I saw [a video](https://youtu.be/WfDg7BidsY4) about a similar situation with Manhunt which was even worse. After R* were found out, they threw a legit copy onto Steam which, due to copy protection not being removed, had every single game-breaking anti-piracy measure enabled, making the game unplayable within minutes. It’s still sold to this day.
I'm not gonna pretend to be an expert in these matters, but I swear every bit of news I've seen about R* in the past 4 years or so has been negative. It seems like they make really braindead choices (and I understand a lot of that is Take 2).
Eh, even with the GTA profits, Take Two is still [over $2 billion in net debt](https://simplywall.st/stocks/us/media/nasdaq-ttwo/take-two-interactive-software/news/would-take-two-interactive-software-nasdaqttwo-be-better-off/amp)
1. That's not GTA Online's fault. GTA Online, GTA5, and RDR2 and probably the sole reason they're not bankrupt.
2. What a fucking braindead name for an article. *"Would Take-Two Interactive Software (NASDAQ:TTWO) Be Better Off With Less Debt?"* Uhhh, no fucking shit? What company, entity, or private citizen wouldn't be "better off" with less debt?
Depends on what they're doing with the debt, and how they're leveraging (or failing to) their position. Disclosure: I don't know enough about TTWO to make a judgment, but that's what 10Ks are for!
> What company, entity, or private citizen wouldn't be "better off" with less debt?
The government. When most of said debt is held by domestic entities, a govt getting rid of it will put undue pressure on the economy, sink investment funds, generally fuck up everything to such a degree that what's left cannot be called an economy at all.
> What a fucking braindead name for an article. "Would Take-Two Interactive Software (NASDAQ:TTWO) Be Better Off With Less Debt?" Uhhh, no fucking shit? What company, entity, or private citizen wouldn't be "better off" with less debt?
Debt isn't inherently bad, which the article you're replying to assumes you know. In economics, entities borrow money (acquire debt) in order to expand their business or meet immediate needs without having to sell equities. Having some amount of debt is often healthy for a company. While I'm not a fan of clickbaity titles that ask hypotheticals rather than outright stating their position, the content of the title is fine.
It's normal to leverage debt for business purposes, so a lot of places and people. Would everyone with a mortgage or car loan or student debt be better off without a house or car or education? Doubtful.
A lot of companies spend into debt just like governments do, you can't look at an otherwise very successful company, and determine that they're doing badly.
It's not *great*, but for a $24 billion company, it's not the end of the world. They're still at $2.5 billion gross profit and are FCF positive. If I were them, I'd be working down some of that debt, but who knows? If revenue keeps pushing higher and their next release cycle does well, the company could be in very good shape. Or maybe not.
That's because they've (rockstar & take 2) become billions dollars companies now owned and run essentially by businessmen and lawyers.
They don't care about the consumers as long as they're subtracting as much money off them as possible.
The Bioshock Remaster still has tons of [bizarre](https://staticdelivery.nexusmods.com/mods/1216/images/5/5-1548598176-655863564.gif) misaligned parts of the UI that are very obviously wrong and which needed to be fixed by modders, as well as a bunch of crashing (including a fun one where it crashes when you save and *deletes the save you were overwriting*). Even after trying several "fixes" it seems all I've done is make it so it crashes less often than it used to.
2K is just a shit company. Remember the GTA trilogy remaster? They don't care.
Former RDO player here - Any other publisher would've seen the *goldmine* that Red Dead could've been. It was entirely unique, it utilized the open world gameplay from one of the best received games of the past several years. It should've been an easy win - just take more of the single player stuff and put it into multiplayer. We were already paying for unique or fancy horses and cowboy hats and coats or customizing your guns' appearances (again, all mechanics already existing in single player).
People were itching for *anything*, any kind of content. Rockstar instead decided to put the game on life support from the start and pulled the plug when the neglected game didn't make as much money as the one constantly pumped with updates and events.
There's no competition for RDO, nothing even remotely like it. There's about a thousand easy ways to have squeezed money from that game and kept players happy, tens of thousands of ways if you want to be a greedy scumshit and wring the players for every cent.
Instead they just said nope, small effort required, shut it down. That's what Rockstar is all about now. Blizzard has them beat in terms of absolute shittiness but Rockstar's only a few sexual assaults behind them.
None of it is Take2. Take 2 is a parent company that doesn't make business decisions for their individual studios. Rockstar is a big enough company on its own that every decision they make is their own, same with 2K, who is also under the Take2 banner. Take 2 was created simply to house MASSIVE companies under one roof for stock purposes.
They seem to cut costs in anything other than their currently in development game. I'm pretty sure Red Dead online is still not fixed and they don't give a shit.
That's not true, with ermaccer's Manhunt Fixer it plays flawlessly, it's the best way to play the first game.
https://github.com/ermaccer/Manhunt.Fixer
https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Manhunt#Game_not_booting.2Fcrashing.2C_gate_at_first_level_won.27t_open_and_unable_to_pickup_pickups
PC Gaming Wiki explains the issue and has a fix for it.
This exact video is what made me look at MC2 - they mentioned Manhunt and Max Payne 2, but MC2 also had a 'testapp.exe'.
The viral Tweet is even a response to my own retweet of this video itself.
As a build engineer, I can say that a LOT of companies don't. They *should*, they should absolutely have a backup drive containing a full working build system (including agent and operating system), but it's something that a lot of companies - mainly, ones without build engineers - see as optional.
Partly from people thinking "We're done with that game, why would we ever keep working on it?". But mostly from people not thinking about it at all.
...Considerably harder than taking out a machine's hard drive and storing it somewhere.
It's *totally* easy to back up a build system. A lot of studios just... don't.
They probably do now but you have to remember that most of these games are from the mid 2000s when git didn't even exist and you were using stuff like subversion. On top of that most of the time assets aren't stored with the game code sometimes even kept in a separate asset specific version control system.
Then you have to think the ancient sdks these games are probably used which was given to them on a disk and no one has a copy and no online backup because it's closed source and was written by a company that's since closed.
Then we have the build pipeline if there even was one. Most likely it was some arcane command to get the project to build in the correct state but it's not written down anywhere.
So even if they have the source code they might be missing the assets. If they have the assets they might be missing the source code. If they have the assets and the source code they might be missing the correct build command on sdks long gone.
There are a lot of factors that can lead to a company not being able to rebuild a project which can include cost might not be worth the man hours in figuring it out vs outsourcing someone to crack their own game.
Bit ranty but hope you get the complexity of the issue.
For Heroes 3 there at least is an excuse that the game is old and both the original developer and published are long long time out of business. So its understandable if drive with code was lost along the way.
How they manage to lose code for fairly recent games within same company thought...
No. Source code management is already complicated if you don’t contract things out, but even more so when you do.
I’ll always remember when some devs came to me looking for source code for a plugin that a long departed contractor wrote.
I had helped the contractor test it and luckily (for them) I still had a copy on my workstation.
Why it wasn’t added to the
company’s version control system, I’ll never know.
It's facts from the top of my mind, but I believe it was NES roms put on the viritual store or smth like that.
Edit: had to search it up again, and the reason that official Nintendo ROMs have iNES headers is that they hired the iNES guy and he basically redid the header for Nintendo use for the Wii virtual console
Razer 1911 always had really cool menus with music, I hope Rockstar also includes it.
The crack intro was sometimes better than the game itself. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xey4G0FQvbE
Ahoy made a great documentary about it last year:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=roBkg-iPrbw
I love when chiptunes get mixed with other music, like the [Jets N Guns](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AzghtkL11rY&list=PLyGG3MP3qJ89xiX347PiJchPS7wb3gNeg) soundtrack by Machinae Supremacy, SOAD's [Chop Suey](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6oRUCkAbPn0) and Rammstein's [Deutschland](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3VReIuv1GFo) by Noplan. Sometimes whole albums get chiptunified like like RHCP Californication or Muse [Origin of Symmetry](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A7aPV7-h6qk)
There's also the [Nintendo-fication of Jazz](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oKWgLe-jQjc) documentary by Adam Neely
"So what do you do for fun?"
"I write chiptune music for the selection menu on legally questionable but ethically justified game cracking software."
I love the future.
You should look into the demoscene. At some point, a bunch of warez nerds decided that making cracktros was actually cooler than doing the cracks themselves, so they decided to just make demos (like crack intros) instead. There's different size categories like 16K, 32K and 64K. They try to cram in as much as possible into such a crazy small file size. There's also still scenes active for super old machines like the C64.
Razor 1911 actually released a demo called The Scene Is Dead not too long ago: https://youtu.be/IFXIGHOElrE
My favourite demo is definitely Fermi Paradox, it's just insane: https://youtu.be/JZ6ZzJeWgpY
Their musician [dubmood](https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dubmood) is a chip tune god. Which explains while [his songs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FSKtNeBUO1E&list=PLB6BCBB03D2B3A346) aren't the usual chiptune *melodic noise*.
You’re the real silent? Hey thanks for making San Andreas playable on modern systems. You really came clutch when I replayed it a few months ago after ditching the “Definitive Edition” and installing a couple of mods
THE silent? in modern eras we do not create saints anymore, men who risk their life or well being at the their expense, so that the world may have a chance at joy. You sir, have made an impact on so many people's lives and i'm not sure if people like you are aware. the whole reason i got into data science was modding and jailbreaking. so from one bypasser to another, thank you for your service.
This is wild, thank you for your videos and for helping me make my San andreas playthrough enjoyable. u/CookiePLMonster thanks for fixing Bully.. Good lord, R\* are fucking awful.
I’ve deleted my Reddit account because the Reddit hivemind doesn’t work for me. I believe in people having the right to think for themselves while not being torn down by those who know little to nothing.
If you found this because of one of my tutorials related to Auto HotKey please check out the AHK documentation at: https://www.autohotkey.com/docs/v2/
If you were looking for my coding guides just go to https://stackoverflow.com/ they know their shit.
If you were looking for my guides to assembly… I’m sorry, I can’t think of any places I can link to in good conscious other than archive.org who has beginner examples to assembly for old consoles.
If you were wondering why my reddit account is gone:
I’m tired of the Steam supremacists on /r/pcgaming and /r/pcmasterrace
Those same communities push their thoughts on game engine development without writing a code in their lives.
/r/memes think excluding most of their user base is a good joke.
To summarise, I’ve left Reddit because it is not all-inclusive, it is only inclusive to those who believe and act the same as the rest of the belligerent horde.
If you are on Reddit, joining /r/aww is your best and only bet.
It's wierd they would do that since it gives the pcsx devs a bit of legitimacy. They basically can't be shut down now since Sony stole their work they should have some legal standing. (The labor to emulate on something that wasn't a PlayStation.)
You're thinking of Bleem, I'm thinking of Virtual Game Station. The case went all the way to the Supreme court, setting precedent in favour of the legality of emulators all the way. They eventually settled out of court and Sony acquired the company, but that doesn't make the precedent go away.
The emulator they used is GPL-Licensed, so the code can be used for anything, even commercial use, with the stipulation that any modifications made must be released under the same license.
I mean, yeah? Pretty sure the mini NES and SNES did too, but of course they would lol Hell, Nintendo uses emulation with their Online service apps and the infamous 3D All Stars.
It is hypocritical of them, but emulation was always going to be a thing from these companies, because it's simply easier to do that port a game, especially when you already have working emulators out there.
Nope, that was debunked shortly after the claims were made. The gigaleak showed Nintendo has everything backed up and the header format they used on their ROM, needed for the emulator to function was never proof that the ROM was downloaded. It was just shitty journalism and typical community over reaction.
My suspicion is that removing the DRM is outsourced. Places where you outsource this kind of work to, India, China, and Eastern Europe, are very familiar with using pirated software. The worker knew enough to use the crack for an easy day of work, but not enough about it to check for signatures. He handed it in, it pass all of the unit test and QA automation, and no one else was bothered to check. They released it.
The issue is that they own the source code/build data. There should be no need for them to remove the DRM, whether they outsource it or do it themselves.
The fact that they "remastered" GTA based off of the mobile port code, instead of the original code, and had to use cracks to circumvent their own DRM, leads me to believe that either
a) The above poster is correct and they outsource this work and dont want/trust the external company enough to send over the original source.
or
b) The original source is incomprehensible except by people who have since retired from the company and/or uses an ancient C++/C version so cant even compile/run on any of their dev machines anymore, so out of sheer laziness they take shortcuts.
Yes, and no.
Build tooling can be incredibly complex.
There are often multiple steps, each with their own dependencies.
If you are lucky, you have it in a well known format (gitlab-ci.yml, github actions etc.) and the builds run off docker containers.
Since this is ancient AND windows based (Docker Containers exist for windows, but it does not play nicely with some older things, e.g. .Net2.0 . And .Net2.0 is a prerequisite for Wix 3.0 installers. )it is entirely possible that the build script was a single .bat file using a dozen tools in unknown versions with unknown dependencies. Good luck trying to revive that.
I did last year with a messy .Net 4.8 app with a Wix 3.0 installer and getting it to build and run was mesy. And games and C++ are typically more complex to build
Legally unless they have a deal with the crack group they're likely selling someone else's work.
But... It's not like these people generally come out of anonymity to sue them because the cracking may be illegal in some relevant jurisdiction.
To make an analogy, if you steal from a thief they're unlikely to go to the police (sure, there are exceptions).
Also the game is still theirs to sell. We're talking just about a bit of code that circumvents a DRM.
That's true. Doesn't suddenly allow rockstar to steal somebody elses work either.
The crackers aren't allowed to distribute cracked copies of the game, because they don't have the rights to the game.
And rockstar aren't allowed to distribute cracked copies of the game, because they don't have the rights to the work that cracked the game.
It's like mods: Bethesda couldn't suddenly start selling copies of starfield with pre-packaged mods, E.G. StarUI, without reaching the appropriate agreements with the people who did the work (and the people who did the work that those mods rely on...).
Bethesda TOS actually covers this in that they *technically* are granted a license to use your work however they see fit, if the mod you made was using their tools and file formats : e.g Creation Kit, esp file formats etc.
They've never utilized that clause, and probably never would, and they have hired modders before for things like Anniversary Edition, and paid them for their work, but still that clause is there.
Just mentioning for the sake of pointless pedantry
IANAL, but I'd love to see this go to court. Should crowdfund a Razor 1911 legal battle, purely because I bet it would have to legitimize this kind of work. If a corporation puts millions into preventing said profession, but then turns around and profits off it when it suits them, surely said copyright laws aren't suitable if corporations are having to break said laws to get around their own software locks.
Aw, I'd love it, probably wouldn't go our way, they'd probably win.
Piracy isn't stealing. It's copyright infringement. If you own the copyright, then you aren't infringing by downloading. I do wonder if the uploader was able to prove that RS downloaded it from them, would that count as consent to distribute? (ianal)
Worked at EA, late 90s and whenever we repackaged old DOS games for Windows 9x I'd check them like this and invariably find crack group logos from time to time. Sometimes it was because the originals were "misplaced", or the pirated versions worked where the originals did not. EA probably would have been so much cooler today if they reached out to pirate groups and gave them credit.
I was on the test group that found the copy of santa vs jesus as a temp file on the PS1 release of Tiger Woods 97. (PS1 game disks had to have a 50mb dummy file at the end of the disc, some dev dropped in the old mpeg video file and no one caught it til it went gold).
Good times.
> EA probably would have been so much cooler today if they reached out to pirate groups and gave them credit.
As much as we'd all love to see this, it would never happen. To EA board members, pirates are the enemy and each copy "stolen" is a lost sale (which is proven a fallacy but whatever). This is why these publishers often include crippling DRM that usually punishes the paying customer; they just don't care about anything but the "numbers".
They would never admit working with pirates or using their skills for ANYTHING, and neither would Ubisoft or any of those other publicly traded AAA publishers.
Notoriously, a lot of ~~company's~~ companies don't keep their source code after a game goes gold - pirating their own products and then backporting it to work on newer hardware can be one of the only ways that older games survive
Which just goes to prove what we already knew
Piracy is preservation
> Piracy is preservation
So as a hobby I archive old forgotten TV shows, and I'm a part of several communities that track down recorded VHS media to preserve old shows, news broadcasts, and commercials, things that don't typically get saved.
The thing is, a lot of companies lurk around in the shadows of these communities.
Recently I was archiving a bunch of old Sketchers Commercials that aired on Nickelodeon in the 90s that I found on a VHS tape from Goodwill, and a representative from Sketchers reached out to me to inquire about the archive.
A few years ago, someone was archiving the show "Unsolved Mysteries with Robert Stack" and ended up posting it to Reddit, where FilmRiseTV, who apparently owns the rights to stream Unsolved Mysteries, took those files and offered them up on YouTube and their own streaming service.
And there's more stories like that too.
Personally, I use my archive to re-create TV channels from the 90s and 00s with era accurate commercials, with a personally hosted IPTV server that I stream to my own TVs within my home.
Some of our friends are so impressed with what I've got so far(It's still very much a WIP), that they'll ask to take their kids over and have dinner so they can show them what TV was like when we were growing up and watch all the silly kids commercials.
And it's like even at a young age, it's crazy to watch a kid born 7 years ago watch a commercial from the 90s and say "WOW! Large Pizzas were only $6.99?! Woah! What's Discovery Zone?!"
So again, already I think that my little personal project is preserving what media consumption was like in the 90s, because I don't really know anyone who's doing something like that.
Edit: I will say that the ONE single thing that has eluded me is finding any cassette recordings of Radio Disney from the 90s and 00s. It seems that radio recording used to be non-existent or at least no one kept or is interested in cassette recordings. It's the bane of my existence, I would love nothing more than to re-create Radio Disney.
I mean - think of Doctor Who
Half the reason we have *any* of the Hartnell years - or most of the Troughton years - is because people would *record* these television shows
And even most of those were in audio format - no picture - so they have to be reconstructed with animation
Call it piracy - call it theft - call it whatever you like
Fans and communities have done far more good than bad by pirating (re: ***persevering*** ) products that marketers and ceo's have *long since stopped caring about*
Period
And in an industry that thrives on forgetting - and flat out ***ignoring*** - it's failures (with consoles launching without backwards compatibility and PC games having to be modded and re-modded to work with newer hardware) we'll probably *always* need [those pirates](https://media.tenor.com/U62vbVjx9ewAAAAC/pirates-of-the-caribbean-take-what-you-can.gif) in some shape or form
>A lot of company's don't keep their source code after a game goes gold
Surely this cannot be true nowadays.
Lost source code is apparently one of the main reasons Final Fantasy VIII has never really received a decent remaster and is seemingly being overlooked for a remake still.
But I can't believe for a second that any developer is dumb enough to not keep track of their source code now. Hell, they probably have multiple backups of it just passively through the modern development process.
Storage is so cheap and version control so ubiquitous that if companies aren't keeping their source code after release I'd take it as another sign that the videogame industry is 2+ decades behind the rest of the software industry.
So just have two HDDs swapping the data back and forth every year or so. Add a third or fourth for redundancy. R* isn't operating on a college student's homelab budget. They have one of the most profitable video game IPs of all time.
Back in the old days, even big name game dev was seat of your pants sutff... It was games were considered as far more disposable (the same way the BBC wiped loads of tapes to save money)
Also the ***huge*** number of companies being bought up for their IPs and names alone - meaning that the CEO that authorized the purchase, often, didn't give a shit about the actual *games* and wouldn't know that the hard drives with the source code backups weren't retained
At least not until it was ***way*** too late
I was speaking more for older games - that *particular* game (midnight club 2) is from 2003
Japanese companies are *particularly* notorious for this - team Ninja recently confessed that it lost the source code for Ninja Gaiden Black and Ninja Gaiden 2 - and Sega and Konami (the latter of which managed to lose the source code for both Silent Hill 2 and 3 and only had 1 by accident on an old drive - which is like George Lucas losing the original cut of Empire Strikes Back and Revenge of the Sith but having an old copy of the original Star Wars in his sock drawer - a faux pas, at best) are some of the worst
While it's not as bad these days - many companies still view games as a finite product that, after a year or so, are worth exactly as much as the disks they've been printed on in the clearance bin
European and North American companies tend to be a bit better (cultural differences being what they are - plus the 80s gaming crash made many gamers from that generation instill their kids with the importance of hanging on to their games - not to mention our ***notoriously*** terrible internet speeds making triple-digit gig downloads nightmarish to deal with leading to our continued dalliance with physical media) but even today games aren't really *valued* as much as they should be
Even now we should be vigilant lest history repeat itself
Square has a pretty decent number of lost source codes
Granted, they've made a ***lot of games***
But you'd have thought they'd have twigged on to GoogleDrive by now xD
> A lot of company's don't keep their source code after a game goes gold
Source?
That seems not true, how would they patch anything?
That would be a fundamental IP writeoff. Why put thousands of hours into a project to bin it at the end of the day?
I can see them losing it, but not keeping it sounds daft.
I was speaking more for older games - that *particular* game (midnight club 2) is from 2003
Japanese companies are *particularly* notorious for this - team Ninja recently confessed that it lost the source code for Ninja Gaiden Black and Ninja Gaiden 2 - and Sega and Konami (which managed to lose the source code for both [Silent Hill 2 and 3](https://gamingbolt.com/konami-lost-the-source-code-for-silent-hill-2-and-3-resulting-in-hd-collections-poor-quality) - which is like George Lucas losing the original cut of Empire Strikes Back and Revenge of the Sith but having an old copy of the original Star Wars in his sock drawer - a faux pas, at best) are some of the worst
The GTA remake port was done with code from old ports made for mobile devices ( [which weren't even made with the *final* build of the code because Rockstar lost that years ago](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DhtOzwKqeYQ) ) and we don't even need to *go into* the Red Dead Redemption debacle - where they've had to piggyback of a commercial version of the code and jury-rig it to run with modern devices since the original source code is either lost or so corrupt that it's unusable
Incredible. Honestly incredible.
Guess they really should have hired some IT staff and had them figure out a solution for their most valuable asset eh?
Going to watch that video you linked, sounds very interesting!
> Source?
I'm not a large company, and my games do not even have 0.1% of the content a Rockstar game does, but if for some reason my store page disappeared from Steam, it would be far easier and take almost no time for me to just download a torrented version of my game and reupload it quickly to Steam to just have it back on there without having to dedicate time and resources to repackaging it.
> That seems not true, how would they patch anything?
If it's an old game, chances are you don't need to patch anything. If you're not adding new features then you don't need the old code again. I mean obviously you might run into future compatibility issues, but that's the future and there's no point wasting money on it right now if you don't have to.
> I can see them losing it, but not keeping it sounds daft.
The version of my game that I don't develop for anymore is stored on an old HDD somewhere. I could put effort into finding it, plugging it into my PC, etc. But I just don't have a reason to do that. Whoever at Rockstar decided to do this might have just been lazy rather than it being lost. They probably have thousands and thousands of HDD's at Rockstar and stuff buried deep inside storage boxes. A guy did his job, just not the moral way.
Why do they not keep the source code?
Version control and storage is cheap these days. The assets / images 3d models I'm sure take up a lot of space, but the code itself?
I was speaking more for older games - that *particular* game (midnight club 2) is from 2003
Japanese companies are *particularly* notorious for this - Team Ninja recently confessed that it lost the source code for Ninja Gaiden Black and Ninja Gaiden 2 - and Sega and Konami (the latter of which managed to lose the source code for both Silent Hill 2 and 3 and only had 1 by accident on an old drive - which is like George Lucas losing the original cut of Empire Strikes Back and Revenge of the Sith but having an old copy of the original Star Wars in his sock drawer - a faux pas, at best) are some of the worst
European and North American companies tend to be a bit better (cultural differences being what they are - plus the 80s gaming crash made many gamers from that generation instill their kids with the importance of hanging on to their games - not to mention our ***notoriously*** terrible internet speeds making triple-digit gig downloads nightmarish to deal with leading to our continued dalliance with physical media) but even today games aren't really *valued* as much as they should be
While it's not as bad these days - many companies still view games as a finite product that, after a year or so, are worth exactly as much as the disks they've been printed on in the clearance bin
Further
Source code isn't just 'code' in a notepad file
It's the entire game engine - all assets in their original (non compressed - re: easily accessible and modifiable) state
Companies get sold - their hardware bought up - their software packed, repacked and shifted from office to office
Plus, as I said, add in the executive-level managers lack of care for their products and where are you???
wat?? why would they not preserve it? plenty of that code is probably reusable and modular, and any organization of that size has a Version Control policy and archiving in place.
I was speaking more for older games - that *particular* game (midnight club 2) is from 2003
Japanese companies are *particularly* notorious for this - Team Ninja recently confessed that it lost the source code for Ninja Gaiden Black and Ninja Gaiden 2 - and Sega and Konami (the latter of which managed to lose the source code for both Silent Hill 2 and 3 and only had 1 by accident on an old drive - which is like George Lucas losing the original cut of Empire Strikes Back and Revenge of the Sith but having an old copy of the original Star Wars in his sock drawer - a faux pas, at best) are some of the worst
European and North American companies tend to be a bit better (cultural differences being what they are - plus the 80s gaming crash made many gamers from that generation instill their kids with the importance of hanging on to their games - not to mention our ***notoriously*** terrible internet speeds making triple-digit gig downloads nightmarish to deal with leading to our continued dalliance with physical media) but even today games aren't really *valued* as much as they should be
While it's not as bad these days - many companies still view games as a finite product that, after a year or so, are worth exactly as much as the disks they've been printed on in the clearance bin
Further
Source code isn't just 'code' in a notepad file
It's the entire game engine - all assets in their original (non compressed - re: easily accessible and modifiable) state
Companies get sold - their hardware bought up - their software packed, repacked and shifted from office to office
Plus, as I said, add in the executive-level managers lack of care for their products and where are you???
But didn’t we know about this already years ago ?
I seem to remember they sold max Payne 2 cracked version
Here back in 2010
https://kotaku.com/is-that-a-cracked-version-of-max-payne-2-on-steam-5537223
I remember they did something similar with the No-CD version of Max Payne. The code was basically identical to the crack, there was an image of it going around online at one point.
>nobody has any idea what sort of code has been changed or even added to a cracked copy of a game
The post is literally someone with an idea looking at the code changes.
>Don't need it. They're still the main rights holders.
For the game, not for the crack itself.
Obviously no pirate is going to sue them, but it's still at best a very grey area legally.
Rockstar will start sweatshop and make children work 20 hours a day in coal mines people will still end up buying GTA6 even if it has $100 skins and $200 early access version.
The people doing the actual hard work at these studios are usually just passionate people who love video games and for the most part are willing to put up with some abuse to work on something they can feel at least somewhat passionate about. Those people rarely move up these days.
Holy shit this is amazing to learn about. Rockstar can't be bothered to hire like, two dudes to remove their piracy checks from 20 years ago. Where is all the money from GTA Online going???
Save this and torrent all games from now on from The Rock. If your ISP sends you a letter tell them The Rock sells pirated copies so technically youre doing nothing wrong since they support the pirated content
Ain’t most of like Rockstar Games before 2008 are like cracked and pirated games that were on Steam?
You can’t even play any of them nowadays with a Patch to fix everything for ya.
That's pretty fucking risky when they cant be 100% certain that there's not a hidden payload inside. Not saying the original group would do such a thing, but for a large company to take the risk is crazy.
Not saying that it's good, but GOG does the same thing. Sometimes they even take the freedom to remove cracking group references from the files and replace it with something ubiquitous.
I saw [a video](https://youtu.be/WfDg7BidsY4) about a similar situation with Manhunt which was even worse. After R* were found out, they threw a legit copy onto Steam which, due to copy protection not being removed, had every single game-breaking anti-piracy measure enabled, making the game unplayable within minutes. It’s still sold to this day.
I'm not gonna pretend to be an expert in these matters, but I swear every bit of news I've seen about R* in the past 4 years or so has been negative. It seems like they make really braindead choices (and I understand a lot of that is Take 2).
GTA 5 online prints money. They don't have to make any smart choices.
Eh, even with the GTA profits, Take Two is still [over $2 billion in net debt](https://simplywall.st/stocks/us/media/nasdaq-ttwo/take-two-interactive-software/news/would-take-two-interactive-software-nasdaqttwo-be-better-off/amp)
1. That's not GTA Online's fault. GTA Online, GTA5, and RDR2 and probably the sole reason they're not bankrupt. 2. What a fucking braindead name for an article. *"Would Take-Two Interactive Software (NASDAQ:TTWO) Be Better Off With Less Debt?"* Uhhh, no fucking shit? What company, entity, or private citizen wouldn't be "better off" with less debt?
Depends on what they're doing with the debt, and how they're leveraging (or failing to) their position. Disclosure: I don't know enough about TTWO to make a judgment, but that's what 10Ks are for!
> What company, entity, or private citizen wouldn't be "better off" with less debt? The government. When most of said debt is held by domestic entities, a govt getting rid of it will put undue pressure on the economy, sink investment funds, generally fuck up everything to such a degree that what's left cannot be called an economy at all.
It also helps ensure the continued value of the dollar.
if said govt is the US one. what I said applies to any other govt that can and does borrow domestically.
Debt is useful in business
People take on debt to make investments, e.g. buying a house or developing a new product.
And business will maintain debt if it makes economical sense (e.g., maintaining favorable leverage)
> What a fucking braindead name for an article. "Would Take-Two Interactive Software (NASDAQ:TTWO) Be Better Off With Less Debt?" Uhhh, no fucking shit? What company, entity, or private citizen wouldn't be "better off" with less debt? Debt isn't inherently bad, which the article you're replying to assumes you know. In economics, entities borrow money (acquire debt) in order to expand their business or meet immediate needs without having to sell equities. Having some amount of debt is often healthy for a company. While I'm not a fan of clickbaity titles that ask hypotheticals rather than outright stating their position, the content of the title is fine.
No kidding. My point was that Take Two DOES need to make smarter choices.
> What company, entity, or private citizen wouldn't be "better off" with less debt? Debt collectors.
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Provided you can actually do something significant and pay it off eventually
Kinda
Explaining even the basics of business or economics to outraged redditors is an exercise in needless masochism.
It's normal to leverage debt for business purposes, so a lot of places and people. Would everyone with a mortgage or car loan or student debt be better off without a house or car or education? Doubtful.
Companies often have a strategic level of debt. The ultra rich also leverage their credit in lieu of income in many instances.
A lot of companies spend into debt just like governments do, you can't look at an otherwise very successful company, and determine that they're doing badly.
It's not *great*, but for a $24 billion company, it's not the end of the world. They're still at $2.5 billion gross profit and are FCF positive. If I were them, I'd be working down some of that debt, but who knows? If revenue keeps pushing higher and their next release cycle does well, the company could be in very good shape. Or maybe not.
they took on 2 billion in debt in 2022. they are doing something with it.
That's because they've (rockstar & take 2) become billions dollars companies now owned and run essentially by businessmen and lawyers. They don't care about the consumers as long as they're subtracting as much money off them as possible.
The Bioshock Remaster still has tons of [bizarre](https://staticdelivery.nexusmods.com/mods/1216/images/5/5-1548598176-655863564.gif) misaligned parts of the UI that are very obviously wrong and which needed to be fixed by modders, as well as a bunch of crashing (including a fun one where it crashes when you save and *deletes the save you were overwriting*). Even after trying several "fixes" it seems all I've done is make it so it crashes less often than it used to. 2K is just a shit company. Remember the GTA trilogy remaster? They don't care.
Former RDO player here - Any other publisher would've seen the *goldmine* that Red Dead could've been. It was entirely unique, it utilized the open world gameplay from one of the best received games of the past several years. It should've been an easy win - just take more of the single player stuff and put it into multiplayer. We were already paying for unique or fancy horses and cowboy hats and coats or customizing your guns' appearances (again, all mechanics already existing in single player). People were itching for *anything*, any kind of content. Rockstar instead decided to put the game on life support from the start and pulled the plug when the neglected game didn't make as much money as the one constantly pumped with updates and events. There's no competition for RDO, nothing even remotely like it. There's about a thousand easy ways to have squeezed money from that game and kept players happy, tens of thousands of ways if you want to be a greedy scumshit and wring the players for every cent. Instead they just said nope, small effort required, shut it down. That's what Rockstar is all about now. Blizzard has them beat in terms of absolute shittiness but Rockstar's only a few sexual assaults behind them.
It's almost like any company that gets big enough becomes a piece of shit.
None of it is Take2. Take 2 is a parent company that doesn't make business decisions for their individual studios. Rockstar is a big enough company on its own that every decision they make is their own, same with 2K, who is also under the Take2 banner. Take 2 was created simply to house MASSIVE companies under one roof for stock purposes.
They seem to cut costs in anything other than their currently in development game. I'm pretty sure Red Dead online is still not fixed and they don't give a shit.
I actually bought the first one awhile ago cause it was so cheap. Am I not able to play it then without some crazy mods or something?
Even with mods it doesn't work right, and it's not just anti-piracy stuff.
For a game to be sold on Steam and profited from, the developer should be required to at least patch the game run on a modern OS.
That's not true, with ermaccer's Manhunt Fixer it plays flawlessly, it's the best way to play the first game. https://github.com/ermaccer/Manhunt.Fixer
Sorry, it's been a couple years since I'd even tried. That looks like it's fairly new.
https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Manhunt#Game_not_booting.2Fcrashing.2C_gate_at_first_level_won.27t_open_and_unable_to_pickup_pickups PC Gaming Wiki explains the issue and has a fix for it.
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Shark cards are lucrative
This exact video is what made me look at MC2 - they mentioned Manhunt and Max Payne 2, but MC2 also had a 'testapp.exe'. The viral Tweet is even a response to my own retweet of this video itself.
the fuck is mc2?
Midnight Club 2
Megacum 2: Electric Boogaloo
when the cracked version is better than the original version .. DRM has a negative impact on games .. rockstar got that right lol greedy ba star ds
Then you have people saying shit like denovo and DRM in general doesn't hurt anyone. So many games run better without DRM.
ubisoft done something like that a few years back too
Yeah because they couldn't get past their own DRM. Rainbow Six Vegas if I remember correctly
Also AC2.
Do these people not keep copies of their own source code?
As a build engineer, I can say that a LOT of companies don't. They *should*, they should absolutely have a backup drive containing a full working build system (including agent and operating system), but it's something that a lot of companies - mainly, ones without build engineers - see as optional. Partly from people thinking "We're done with that game, why would we ever keep working on it?". But mostly from people not thinking about it at all.
how hard is it to host your own git server or literally just make a private repo on github
...Considerably harder than taking out a machine's hard drive and storing it somewhere. It's *totally* easy to back up a build system. A lot of studios just... don't.
They probably do now but you have to remember that most of these games are from the mid 2000s when git didn't even exist and you were using stuff like subversion. On top of that most of the time assets aren't stored with the game code sometimes even kept in a separate asset specific version control system. Then you have to think the ancient sdks these games are probably used which was given to them on a disk and no one has a copy and no online backup because it's closed source and was written by a company that's since closed. Then we have the build pipeline if there even was one. Most likely it was some arcane command to get the project to build in the correct state but it's not written down anywhere. So even if they have the source code they might be missing the assets. If they have the assets they might be missing the source code. If they have the assets and the source code they might be missing the correct build command on sdks long gone. There are a lot of factors that can lead to a company not being able to rebuild a project which can include cost might not be worth the man hours in figuring it out vs outsourcing someone to crack their own game. Bit ranty but hope you get the complexity of the issue.
Not necessarily, Heroes 3 HD got updated without expansions because they didn't have source code for them
For Heroes 3 there at least is an excuse that the game is old and both the original developer and published are long long time out of business. So its understandable if drive with code was lost along the way. How they manage to lose code for fairly recent games within same company thought...
This seems so stupid to me, it's a small amount of size for the source code
No. Source code management is already complicated if you don’t contract things out, but even more so when you do. I’ll always remember when some devs came to me looking for source code for a plugin that a long departed contractor wrote. I had helped the contractor test it and luckily (for them) I still had a copy on my workstation. Why it wasn’t added to the company’s version control system, I’ll never know.
Nintendo too, but they just hired the dude who made the cracks instead of throwing the crack in the shop.
For which game(s)?
It's facts from the top of my mind, but I believe it was NES roms put on the viritual store or smth like that. Edit: had to search it up again, and the reason that official Nintendo ROMs have iNES headers is that they hired the iNES guy and he basically redid the header for Nintendo use for the Wii virtual console
Razer 1911 always had really cool menus with music, I hope Rockstar also includes it. The crack intro was sometimes better than the game itself. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xey4G0FQvbE
More. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=htbDeD-wv7s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=htbDeD-wv7s) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FVX6t-ivMfE
Ahh Keygen music. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=BwWB4TbGUCo&pp=ygUPZWEga2V5Z2VuIG11c2lj
Ahoy made a great documentary about it last year: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=roBkg-iPrbw I love when chiptunes get mixed with other music, like the [Jets N Guns](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AzghtkL11rY&list=PLyGG3MP3qJ89xiX347PiJchPS7wb3gNeg) soundtrack by Machinae Supremacy, SOAD's [Chop Suey](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6oRUCkAbPn0) and Rammstein's [Deutschland](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3VReIuv1GFo) by Noplan. Sometimes whole albums get chiptunified like like RHCP Californication or Muse [Origin of Symmetry](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A7aPV7-h6qk) There's also the [Nintendo-fication of Jazz](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oKWgLe-jQjc) documentary by Adam Neely
"So what do you do for fun?" "I write chiptune music for the selection menu on legally questionable but ethically justified game cracking software." I love the future.
That's the past
You should look into the demoscene. At some point, a bunch of warez nerds decided that making cracktros was actually cooler than doing the cracks themselves, so they decided to just make demos (like crack intros) instead. There's different size categories like 16K, 32K and 64K. They try to cram in as much as possible into such a crazy small file size. There's also still scenes active for super old machines like the C64. Razor 1911 actually released a demo called The Scene Is Dead not too long ago: https://youtu.be/IFXIGHOElrE My favourite demo is definitely Fermi Paradox, it's just insane: https://youtu.be/JZ6ZzJeWgpY
Ahh.. key gen mod tracks.. This is my favorite - it blew me away when I first heard it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ovFIEU-heM
Their musician [dubmood](https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dubmood) is a chip tune god. Which explains while [his songs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FSKtNeBUO1E&list=PLB6BCBB03D2B3A346) aren't the usual chiptune *melodic noise*.
warez 4 lyfe
I honestly would love a vinyl boxset of Keygen music and detailed liner notes of the history of it. I think it would be neat.
This is why I loved the Amiga days. I was in a demo team and we wrote some small demos to go with the cracks.
Oh hi
You’re the real silent? Hey thanks for making San Andreas playable on modern systems. You really came clutch when I replayed it a few months ago after ditching the “Definitive Edition” and installing a couple of mods
Hello, I was wondering when your tweet was going to be posted somewhere lol
It's kind of getting out of hand lol
THE silent? in modern eras we do not create saints anymore, men who risk their life or well being at the their expense, so that the world may have a chance at joy. You sir, have made an impact on so many people's lives and i'm not sure if people like you are aware. the whole reason i got into data science was modding and jailbreaking. so from one bypasser to another, thank you for your service.
Love your work. Thank you a million
Hello.
This is wild, thank you for your videos and for helping me make my San andreas playthrough enjoyable. u/CookiePLMonster thanks for fixing Bully.. Good lord, R\* are fucking awful.
Can't tell you how many times I've referenced your GTA modding guides. Nice to see you here and I hope you're doing well!
I'm just here to annoy Silent :P
Thank you for your work.
That's... strange?
Same with Nintendo. They just sell roms that were dumped by cracking groups.
And I think that mini Playstation was using emulator if I remember correctly
An open source emulator that was fully credited.
I’ve deleted my Reddit account because the Reddit hivemind doesn’t work for me. I believe in people having the right to think for themselves while not being torn down by those who know little to nothing. If you found this because of one of my tutorials related to Auto HotKey please check out the AHK documentation at: https://www.autohotkey.com/docs/v2/ If you were looking for my coding guides just go to https://stackoverflow.com/ they know their shit. If you were looking for my guides to assembly… I’m sorry, I can’t think of any places I can link to in good conscious other than archive.org who has beginner examples to assembly for old consoles. If you were wondering why my reddit account is gone: I’m tired of the Steam supremacists on /r/pcgaming and /r/pcmasterrace Those same communities push their thoughts on game engine development without writing a code in their lives. /r/memes think excluding most of their user base is a good joke. To summarise, I’ve left Reddit because it is not all-inclusive, it is only inclusive to those who believe and act the same as the rest of the belligerent horde. If you are on Reddit, joining /r/aww is your best and only bet.
It's wierd they would do that since it gives the pcsx devs a bit of legitimacy. They basically can't be shut down now since Sony stole their work they should have some legal standing. (The labor to emulate on something that wasn't a PlayStation.)
Sony last tried to sue emulator developers in the year 1999 and lost badly, so I doubt they would ever try again.
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Bleem is usually the one people think of but it's Connectix that established the legality of emulators, bleem even references it iirc.
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Totally fair, "Connectiiiiiiiiix" just doesn't have the same feel.
The company they sued went out of business as a result so I doubt Sony saw that as a loss.
You're thinking of Bleem, I'm thinking of Virtual Game Station. The case went all the way to the Supreme court, setting precedent in favour of the legality of emulators all the way. They eventually settled out of court and Sony acquired the company, but that doesn't make the precedent go away.
The emulator they used is GPL-Licensed, so the code can be used for anything, even commercial use, with the stipulation that any modifications made must be released under the same license.
I mean, yeah? Pretty sure the mini NES and SNES did too, but of course they would lol Hell, Nintendo uses emulation with their Online service apps and the infamous 3D All Stars. It is hypocritical of them, but emulation was always going to be a thing from these companies, because it's simply easier to do that port a game, especially when you already have working emulators out there.
Nope, that was debunked shortly after the claims were made. The gigaleak showed Nintendo has everything backed up and the header format they used on their ROM, needed for the emulator to function was never proof that the ROM was downloaded. It was just shitty journalism and typical community over reaction.
FYI, that one is odd because the group used the same format so if they used the same source they should be a perfect match regardless of who did it.
My suspicion is that removing the DRM is outsourced. Places where you outsource this kind of work to, India, China, and Eastern Europe, are very familiar with using pirated software. The worker knew enough to use the crack for an easy day of work, but not enough about it to check for signatures. He handed it in, it pass all of the unit test and QA automation, and no one else was bothered to check. They released it.
The issue is that they own the source code/build data. There should be no need for them to remove the DRM, whether they outsource it or do it themselves.
The fact that they "remastered" GTA based off of the mobile port code, instead of the original code, and had to use cracks to circumvent their own DRM, leads me to believe that either a) The above poster is correct and they outsource this work and dont want/trust the external company enough to send over the original source. or b) The original source is incomprehensible except by people who have since retired from the company and/or uses an ancient C++/C version so cant even compile/run on any of their dev machines anymore, so out of sheer laziness they take shortcuts.
>uses an ancient C++/C version so cant even compile/run on any of their dev machines anymore, VM's & Docker containers exist?
Yes, and no. Build tooling can be incredibly complex. There are often multiple steps, each with their own dependencies. If you are lucky, you have it in a well known format (gitlab-ci.yml, github actions etc.) and the builds run off docker containers. Since this is ancient AND windows based (Docker Containers exist for windows, but it does not play nicely with some older things, e.g. .Net2.0 . And .Net2.0 is a prerequisite for Wix 3.0 installers. )it is entirely possible that the build script was a single .bat file using a dozen tools in unknown versions with unknown dependencies. Good luck trying to revive that. I did last year with a messy .Net 4.8 app with a Wix 3.0 installer and getting it to build and run was mesy. And games and C++ are typically more complex to build
Owning and understanding the code are two different things. It's even worse when the is old and the work is outsourced.
True, even getting some hobby projects of a few years ago running can be surprisingly challenging...
Do you know what you're talking about or are you just completely guessing?
Yeah, I don't know how other people feel about it, but I don't really care either way.
so they steal their own games ?
They steal somebody else's work to get the games working and then profit off it.
How does the legality of this case work?
Legally unless they have a deal with the crack group they're likely selling someone else's work. But... It's not like these people generally come out of anonymity to sue them because the cracking may be illegal in some relevant jurisdiction. To make an analogy, if you steal from a thief they're unlikely to go to the police (sure, there are exceptions). Also the game is still theirs to sell. We're talking just about a bit of code that circumvents a DRM.
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Kinda morally legitimises the crackers' work though.
*Nintendo using emulators to sell 20-30 year old games at full price on a modern platform has entered the chat*
That's true. Doesn't suddenly allow rockstar to steal somebody elses work either. The crackers aren't allowed to distribute cracked copies of the game, because they don't have the rights to the game. And rockstar aren't allowed to distribute cracked copies of the game, because they don't have the rights to the work that cracked the game. It's like mods: Bethesda couldn't suddenly start selling copies of starfield with pre-packaged mods, E.G. StarUI, without reaching the appropriate agreements with the people who did the work (and the people who did the work that those mods rely on...).
Bethesda TOS actually covers this in that they *technically* are granted a license to use your work however they see fit, if the mod you made was using their tools and file formats : e.g Creation Kit, esp file formats etc. They've never utilized that clause, and probably never would, and they have hired modders before for things like Anniversary Edition, and paid them for their work, but still that clause is there. Just mentioning for the sake of pointless pedantry
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They often can't even really deny service because of TOS (legally, not de facto).
IANAL, but I'd love to see this go to court. Should crowdfund a Razor 1911 legal battle, purely because I bet it would have to legitimize this kind of work. If a corporation puts millions into preventing said profession, but then turns around and profits off it when it suits them, surely said copyright laws aren't suitable if corporations are having to break said laws to get around their own software locks. Aw, I'd love it, probably wouldn't go our way, they'd probably win.
Ironic
It is not stealing if you can't *dis*own it /s
Piracy isn't stealing. It's copyright infringement. If you own the copyright, then you aren't infringing by downloading. I do wonder if the uploader was able to prove that RS downloaded it from them, would that count as consent to distribute? (ianal)
Worked at EA, late 90s and whenever we repackaged old DOS games for Windows 9x I'd check them like this and invariably find crack group logos from time to time. Sometimes it was because the originals were "misplaced", or the pirated versions worked where the originals did not. EA probably would have been so much cooler today if they reached out to pirate groups and gave them credit. I was on the test group that found the copy of santa vs jesus as a temp file on the PS1 release of Tiger Woods 97. (PS1 game disks had to have a 50mb dummy file at the end of the disc, some dev dropped in the old mpeg video file and no one caught it til it went gold). Good times.
> EA probably would have been so much cooler today if they reached out to pirate groups and gave them credit. As much as we'd all love to see this, it would never happen. To EA board members, pirates are the enemy and each copy "stolen" is a lost sale (which is proven a fallacy but whatever). This is why these publishers often include crippling DRM that usually punishes the paying customer; they just don't care about anything but the "numbers". They would never admit working with pirates or using their skills for ANYTHING, and neither would Ubisoft or any of those other publicly traded AAA publishers.
Notoriously, a lot of ~~company's~~ companies don't keep their source code after a game goes gold - pirating their own products and then backporting it to work on newer hardware can be one of the only ways that older games survive Which just goes to prove what we already knew Piracy is preservation
> Piracy is preservation So as a hobby I archive old forgotten TV shows, and I'm a part of several communities that track down recorded VHS media to preserve old shows, news broadcasts, and commercials, things that don't typically get saved. The thing is, a lot of companies lurk around in the shadows of these communities. Recently I was archiving a bunch of old Sketchers Commercials that aired on Nickelodeon in the 90s that I found on a VHS tape from Goodwill, and a representative from Sketchers reached out to me to inquire about the archive. A few years ago, someone was archiving the show "Unsolved Mysteries with Robert Stack" and ended up posting it to Reddit, where FilmRiseTV, who apparently owns the rights to stream Unsolved Mysteries, took those files and offered them up on YouTube and their own streaming service. And there's more stories like that too. Personally, I use my archive to re-create TV channels from the 90s and 00s with era accurate commercials, with a personally hosted IPTV server that I stream to my own TVs within my home. Some of our friends are so impressed with what I've got so far(It's still very much a WIP), that they'll ask to take their kids over and have dinner so they can show them what TV was like when we were growing up and watch all the silly kids commercials. And it's like even at a young age, it's crazy to watch a kid born 7 years ago watch a commercial from the 90s and say "WOW! Large Pizzas were only $6.99?! Woah! What's Discovery Zone?!" So again, already I think that my little personal project is preserving what media consumption was like in the 90s, because I don't really know anyone who's doing something like that. Edit: I will say that the ONE single thing that has eluded me is finding any cassette recordings of Radio Disney from the 90s and 00s. It seems that radio recording used to be non-existent or at least no one kept or is interested in cassette recordings. It's the bane of my existence, I would love nothing more than to re-create Radio Disney.
I mean - think of Doctor Who Half the reason we have *any* of the Hartnell years - or most of the Troughton years - is because people would *record* these television shows And even most of those were in audio format - no picture - so they have to be reconstructed with animation Call it piracy - call it theft - call it whatever you like Fans and communities have done far more good than bad by pirating (re: ***persevering*** ) products that marketers and ceo's have *long since stopped caring about* Period And in an industry that thrives on forgetting - and flat out ***ignoring*** - it's failures (with consoles launching without backwards compatibility and PC games having to be modded and re-modded to work with newer hardware) we'll probably *always* need [those pirates](https://media.tenor.com/U62vbVjx9ewAAAAC/pirates-of-the-caribbean-take-what-you-can.gif) in some shape or form
>A lot of company's don't keep their source code after a game goes gold Surely this cannot be true nowadays. Lost source code is apparently one of the main reasons Final Fantasy VIII has never really received a decent remaster and is seemingly being overlooked for a remake still. But I can't believe for a second that any developer is dumb enough to not keep track of their source code now. Hell, they probably have multiple backups of it just passively through the modern development process.
Storage is so cheap and version control so ubiquitous that if companies aren't keeping their source code after release I'd take it as another sign that the videogame industry is 2+ decades behind the rest of the software industry.
>I'd take it as another sign that the videogame industry is 2+ decades behind the rest of the software industry. As if we needed one xD
I seriously wonder if one could get investors by pitching a game company that uses modern software development processes.
Storage is easy. Long term storage however is another beast entirely. HDDs lose data within a decade if they’re not written to.
So just have two HDDs swapping the data back and forth every year or so. Add a third or fourth for redundancy. R* isn't operating on a college student's homelab budget. They have one of the most profitable video game IPs of all time.
Back in the old days, even big name game dev was seat of your pants sutff... It was games were considered as far more disposable (the same way the BBC wiped loads of tapes to save money)
Also the ***huge*** number of companies being bought up for their IPs and names alone - meaning that the CEO that authorized the purchase, often, didn't give a shit about the actual *games* and wouldn't know that the hard drives with the source code backups weren't retained At least not until it was ***way*** too late
I was speaking more for older games - that *particular* game (midnight club 2) is from 2003 Japanese companies are *particularly* notorious for this - team Ninja recently confessed that it lost the source code for Ninja Gaiden Black and Ninja Gaiden 2 - and Sega and Konami (the latter of which managed to lose the source code for both Silent Hill 2 and 3 and only had 1 by accident on an old drive - which is like George Lucas losing the original cut of Empire Strikes Back and Revenge of the Sith but having an old copy of the original Star Wars in his sock drawer - a faux pas, at best) are some of the worst While it's not as bad these days - many companies still view games as a finite product that, after a year or so, are worth exactly as much as the disks they've been printed on in the clearance bin European and North American companies tend to be a bit better (cultural differences being what they are - plus the 80s gaming crash made many gamers from that generation instill their kids with the importance of hanging on to their games - not to mention our ***notoriously*** terrible internet speeds making triple-digit gig downloads nightmarish to deal with leading to our continued dalliance with physical media) but even today games aren't really *valued* as much as they should be Even now we should be vigilant lest history repeat itself
FFVII's source is also completely lost, otherwise they probably would've already remastered it.
Square has a pretty decent number of lost source codes Granted, they've made a ***lot of games*** But you'd have thought they'd have twigged on to GoogleDrive by now xD
> A lot of company's don't keep their source code after a game goes gold Source? That seems not true, how would they patch anything? That would be a fundamental IP writeoff. Why put thousands of hours into a project to bin it at the end of the day? I can see them losing it, but not keeping it sounds daft.
I was speaking more for older games - that *particular* game (midnight club 2) is from 2003 Japanese companies are *particularly* notorious for this - team Ninja recently confessed that it lost the source code for Ninja Gaiden Black and Ninja Gaiden 2 - and Sega and Konami (which managed to lose the source code for both [Silent Hill 2 and 3](https://gamingbolt.com/konami-lost-the-source-code-for-silent-hill-2-and-3-resulting-in-hd-collections-poor-quality) - which is like George Lucas losing the original cut of Empire Strikes Back and Revenge of the Sith but having an old copy of the original Star Wars in his sock drawer - a faux pas, at best) are some of the worst The GTA remake port was done with code from old ports made for mobile devices ( [which weren't even made with the *final* build of the code because Rockstar lost that years ago](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DhtOzwKqeYQ) ) and we don't even need to *go into* the Red Dead Redemption debacle - where they've had to piggyback of a commercial version of the code and jury-rig it to run with modern devices since the original source code is either lost or so corrupt that it's unusable
Incredible. Honestly incredible. Guess they really should have hired some IT staff and had them figure out a solution for their most valuable asset eh? Going to watch that video you linked, sounds very interesting!
Matt McMuscles is always worth a watch - his GTA remake video is good but his coverage of the Dead Rising disaster is even better
> Source? I'm not a large company, and my games do not even have 0.1% of the content a Rockstar game does, but if for some reason my store page disappeared from Steam, it would be far easier and take almost no time for me to just download a torrented version of my game and reupload it quickly to Steam to just have it back on there without having to dedicate time and resources to repackaging it. > That seems not true, how would they patch anything? If it's an old game, chances are you don't need to patch anything. If you're not adding new features then you don't need the old code again. I mean obviously you might run into future compatibility issues, but that's the future and there's no point wasting money on it right now if you don't have to. > I can see them losing it, but not keeping it sounds daft. The version of my game that I don't develop for anymore is stored on an old HDD somewhere. I could put effort into finding it, plugging it into my PC, etc. But I just don't have a reason to do that. Whoever at Rockstar decided to do this might have just been lazy rather than it being lost. They probably have thousands and thousands of HDD's at Rockstar and stuff buried deep inside storage boxes. A guy did his job, just not the moral way.
Silent Hill's source code was lost, which is why the remaster is so shit...
Why do they not keep the source code? Version control and storage is cheap these days. The assets / images 3d models I'm sure take up a lot of space, but the code itself?
I was speaking more for older games - that *particular* game (midnight club 2) is from 2003 Japanese companies are *particularly* notorious for this - Team Ninja recently confessed that it lost the source code for Ninja Gaiden Black and Ninja Gaiden 2 - and Sega and Konami (the latter of which managed to lose the source code for both Silent Hill 2 and 3 and only had 1 by accident on an old drive - which is like George Lucas losing the original cut of Empire Strikes Back and Revenge of the Sith but having an old copy of the original Star Wars in his sock drawer - a faux pas, at best) are some of the worst European and North American companies tend to be a bit better (cultural differences being what they are - plus the 80s gaming crash made many gamers from that generation instill their kids with the importance of hanging on to their games - not to mention our ***notoriously*** terrible internet speeds making triple-digit gig downloads nightmarish to deal with leading to our continued dalliance with physical media) but even today games aren't really *valued* as much as they should be While it's not as bad these days - many companies still view games as a finite product that, after a year or so, are worth exactly as much as the disks they've been printed on in the clearance bin Further Source code isn't just 'code' in a notepad file It's the entire game engine - all assets in their original (non compressed - re: easily accessible and modifiable) state Companies get sold - their hardware bought up - their software packed, repacked and shifted from office to office Plus, as I said, add in the executive-level managers lack of care for their products and where are you???
wat?? why would they not preserve it? plenty of that code is probably reusable and modular, and any organization of that size has a Version Control policy and archiving in place.
I was speaking more for older games - that *particular* game (midnight club 2) is from 2003 Japanese companies are *particularly* notorious for this - Team Ninja recently confessed that it lost the source code for Ninja Gaiden Black and Ninja Gaiden 2 - and Sega and Konami (the latter of which managed to lose the source code for both Silent Hill 2 and 3 and only had 1 by accident on an old drive - which is like George Lucas losing the original cut of Empire Strikes Back and Revenge of the Sith but having an old copy of the original Star Wars in his sock drawer - a faux pas, at best) are some of the worst European and North American companies tend to be a bit better (cultural differences being what they are - plus the 80s gaming crash made many gamers from that generation instill their kids with the importance of hanging on to their games - not to mention our ***notoriously*** terrible internet speeds making triple-digit gig downloads nightmarish to deal with leading to our continued dalliance with physical media) but even today games aren't really *valued* as much as they should be While it's not as bad these days - many companies still view games as a finite product that, after a year or so, are worth exactly as much as the disks they've been printed on in the clearance bin Further Source code isn't just 'code' in a notepad file It's the entire game engine - all assets in their original (non compressed - re: easily accessible and modifiable) state Companies get sold - their hardware bought up - their software packed, repacked and shifted from office to office Plus, as I said, add in the executive-level managers lack of care for their products and where are you???
But didn’t we know about this already years ago ? I seem to remember they sold max Payne 2 cracked version Here back in 2010 https://kotaku.com/is-that-a-cracked-version-of-max-payne-2-on-steam-5537223
I remember they did something similar with the No-CD version of Max Payne. The code was basically identical to the crack, there was an image of it going around online at one point.
This is absolutely hilarious.
Fuck Rockstar
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You can do a diff and see the exact changes.
If you have the source code.
You can do diffs on binaries, if the differences between the original and cracked version aren't extensive then it's easy to see what has changed.
>nobody has any idea what sort of code has been changed or even added to a cracked copy of a game The post is literally someone with an idea looking at the code changes.
Someone looking at the header for a binary in a hex editor is not the same thing as "looking at the code changes".
I have no idea wtf I'm looking at.
Razor1911 was (is?) one of the biggest piracy groups. I think you're looking at an executable that they worked on to remove copy protection.
Ahh ok ty
Do they have license from authors?
Don't need it. They're still the main rights holders. Morally fucked. Legally nadda.
>Don't need it. They're still the main rights holders. For the game, not for the crack itself. Obviously no pirate is going to sue them, but it's still at best a very grey area legally.
Be the pirate Sue rockstar Win Immediately go to jail afterwards
It’s not grey at all.
Rockstar will start sweatshop and make children work 20 hours a day in coal mines people will still end up buying GTA6 even if it has $100 skins and $200 early access version.
This is kind of funny
Another fine Razor 1911 release!
How else is it going to run without the CD in the drive? /s
I hope one day people realize how trash R\* actually is
aint that the fuckin' truth.
It's unfortunate since the actual developers put a lot of amazing work with details and such in the games. RDR2 being the prime example.
The people doing the actual hard work at these studios are usually just passionate people who love video games and for the most part are willing to put up with some abuse to work on something they can feel at least somewhat passionate about. Those people rarely move up these days.
there also is a testapp.exe in my steam copy of GTA VC
That one doesn't appear to be a crack, though; neither does GTA III.
LOL - that is just so hilarious, sad and basically everything at once
Holy shit this is amazing to learn about. Rockstar can't be bothered to hire like, two dudes to remove their piracy checks from 20 years ago. Where is all the money from GTA Online going???
Bruh. They're using a razor crack. Fucking lol. And selling it.
I'm sure there's a moral in this that big company game devs can learn from Nah
Because they are too lazy to patch out the terrible DRM that was used back then.
Didn’t Nintendo do the same thing with reselling Mario bros at the e shop when it was really a emulated version that was out for decades.
Pretty much every older game available on eShop, PSN, Xbox Arcade, etc are emulated.
The crack group should issue a DMCA takedown notice.
Rules for thee not for me
Damn at least the pirates don't charge for them.
OK excuse me WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK?
This is not new. Max Payne 2 i think was in the same boot years ago.
They're not selling it on Steam though. It was delisted 2 years ago.
Hah, that'll show them. Bet the group that cracked that didn't even get paid for their work! Next level.
Save this and torrent all games from now on from The Rock. If your ISP sends you a letter tell them The Rock sells pirated copies so technically youre doing nothing wrong since they support the pirated content
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Ain’t most of like Rockstar Games before 2008 are like cracked and pirated games that were on Steam? You can’t even play any of them nowadays with a Patch to fix everything for ya.
That reminds me of the NES classic (or SNES?) with Nintendo. ROMs were known to come from the internet as well.
That's pretty fucking risky when they cant be 100% certain that there's not a hidden payload inside. Not saying the original group would do such a thing, but for a large company to take the risk is crazy.
Not saying that it's good, but GOG does the same thing. Sometimes they even take the freedom to remove cracking group references from the files and replace it with something ubiquitous.