Is That A Cracked Version Of Max Payne 2 On Steam?

The Steam executable for Rockstar’s Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne bears a striking resemblance to a no-CD hack released by now defunct piracy group Myth. Could it just be a coincidence?

Several Kotaku readers have pointed us towards a post on the Max Payne Steam forums, in which Steam user Liamaj points out the Myth logo he discovered after opening the Max Payne 2 executable in notepad.

I downloaded my own version of Max Payne 2 from Steam, and the logo is definitely in there.

Check out this image to compare executables. At the top, we have the executable downloaded for Max Payne 2 via Steam, with the Myth logo displayed prominently at the top. On the bottom, the executable file I found while searching for Max Payne 2 hacks in Google.

The Steam executable weighs in at 1,460 KB, while the 1.01 no-CD hack from Myth is 1,452 KB.

Now there’s a chance this is just a prank from some Rockstar programmer, perhaps playing off the trouble Ubisoft ran into in 2008, when a no-CD hack from piracy group Reloaded was used in an official update to Rainbow 6: Vegas 2

https://lastchance.cc/ubisoft-used-pirate-hack-to-fix-rainbow-six-vegas-2-5026905%3C/a%3E%3C/p%3E

Or it could just be a lazy programmer. If the tool exists that gets the job done faster than creating a new one, why not use it? Of course, speaking out against piracy becomes a problem when you use the products of piracy in your official releases, but surely this won’t upset anyone at all, right?