry.

So, can anyone do a diff of the binaries? :)

~~~
aw3c2
Yeah, this is weird. Max Payne 2 was originally "scene released" by DEViANCE.
There is no hint at Myth anywhere on any pre-db I checked. Seeing as many of
the Remedy Entertainment developers had their origins in the demoscene, a
connection to the warez scene and thus an ex-scener "faking" this does not
sound too unlikely.

~~~
u238
See my comment below. Myth and DEViANCE were partners.

~~~
aw3c2
You are right, the DEViANCE executables both have the Myth logo in them.

------
jpcx01
Pretty funny, but seems like a perfectly valid approach. Some dude at Rockstar
could either code a no-cd workaround himself to get it listed on Steam, or
just reuse one that already works (and was extremely well tested by the pirate
community). Imagine trying to obtain (and understand) the source code for a
game binary released 7 years ago

No brainer if you ask me. He just forgot to remove the credits.

~~~
Psyonic
As backwards as it seems... isn't that copyright infringement?

~~~
sliverstorm
What, infringing Myth's copyright on the crack? Even if you're right- they had
a copyright, and it was enforceable- I doubt there is a person who would be
willing to step forward and claim ownership of the crack. Whole point of
anonymous groups was nobody could pin it on you.

Plus, restitution of copyright infringement is usually based on damages done.
Considering Myth's 'product' was free, there are no sales damages.

~~~
pmh
Technically, restitution could come in form of statutory damages instead of
actual damages. In the US though, the work has to be registered and the crack
would certainly fall foul of the DMCA anyway. It would be interesting if a
cracker in another country claimed infringement.

------
u238
This was probably more than just a no-cd crack. Most retail games are
protected by some type of packing system (meaning the .code section of PE
executable is encrypted on the hard disk and then decrypted once in memory).
The cracker has to dump the .code section to the disk once it is unpacked
while in memory and then rebuild the executable (hence the ability to put the
Myth logo in the file) to run properly (and probably cracking the additional
no-cd checks).

So this is could be bad, real bad, since it's a executable that was basically
rebuilt from a memory dump, not by a compiler.

------
DCoder
Electronic Arts did a similar thing when creating the C&C First Decade
collection DVD: Red Alert 2 was recompiled to modify CD checks (the game
compares the CD label against a hardcoded one, on top of the usual CD checks),
but its expansion pack, Yuri's Revenge, was hex-edited instead to the same
effect. This was done to maintain compatibility with the community-made patch
that hooks into the EXE at assembly level to add new functions and fix bugs.
(I'm the current lead developer for said patch.)

See, EA is not _all_ bad. :-)

------
thenbrent
Maybe the Myth team now work for Rockstar and just wanted to reuse their own
code haha.

------
kevinh
Max Payne 2 just updated on Steam. I'll give you guys two guesses at what
happened to the executable.

------
est
I remember years ago the same thing happened to another steam game?

~~~
romland
Yeah, Ubisoft used a Reloaded crack for Rainbow 6: Vegas 2. :)

------
u238
uh, will someone just do a fc.exe /B already?

~~~
romland
Not sure why you were down modded. I'm pretty curious myself.

(fc.exe = filecompare)

~~~
yread
I think he is getting down modded because game executables are usually packed
when they come from the distributor and the crack groups pack them again some
more to save space and protect the changes they made from competition.

Cracking a game like that involves running it getting the image of it from
memory (perhaps multiple times) and then reconstructing important loader
structures (library imports, sections, resources). And only after that can you
actually concern yourself with removing or overcoming the actual software
protection

~~~
u238
I know how they are cracked (<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1343066>). I
was wondering why no one was doing a file compare on the original Myth cracked
exe and the one from Steam.

But you're wrong about game exes being packed by release groups. There is
nothing to "hide" from other groups. Once you remove the commercial protector
(SecureROM, etc.) the rest of the patches are pretty trivial.

------
tlb
Probably just a Martian face. I suspect you could find equally plausible logos
in many binaries by trying enough combinations of screen width & formatting
and doing some kind of image recognition on the ascii art.

~~~
chaosmachine
It's much easier to see when you use the proper font.

<http://imgur.com/ztRPu.png>

~~~
u238
+1 for DAMN NFO Viewer ;) old skool

