It seems that Grand Theft Auto developer Rockstar has released a copy of Max Payne 2 for Steam that makes use of a no-CD crack released by pirating group Myth.

This is going to make the next antipiracy campaign a hard sell...

Word of the misappropriated code comes via Steam forum user Liamaj, who, for one reason or another, saw fit to open the maxpayne2.exe that was downloaded when he bought Rockstar’s Max Payne 2 through Steam’s digital delivery service in a hex editor. The file itself was revealed to contain the Myth logo in ascii, a fairly telltale sign indeed that the code may not have originated within Rockstar itself.

The post to the Steam forums is simply titled, “Now that’s a bit lazy of your Rockstar,” and goes on to say,

“ Not sure if this has been mentioned anywhere, or if there is another reason for it, but it seem[sic] rockstar used a cracked version of Max Payne 2 for steam retail… Seems Rockstar got a little lazy and used this crack instead of recompiling their executable without DRM.”

This is accompanied by a shot of the Myth ascii art, pulled directly from the executable from Max Payne 2.

It’ll be interesting to see the official response from Rockstar to this one, given that this isn’t the first such debacle to have hit a major developer. Not so long ago, Ubisoft released Rainbow Six Vegas 2 through IGN’s Direct2Drive service with similar results. When an update failed to load for D2D customers, they were advised by Ubisoft to install a patch, which later turned out to contain a no-CD crack for the game itself.

While Ubisoft was fairly soundly drubbed for the misstep, it recovered relatively quickly. The odds are that people may be less understanding with Rockstar, given that this is the second time that this has happened, though of course, Rockstar has some fairly dedicated fans, so it could just be forgotten fairly quickly.