Rockstar is selling cracked game copies on Steam

https://twitter.com/__silent_/status/1698345924840296801

by robbiet480 • 3 years ago

502 234 3 years ago

Reubend• 3 years ago

Could we get some more context than this tweet (which doesn't really explain what's going on)?

robbiet480• 3 years ago

The 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.

jonny_eh• 3 years ago

Razor1911 was the cracking group in this particular case.

bonestamp2• 3 years ago

That's hilarious. I wonder what the license model is for the crack that they used.

kolanos• 3 years ago

Did Rockstart have to license Razor1911's cracking software?

It would be ironic if Rockstar was in violation of Razor1911's copyright.

baobabKoodaa3• 3 years ago

Sounds like Razor could sue Rockstar for copyright infringement. That would be hilarious.

yomlica8• 3 years ago

Are we sure they didn't just lose the source code entirely?

ewzimm• 3 years ago

Did 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• 3 years ago

This 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.

Akronymus• 3 years ago

One 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• 3 years ago

Cracking was a 90s term for pirating software

itsnotlupus• 3 years ago

Cracking is about removing anti-features, typically copy protections. It pairs well with pirating, but neither one strictly requires the other.

phpisthebest• 3 years ago

pirating software (movies, and music) is a term from the 90's by the MPAA, Riaa, and Games industry in attempting to link the act of simple copyright infringement, a civil non-criminal violation of the law to violent robbery on the high seas...

Cracking is a method of removing undesired features or inclusions from software, often licensing controls, or other anti-consumer features.

Many many many people "cracked" their software who where not eganged in the act of copyright infringement, they legally owned the software but for a number of reasons has no desire to run the invasive software bundled with the game or content they purchased.

PrimeMcFly6• 3 years ago

I 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• 3 years ago

He knows what cracked means. I think you misunderstood.

magic_hamster• 3 years ago

Considering the rapid change in HN audience I suspect this person is simply uninformed.

nottorp• 3 years ago

I 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• 3 years ago

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• 3 years ago

Does RAZOR1911 have a legal way to have a share of revenue since they are using his hard work?

threeio• 3 years ago

Razor1911 is a cracking group from the mid 80s on... but it would be fantastic wouldn't it? :)

PrimeMcFly6• 3 years ago

They are not entitled to anything. Rockstar can use their crack as much as they want.

NoMoreNicksLeft4• 3 years ago

Anyone a little savvy would have guessed that.

I'm betting even at the time of the game's release, it was so fragile that someone breathing wrong on the build machine would cause the build to fail. Any time the Windows machine displayed the numeral 1 in the systray, it would be unbuildable. And on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Fridays it would just fail to compile. That there were only 3 employees who could get it to work at all the last 3 months of development... and they all quit years ago.

Now? Now it won't build on Windows 11, or even on the old XP machine they dug up. It's so riddled with Denuvo or whatever, that they'd have to spin up a team of 12 for two months just to delete that, and only for them to discover it won't build afterwards.

And, whatever else, they sure as hell don't have anyone who's good enough at assembly and IDA Pro to crack themselves. Probably too cheap to even get the single seat license for IDA Pro.

h2odragon2• 3 years ago

could the NoCD crack author do a DMCA takedown on these games now? Would it even need to be the author issuing such a request?

capableweb4• 3 years ago

You 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.

h2odragon2• 3 years ago

If 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?

NoMoreNicksLeft4• 3 years ago

You need that in the sense that it would be a legitimate notice.

No requirement such as that is part of the DMCA, and there is no penalty in statute for making illegitimate notices.

creatonez• 3 years ago

In Russia, developers of a Minecraft crack called TLauncher have targeted other developers of other Russian Minecraft cracking projects with takedowns and trademark complaints. How did they do it? They registered a company in the Seychelles islands to protect their identity. And of course, they're relying on the fact that the Russian government is uninterested in protecting the intellectual property of Mojang.

sixthDot• 3 years ago

Modified or not, legally R.S. Games owns it anyway.

mabbo• 3 years ago

They don't own the no-CD crack. So technically, they are selling software they pirated.

ohnoesjmr• 3 years ago

They are not shipping the crack. They are shipping their own binary that has been modified by the crack.

thereisnospork• 3 years ago

They are also (arguably) selling software written/designed/intended for the express purpose of bypassing copyright protections, which as I understand is in and of itself a no-no under the DMCA regardless of underlying ownership.

I ANAL of course.

edit: per the sibling comment the crack might not be included, so this might not apply.

capableweb4• 3 years ago

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.

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?

Zetobal2• 3 years ago

I don't know why I have to write this comment but not every twitter user is a journalist...

wtallis• 3 years ago

The 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.

capableweb4• 3 years ago

That's a pretty good point actually.

Twirrim• 3 years ago

I 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.

sjsdaiuasgdia2• 3 years ago

First 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.

capableweb4• 3 years ago

First solution: Yes, finding the PC CD for this game took me like 20 minutes, both new/old in even my country for something like 20 EUR. If the author wanted to, I'm sure they could have found it equally easy.

Second solution: Not really, when you do CD releases you have a "gold master" which is the final burned CD that the other CDs are copied from. That's the one you use as the official one, as that's the one most people on PC actually have.

If the game had multiple regions (something PC games usually don't), you have multiple executables. But this happens mostly for console games, but again wouldn't be difficult to acquire a specific one for one of the ~4/5 regions there is.

Re third problem, you're probably right about this. But I'd still argue that verifying information after a finding would add more credence to the story itself and cement it better, it wouldn't take anything away from the story (unless it proved that there isn't actually any story).

usrusr• 3 years ago

First time I hear someone suggest that hashes might be a superior form of journalism. The cracking group signature is a smoking gun. Hashes would only show that the steam binary isn't bit-wise identical with the original release, which any solution to "steam release can't require a CD check" would imply.

(well, "smoking gun" in quotes, because I don't really see Rockstar doing anything wrong here. Would it have been better if they had zeroed out that string?)

asddubs• 3 years ago

why not use the hex dump, it says the name of the cracking group, that's more easily verifiable than comparing hashes to files you might not have

jstarfish• 3 years 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• 3 years ago

There'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 [2] https://torrentfreak.com/turner-classic-movies-airs-a-film-w...

dalore2• 3 years ago

He 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• 3 years ago

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.

echelon_musk• 3 years ago

This 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• 3 years ago

System 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...

lelandfe• 3 years ago

I'm impressed both that you had a nearly 20 year old link ready, and that this URL still works.

monocasa4• 3 years ago

I seem to remember hearing that wrt roms on at least one of the NES|SNES|PS1 Classic systems.

barbs2• 3 years ago

Yeah same, although I think it was the ROMs distributed in the Wii Shopping Channel?

Agingcoder2• 3 years ago

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.

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

andrewmcwatters• 3 years ago

I 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• 3 years ago

As 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.

elvis70• 3 years ago

Didn't Microsoft published a Word document from a "pirated" Word release in the past?

Thaxll• 3 years ago

This is not new: https://torrentfreak.com/ubisofts-no-cd-answer-to-drm-080718...

0xcde4c3db• 3 years ago

I 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.

Havoc• 3 years ago

Razor should sue rockstar for IP theft.

paxys2• 3 years ago

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.

I'm guessing this is some subcontractor taking shortcuts rather than an official company policy approved by legal.

toast0• 3 years ago

Razor1911 isn't an untrustworthy source though.

paxys2• 3 years ago

Just because it says Razor1911 in the binary doesn't mean it actually came from that group though.

ghusbands• 3 years ago

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.

o0banky0o• 3 years ago

razor1911 never started owning it when they made the crack, so, fair.

pengaru4• 3 years ago

Rockstar 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.

incrudible3• 3 years 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.

pengaru4• 3 years ago

It'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.

raxxorraxor2• 3 years ago

Ironically the leet warez often are more well behaved pieces of software than the average crap app on the store of popular mobile OS manufacturers.

People had standards at the time, which wasn't that long ago either.

yieldcrv• 3 years ago

Fans did the work for them, likely illegally, and it remains within Rockstar’s right to use it

analogous to free work-for-hire

shmerl• 3 years ago

Good, they shouldn't have been DRMed in the first place, then they won't need to be cracked.

CobrastanJorji2• 3 years ago

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.

Bluecobra2• 3 years ago

It 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• 3 years ago

man that is absolutely brutal

Darmody• 3 years ago

To 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.

atherton33• 3 years ago

There was an example of this reposted here just last week: 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.

thaumasiotes• 3 years ago

This is the case for many "cracked" DOS games. You can find archives that say "we checked all the games to make sure they're really cracked", but I obtained a copy of Spaceward Ho! from such an archive, and the developers had pre-defeated this assurance measure by not invoking the copy protection until several turns into the game.

joveian• 3 years ago

I think this was the case for one version of King's Bounty: The Legend on GOG (not the current version it sounds like?), which had a bug where you couldn't talk to an NPC at one point when you needed to do so to advance the game. At least, I recall someone mentioning somewhere when I looked after encountering the bug years ago that this was an issue of a random crack posted to the net that someone (the publisher I'm guessing, maybe GOG or the developer) had applied to produce the GOG version.

ndiddy• 3 years ago

Was it Gametap?

CobrastanJorji2• 3 years ago

It was!

tj-teej• 3 years ago

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.

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

bri3d2• 3 years ago

Yes, 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-looku...

rsstack• 3 years ago

Sim 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• 3 years ago

It was common as well to use these things called Code Wheels:

https://archive.org/details/code-wheels

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_wheel

pimlottc• 3 years ago

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

2: https://ia904503.us.archive.org/view_archive.php?archive=/22...

3: https://ia904503.us.archive.org/view_archive.php?archive=/22...

milesvp• 3 years ago

I remember when I was young getting a game from my older sister's college boyfriend. Gave me the game on disks, and also a photocopied manual just for this same purpose. Used to be super common for games to use these kinds of checks for anti piracy. I thought it was super funny though, because the game was pretty old, and I was confused why this guy didn't know how to find a cracked version of the game to avoid having to pull out a 60 page manual just to play.

spelunker• 3 years ago

I remember doing this for the original X-COM: UFO Defense. Actually I wonder how the Steam versions of these games work? Do they just include a PDF of the original manual?

AbraKdabra• 3 years ago

GTA IV has something similar, if you play a cracked copy eventually the camera starts to wobble and it makes it impossible to play, and it makes it look like a bug. I remember thousands of players asking in the forums why their camera was shaking without knowing they're telling everyone they had a pirated game. Hilarious move from Rockstar.

For those wondering, yes it happened to me, it was absolutely infuriating like "man this fucking game is full of bugs", lol.

jamaicahest• 3 years ago

The original Settlers 1 game, released in 1993, had ingenious copy protection built in. It had multiple levels of copy protection, that would activate, if the copy protection was attempted circumvented, i.e. cracked. It would not let you complete levels due to some characters missing/never appearing and the likes, if you used a cracked version of the game. Much like you describe with GTA IV, users thought this was a buggy game, while in reality it was a buggy crack.

szatkus• 3 years ago

This was even more confusing for me, because the versions of those games I played were usually already cracked and accepted any input. So I was wondering what's the point.

xxs2• 3 years ago

I wonder if this was an anti-piracy strategy

Totally, and exceptionally common. It was popular in the '80 and the early '90.

apples_oranges• 3 years ago

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..

bluejay2387• 3 years ago

Kind of mind blowing to see a name (Razor1911) from my C64 days make an appearance again 0.o

meesles2• 3 years ago

They've been a consistent name in cracking since then!

nxobject• 3 years ago

I 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.

jdjdjdjdjduuuu• 3 years ago

At least its not DRM copies....

jrflowers• 3 years ago

Once again Razor 1911 shows up as an important part of the software archival ecosystem. Good people.

GuB-42• 3 years ago

Maybe 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.

lousken• 3 years ago

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.

(I am talking with the context of current games using denuvo, not this specific case)

tus666• 3 years ago

Would be funny if the hacker sued rockstar for profiting off his work.

tetrisgm• 3 years ago

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.

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• 3 years ago

Ubisoft has done this too if I remember right. They stole the cracked exe, what could the haxors do, sue them?

extraduder_ire2• 3 years ago

I take it from this that we're not likely to see any of rockstar's games showing up on gog.com any time soon.

bravetraveler2• 3 years ago

Does 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

sznio2• 3 years 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.

bravetraveler2• 3 years ago

Interesting, 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• 3 years ago

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).

happytiger• 3 years ago

It’s nice to see gaming companies finally figuring out what users have known since the 90s.

dusted• 3 years ago

I think Razor should sue Rockstar for IP violation, Razor obviously owns the IP to unprotect the binary ;)

CTOSian• 3 years ago

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

Rockstar is selling cracked game copies on Steam

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