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Rockstar is selling cracked game copies on Steam
- Reubend 3y agoCould we get some more context than this tweet (which doesn't really explain what's going on)?
- robbiet480 3y agoThe game shown here, Midnight Club II, required the CD to be in the drive to play it. With the advent of Steam and companies releasing older games on Steam, they needed a way to bypass that check. Bypassing a CD (commonly called No-CD) was a very common crack/DRM bypass back in the day. Rockstar didn't want to bring up old source code and find someone who understood it enough to remove the check, so instead they just installed a No-CD crack into the existing EXE and uploaded the thing to Steam.
- baobabKoodaa 3y agoSounds like Razor could sue Rockstar for copyright infringement. That would be hilarious.
- jiofj 3y agoThey could. They would lose, though
- bogwog 3y agoBecause Rockstar is a huge company, or because the dev wouldn’t have a case?
- wongarsu 3y agoA No-CD crack might not be transformative enough to warrant copyright protection as derivative work in the US. But they could sue in a jurisdiction that is more likely to give them a favorable outcome. Handling of derivative works and the minimum threshold for copyright varies considerably between countries.
- Guvante 3y agoLikely Rockstar would counter sue for violating their original Copyright and the terms of use attached to them. At best it would be a wash, there is a decent chance the damages for the countersuit would lead to a net loss.
- ArnoVW 3y agoThe can sue them for anti-circumvention statutes in the DMCA. But not for infringement, since the developers did not do the infringement, they only enabled it.
- favorited 3y agoHow did the cracked game enter circulation, if the crackers didn't redistribute it?
- methou 3y agoIn this very specific case, it's a no-cd patch, you can be a legitimate owner of the copy but for some very valid reasons that do not want load the CD every time you play the game. (Like disk and/drive wearing, or just don't like the hassle)
- hnick 3y agoDo those statutes apply for interoperability? Which takes precedence? This is basically how Rockstar used it - to make the game work on computers without CDs. So the actual rights holder has recognised that this tool or one like it is legitimately required for interoperability, between the game as a piece of technology and a modern computer. They won't work together otherwise. Maybe I am being too tricky but that's how I see it. And if that makes it a legitimate work then it's funny to think about the consequences.
- ArnoVW 3y agoCertain excemptions are provided in the DMCA, and have been established via jurisprudenence: https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2021/10/28/2021-23311/exemption-to-prohibition-on-circumvention-of-copyright-protection-systems-for-access-control https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2021/10/28/2021-23... Geeks often think that the law is some sort of blockchain-esque thing that is absolute, context-free and machine-interpretable. In reality, many laws require 'guilty intent' (mens rea). This is why we have 'judges', who perform 'judgement'. So the same tool called 'no-cd', marketed as a backup tool may be judged 'OK', where 'WaR3z HaCk.exe' published by a group of known software pirates will be judged 'anti circumvention'
- parineum 3y agoWhat's the copyrighted work here?
- baobabKoodaa 3y agoBoth the original game and the no-cd crack are copyrighted works.
- parineum 3y agoWho owns the no-cd copyright?
- baobabKoodaa 3y agoWell, obviously the people who wrote it. They don't own the game, which they didn't make, but they own rights to the cracking code, which they did make.
- enos_feedler 3y agoFormer cracker for rzr here :) did not do this game unfortunately.
- effingwewt 3y agoThank you for your service o7
- apgwoz 3y agoOh, you "didn't" do this game, wink wink, nudge nudge. ;)
- pizzafeelsright 3y agoQuestion for you from the 17 year old me. Why did you do this? Fame? Money? Challenge? I didn't know enough to so it myself and no one would teach me.
- blagie 3y agoHaving done similar (not identical) things at that age, a lot of it is quite literally for the LOLs, and more than a bit is for community identity. Fame: Non-existent, since you don't tell people. Money: Non-existent, you don't get paid. In retrospect, I think a major drivers for teenagers for a lot of activities is a sense of identity. You feel like one of the role models in [name your favorite hacker movie]. It's the same reason why punks wore spikes and mohawks, goths wore black, and people might pick a genre of music (even if privately). I'd guess a lot of more negative things, like vandalism, are similar too. You become part of a community too. And ultimately, you contribute to it. As much as it might be illegal, cracking software helps other kids who can't afford that software. Few real engineers will use a hacked copy of AutoCAD, and literally everyone I know began to pay for music once they could afford it. On the other end of the bell curve are kids who can't afford those. Providing them with access is a community service. And it's going up against The Man. It's illegal, but by the code of ethics we followed at the time, it was very ethical.
- joshmn 3y agoI've done something similar in recent past on a large scale: I did it because it was interesting, I wanted to prove DRM is a flawed concept and broken construct, and because the community which I built (as a result) was really great and a home to me when I didn't ever experience one. It was never about money or fame, it was about providing something to people that had a value. People said the "thing" I provided was better than the "real thing", and that gave me a sense of pride: I'd never get hired by the company that made "real thing" to make their "thing" better because I didn't have the credentials on paper. But at least my "thing" was better.
- 3abiton 3y agoI wonder if No-CD was released under a specific open-source license, that would be hilarious
- jonny_eh 3y agoRazor1911 was the cracking group in this particular case.
- gintoddic 3y agounderstated context here
- OnlyMortal 3y agoHeh. I recall their demos on the Amiga.
- tpmx 3y agoProbably Norway's most long-lived and industrious software export success. Founded in 1985.
- readyplayernull 3y agoSomehow I expected them to be founded since 1911, cracking those Analytical Engines.
- nikanj 3y agoIt’s 0x777, making fun of all the l33+ 666 groups
- OnlyMortal 3y ago666. My favourite error code to return when there’s a “wtf” error.
- bonestamp2 3y agoThat's hilarious. I wonder what the license model is for the crack that they used.
- kolanos 3y agoDid Rockstart have to license Razor1911's cracking software? It would be ironic if Rockstar was in violation of Razor1911's copyright.
- yomlica8 3y agoAre we sure they didn't just lose the source code entirely?
- rightbyte 3y agoProbably unbuildable anyways without a lot of effort if you can't recreate the workstation that was building it.
- fragmede 3y agoThese days you'd save a VM image, but if we all move off x86, what good will that do?
- Moomoomoo309 3y agoQEMU can run VMs that are a different architecture than the host. There's obviously a performance penalty to doing that, but it can be done.
- michaelt 3y agoThese days you'd save a VM image, in case you need to rebuild the code in 20 years. Then in 20 years you boot up the image and find you can't log in because your cloud Windows account was deleted 10 years ago for inactivity, your build toolchain is too outdated to download artefacts, the vendor of your text-padding library deleted it in a fit of pique, your code-signing certificates have expired, the guy whose cell phone is on the corporate account 2FA left the company 15 years ago, the OS vendor won't allow new releases to use those obsolete, deprecated APIs.....
- jamesfinlayson 3y agoYou'd hope not, but it could be backed on something like a tape drive: too much effort to retrieve and then access.
- ewzimm 3y agoDid anyone at Rockstar ever confirm that it was an official decision? I wonder if they did assign someone all that and they took a shortcut.
- rpdillon 3y agoThis is a great example of how today's "piracy" is tomorrow's "only working copy left". I wish there were a more formal way to explicitly allow this, though I'm probably just pining for shorter copyright terms. This game was released 20 years ago, longer than the original U.S. copyright term of 14 years.
- chrisco255 3y agoDisney lawyers, meanwhile, are looking to extend copyright to 50 years beyond the life of the author's 3rd generation descendant or the heat death of the universe, whichever comes last.
- darth_avocado 3y agoThe way things are going, the death of Disney may come quicker.
- StimDeck 3y agoLolwat? Have you been to Disney? They take all your money. Have you watched a movie? Chances are Disney made it happen. I want to know in what world a company like Disney goes anywhere and then send Microsoft and Amazon there.
- red-iron-pine 3y agobased on what? their stock is taking a hit but they're still a big, scary corp, and will probably win the fights with FL's a-hole governor.
- raymond_goo 3y agoWalt Disney share price declined 3.9% on Thursday to close at $82.47, its lowest level in nearly nine years, or since October 16, 2014. Investors expect more weakness in Disney shares in the next few months. https://www.livemint.com/market/stock-market-news/disney-share-price-falls-3-9-to-close-at-lowest-level-in-nearly-nine-years-11692932062912.html https://www.livemint.com/market/stock-market-news/disney-sha...
- Akronymus 3y agoOne game I really loved as a kid, sim coaster, has a nocd crack floating around, sadly it blocks some needed features further into the game. And I can't find any non-crack iso to load into the VM. (Can't rip it myself, due to not having a cd drive anymore)
- demarq 3y agoCracking was a 90s term for pirating software
- itsnotlupus 3y agoCracking is about removing anti-features, typically copy protections. It pairs well with pirating, but neither one strictly requires the other.
- nonethewiser 3y ago> Cracking is about removing anti-features Anti what features? Piracy?
- function_seven 3y agoAnti-backup, Anti-I-don't-have-a-cdrom-on-this-machine, Anti-I-lost-the-stupid-dongle, etc. Like parent says, cracking and piracy pair well, but I've had to do it many times just for compatibility reasons, on software I had purchased.
- Dylan16807 3y agoAnd just anti-convenience! Nobody wants to swap CDs purely to tick a checkbox.
- xxs 3y agoThe anti-what-word-is-on-the-17th-page-3rd-paragraph-of-the-handbook was a very common on for so many games.
- nonethewiser 3y ago> Anti-backup, Anti-I-don't-have-a-cdrom-on-this-machine, Anti-I-lost-the-stupid-dongle, etc. All perfectly understandable to me. But from the perspective of the people designing the anti-something system, wouldn't they call it piracy? We can argue if piracy is a charitable enough name for bypassing copyright protections but that's irrelevant in terms of whether or not that is the thing the software provider is trying to do.
- PrimeMcFly 3y agoI didn't feel old today until I jumped on HN and saw someone who didn't know what 'cracked' means in the context of PC games.
- IshKebab 3y agoHe knows what cracked means. I think you misunderstood.
- PrimeMcFly 3y agoNot much room to misunderstand, and if he knows what cracked means what's going on should be obvious.
- paint 3y agoThis seems like a weird hill to die on? yes it's obvious that rockstar (apparently) uploaded a cracked version of their game to steam. It's not obvious why they chose to do that (ie "what is going on")
- PrimeMcFly 3y agoI'm not dying on any hill, I think that's a weird comment to make, let alone to make an issue out of my original comment at all. The way the comment was phrased read as though they didn't understand what had happened, not that they didn't understand why. Especially since no one has an answer to that, so no one can offer an explanation.
- paint 3y ago[flagged]
- PrimeMcFly 3y agoThat's not a particularly productive reply. Thanks for your input, I guess.
- CameronNemo 3y ago[flagged]
- novok 3y agoThat sounds like zit lol
- CameronNemo 3y agoIt sounds like something else too. Email press@twitter.com to find out. https://www.npr.org/2023/03/20/1164654551/twitter-poop-emoji-elon-musk https://www.npr.org/2023/03/20/1164654551/twitter-poop-emoji...
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- nottorp 3y agoI think that if you had a twitter account you could click on something and see more context. Linking twitter has become worse than your average paywalled site, which you can look up on archive.something if it seems interesting.
- justsomehnguy 3y agohttps://nitter.unixfox.eu/__silent_/status/1698345924840296801 https://nitter.unixfox.eu/__silent_/status/16983459248402968... Who could have thought what a company with billions of revenue would use the cracks from RAZOR1911 for IP they are selling to the end users? Shocking!
- ezconnect 3y agoDoes RAZOR1911 have a legal way to have a share of revenue since they are using his hard work?
- threeio 3y agoRazor1911 is a cracking group from the mid 80s on... but it would be fantastic wouldn't it? :)
- Zetobal 3y agoThey disbanded some years ago :*(
- monocasa 3y agoAt least some did. CD Projekt Red got started as a cracking and translation group. At the time (Poland before the fall of the iron curtain) there wasn't actually anything illegal about what they were doing; copyright wasn't really a concept in their legal system at the time, particularly for software.
- sznio 3y ago> At the time (Poland before the fall of the iron curtain) there wasn't actually anything illegal about what they were doing; copyright wasn't really a concept in their legal system at the time, particularly for software. They were successful because they actually stopped when it became illegal and started calling game publishers offering localization and distribution services.
- PrimeMcFly 3y ago
- h2odragon 3y agocould the NoCD crack author do a DMCA takedown on these games now? Would it even need to be the author issuing such a request?
- capableweb 3y agoYou need to either be or represent the copyright holder. I'm 99% sure most warez groups have no interest in exposing themselves to any legal systems when it comes to what they do.
- h2odragon 3y agoIf I say I represent such a group, then; is it likely that anyone will disagree? DMCA cases seem to be about who has the scarier looking letterhead anyway. To whom would I have to prove or disprove my standing to take Rockstar games down, I wonder? Does Steam have any right to refuse such a request just because it's patently absurd?
- elil17 3y agoImagine you did this and ended up in court. If you admit you lied on the DMCA request, you'd be admitting to perjury. If you continue to claim to be the cracker, Rockstar could sue you for damages from IP theft.
- qingcharles 3y agoPerjury is only if you make a statement under oath knowing it to be a lie. The DMCA doesn't require you by statute to tell the truth. As long as you tell the truth under oath on the witness stand, if it got that far, then you'd be fine from a criminal prosecution perspective. Of course, you'd probably get counter-sued for a number of civil torts for being a fuckhead.
- sillysaurusx 3y agoIt does. Each DMCA requires “A statement that the information in the complaint is accurate, and, under penalty of perjury, that you are authorized to act on behalf of the copyright owner.”
- sixthDot 3y agoModified or not, legally R.S. Games owns it anyway.
- mabbo 3y agoThey don't own the no-CD crack. So technically, they are selling software they pirated.
- ohnoesjmr 3y agoThey are not shipping the crack. They are shipping their own binary that has been modified by the crack.
- Ekaros 3y agoThose modifications have a copy-right they do not own...
- TylerE 3y agoA much better analogy would be how writing code in an open source editor, compiled by an open source tool chain does not make the resulting binary open source.
- Steltek 3y agoA compiler author does not own the output of the compiler.
- neurostimulant 3y agoThey can copyright certain sequence of bits though, like console makers did a while ago to enforce licensing (e.g. can't boot this rom without these sequence of bits, but this sequence of bits is actually a nintendo logo which cannot be distributed unless you have nintendo's permission).
- lxgr 3y ago
- capableweb 3y agoWhy 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. 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?
- Zetobal 3y agoI don't know why I have to write this comment but not every twitter user is a journalist...
- wtallis 3y agoThe location of the string is pretty telling: right after a 256 byte header, and occupying the first few bytes of a long run of zeroes. This isn't how you'd expect to find a constant embedded by a compiler or linker as part of code implementing a check for the presence of a crack.
- capableweb 3y agoThat's a pretty good point actually.
- Twirrim 3y agoI don't see any reference to them being a journalist, anywhere? Why are you expecting some random person who saw and got frustrated with something and shared it, to be a journalist? Are you a journalist because you're frustrated that this person isn't being a journalist...? That's kind of the same logic.
- sjsdaiuasgdia 3y agoFirst problem: You presume this person has another executable of provable provenance to check against. Second problem: There could be many different official executables for this game. Each would have a different hash. Provenance proving applies here too. Third problem: Two hash values doesn't communicate the actual story as well as what this person (who may or may not be a journalist, that appears to be your assumption) chose to do.
- jstarfish 3y ago> 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. 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. 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 and doing the race itself each time.
- madars 3y agoThere's probably an even stronger claim. It is not that Razor is not making things worse, rather a release from a reputable group is a strong indication that it works and that it will continue to do so many years in the future after activation servers are long gone/DRM methods are deprecated/etc. Quality and reliability is probably the reason why Microsoft used DeepzOne's Sound Forge [1] and Turner Classic Movies used subtitles from Karagarga [2] :-) [1] https://boingboing.net/2006/07/19/windows-xp-sounds-cr.html https://boingboing.net/2006/07/19/windows-xp-sounds-cr.html [2] https://torrentfreak.com/turner-classic-movies-airs-a-film-with-pirated-subtitles-230706/ https://torrentfreak.com/turner-classic-movies-airs-a-film-w...
- dalore 3y agoHe commented on that comment, it wasn't the crack. > This gets better - Razor's crack is fine, the reason both Midnight Club 2 and Manhunt crashed when these cracks were in use was the fact that Steam DRM included a .bind section that was code not marked as code - thus tripping Data Execution Prevention
- ineedasername 3y agoIt'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.
- echelon_musk 3y agoThis is more common than you might expect. The Windows port of Marc Ecko's Getting Up: Contents under Pressure being sold on Steam is the DEViANCE crack. Open the game's exe in a hex editor and you can plainly see "DEViANCE".
- RajT88 3y agoSystem sounds *.wav files were also produced with cracked software at some point (no clue if this is still in Win10): https://www.techrepublic.com/forums/discussions/windows-uses-pirated-software/ https://www.techrepublic.com/forums/discussions/windows-uses...
- lelandfe 3y agoI'm impressed both that you had a nearly 20 year old link ready, and that this URL still works.
- monocasa 3y agoI seem to remember hearing that wrt roms on at least one of the NES|SNES|PS1 Classic systems.
- barbs 3y agoYeah same, although I think it was the ROMs distributed in the Wii Shopping Channel?
- danhor 3y agoNintendo used the same file format as used for pirated ROMs, so people assumed Nintendo simply used downloaded ROMs. As it turns out one of the people working at Nintendo for emulation previously worked on emulators outside Nintendo, so it's likely that just the file format was reused. The Nintendo leaks showed that Nintendo has extensive internal archives and the likelihood of them needing to download ROMs of the Internet is low.
- Thaxll 3y agoThis is not new: https://torrentfreak.com/ubisofts-no-cd-answer-to-drm-080718/ https://torrentfreak.com/ubisofts-no-cd-answer-to-drm-080718...
- 0xcde4c3db 3y agoI don't have examples handy, but I'm pretty sure I recall something similar being done for some CD-ROM re-releases of games with floppy-based copy protection.
- Agingcoder 3y agoRazor 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. Apparently they’ve been active again since 2010, but in my ( much older ) mind, steam has made piracy mostly obsolete. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Razor_1911?wprov=sfti1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Razor_1911?wprov=sfti1
- andrewmcwatters 3y agoI think the appeal of cracks is still there for the technically minded. Learning reverse engineering, understanding how to circumvent technologies. That seems to be the real point for these groups. Reputation from reverse engineering. I certainly enjoyed my time writing them. I don't know of any group that does this and doesn't support the developers of the IP in question. You still end up buying the software.
- abestic9 3y agoAs good as Steam might be, it’s still required for the games you purchased to run, and that doesn’t align with some people. You own your games on Steam as much as you own your music on Spotify. So priacy is still alive and well, and a lot of the arguments I see for it is stripping DRM and ownership. I prefer Steam over other platforms because multiplayer is effortless, with a friend or at a LAN party that means means more time actually playing the game. But if it’s not on Steam or not everyone can afford it, we’re probably playing a cracked, portable copy.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- elvis70 3y agoDidn't Microsoft published a Word document from a "pirated" Word release in the past?
- Havoc 3y agoRazor should sue rockstar for IP theft.
- paxys 3y agoWhile 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. I'm guessing this is some subcontractor taking shortcuts rather than an official company policy approved by legal.
- ghusbands 3y agoNote 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.
- o0banky0o 3y agorazor1911 never started owning it when they made the crack, so, fair.
- pengaru 3y agoRockstar owns the copyright, they can do whatever they want with their games. 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? I expect reproducible binaries produced by a controlled toolchain from a responsible developer. Linux distributions have higher standards for binaries they distribute for free ffs.
- incrudible 3y ago> I expect reproducible binaries produced by a controlled toolchain from a responsible developer. I would estimate the number of videogames published for Windows PCs matching all of these critera to be roughly 0.
- pengaru 3y agoIt's not like windows game developers are universally incompetent. They have their source so they can reproduce their binaries at will. They understand the risks of malware and how embarrassing it would be to unwittingly ship some, so they should know better than to be shipping releases built using their personal machine they also browse the web with. For Rockstar to be shipping pirated cracked binaries as their own demonstrates a profound lack of responsibility and professionalism as software developers. But I'm sure there's a non-zero amount of windows game developers being careless/sloppy in general too.
- incrudible 3y agoReproducible builds and controlled toolchains are not really things you are going to realistically have, shipping games for Windows - even in 2023. That does not necessarily mean the final build is coming out of Mikes office PC, however.
- pengaru 3y agoYou're taking what I said to mean a very pedantic definition of "reproducible builds" that even Linux distros largely only aspire to achieve. By reproducible I meant they can recreate their binaries from source code, not necessarily bit-for-bit. There's zero reason to ship a Warez group's cracked version of a game when you're the copyright holder in possession of the source and ability to simply build an executable without the copy protection crap the crack is bypassing. It's pathetic on Rockstar's part.
- yieldcrv 3y agoFans did the work for them, likely illegally, and it remains within Rockstar’s right to use it analogous to free work-for-hire
- shmerl 3y agoGood, they shouldn't have been DRMed in the first place, then they won't need to be cracked.
- CobrastanJorji 3y agoMany 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.
- Bluecobra 3y agoIt would be kind of sad/funny if one of the games had a bad crack and the game itself was broken and not caught by QA. For example, Earthbound has one final check that would cause the game to freeze and delete your save at the final boss.
- avg_dev 3y agoman that is absolutely brutal
- Darmody 3y agoTo me it happened the other way around. The original game from Steam won't run on Linux but if I change the .exe for one that is cracked, it works. I've been keeping that .exe for years.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- atherton33 3y agoThere was an example of this reposted here just last week: https://www.benshoof.org/blog/case-cracked https://www.benshoof.org/blog/case-cracked The crack for The Colonel's Bequest worked by hardcoding the RNG in the interpreter to always return the same number. This broke every random element of the game, which is undetectable on a single playthrough.
- tj-teej 3y agoRelated 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. 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! 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
- bri3d 3y agoYes, this was a common copy protection in old games! There's a big list on mobygames here: https://www.mobygames.com/group/9360/games-with-manual-lookup-copy-protection/ https://www.mobygames.com/group/9360/games-with-manual-looku...
- rsstack 3y agoSim Earth had the same thing! It would ask you a question like "How many moons does Saturn have?" and the manual had some fact sheets at the end with all the numbers. Wikipedia was not around yet, and their fact sheets having slightly different numbers than encyclopedias due to different sources and publish date (moon counts change often, and measurements in meters for anything astronomical have randomness due to imprecisions).
- AdmiralAsshat 3y agoIt was common as well to use these things called Code Wheels: https://archive.org/details/code-wheels https://archive.org/details/code-wheels https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_wheel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_wheel
- pimlottc 3y ago> https://archive.org/details/code-wheels https://archive.org/details/code-wheels Oh dang, these are fun, I remember the classic Monkey Island "Dial-A-Pirate" wheel [3] FYI you can use these without downloading the whole collection: - Under Download Options, click "SHOW ALL" to see the list of files [1] - Find the zip file for the game you want and click "View Contents" [2] - Click the "HTM" file listed [3] Kudos to the kind soul who took the extra effort to package them as single-file self-contained html docs! 1: https://archive.org/download/code-wheels https://archive.org/download/code-wheels 2: https://ia904503.us.archive.org/view_archive.php?archive=/22/items/code-wheels/Secret%20of%20Monkey%20Island%2C%20The%20%281990%29_extra_interactive-code-wheel_v2.5.zip https://ia904503.us.archive.org/view_archive.php?archive=/22... 3: https://ia904503.us.archive.org/view_archive.php?archive=/22/items/code-wheels/Secret%20of%20Monkey%20Island%2C%20The%20%281990%29_extra_interactive-code-wheel_v2.5.zip&file=Secret%20of%20Monkey%20Island%2C%20The%20%281990%29_extra_interactive-code-wheel.HTM https://ia904503.us.archive.org/view_archive.php?archive=/22...
- apples_oranges 3y agoThis 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..
- bluejay2387 3y agoKind of mind blowing to see a name (Razor1911) from my C64 days make an appearance again 0.o
- BowBun 3y agoThey've been a consistent name in cracking since then!
- nxobject 3y agoI wonder if they're like the Bourbaki group in mathematics – an anonymous group where members elect other members, with a trivial amount of cloak-and-dagger secrecy from the public.
- BowBun 3y agoThat's exactly so. Many of the groups know each other, have their private comm channels, and select insiders that release things out to the broader public. There's obviously drama around people leaking releases, stealing cracks, etc. Fun little sub-culture!
- jdjdjdjdjduuuu 3y agoAt least its not DRM copies....
- jrflowers 3y agoOnce again Razor 1911 shows up as an important part of the software archival ecosystem. Good people.
- GuB-42 3y agoMaybe Rockstar has former, maybe even current members of Razor 1911 among their staff. 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.
- draw_down 3y ago[dead]
- lousken 3y agoWouldn'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. (I am talking with the context of current games using denuvo, not this specific case)
- tus666 3y agoWould be funny if the hacker sued rockstar for profiting off his work.
- tetrisgm 3y agoHonestly, 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. 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. Not like the group would have a moral high ground to claim their copyright was violated. Though the idea is fun.
- lofaszvanitt 3y agoUbisoft has done this too if I remember right. They stole the cracked exe, what could the haxors do, sue them?
- extraduder_ire 3y agoI take it from this that we're not likely to see any of rockstar's games showing up on gog.com any time soon.
- bravetraveler 3y agoDoes this mean, then, that their integration to Steamworks or whatever client-ensuring integration... is missing? One could presumably then archive the directory and go DRM-free
- sznio 3y ago> One could presumably then archive the directory and go DRM-free Bypassing Steam DRM requires just replacing a single DLL in the game directory. There's even whole full-featured Steam Emulator DLLs that you just drop in and get to play the game for free with working online play over Valve's servers.
- bravetraveler 3y agoInteresting, didn't realize it was quite so simple :) I was thinking that since the binary seems largely unchanged... that the presence of DLLs and such wouldn't really matter. The cracked version wasn't aware of Steam, so I wonder if it's even checking
- StanislavPetrov 3y agoThe 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).
- happytiger 3y agoIt’s nice to see gaming companies finally figuring out what users have known since the 90s.
- dusted 3y agoI think Razor should sue Rockstar for IP violation, Razor obviously owns the IP to unprotect the binary ;)
- CTOSian 3y ago30 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
- scrumlord 3y ago[dead]