Manhunt - Hidden Anti-Piracy Measures - Feat. BadgerGoodger

Hey, everyone, this is Badger once again  providing the voice for Vadim M. In today's video, we’ll be looking at the  hidden anti-piracy measures in Manhunt, ones left by Rockstar to  protect their game from pirates. But this is a very special case. Not only do  these booby traps make the game a miserable experience to play, but ironically  they’re only experienced by people who actually bought the game legitimately.  And this is still happening even today! It’s all because Rockstar enabled thes

e measures  by a pure accident years later, and they got away with it. Sounds intriguing? Then why don’t you  sit back and relax as we dive into the story. Back in 2004, Manhunt was not the first  game to get these so-called anti-piracy measures. A year prior, they had successfully  implemented some very minor measures into GTA Vice City, something that I already  covered on this channel years ago. Looking at them now, they seem to be just  a small glimpse of what the developers were capable of.

Because, let’s be honest, who would  stop playing a pirated game after triggering a never ending rain? They’d probably think it’s  just set during the rainy season in Florida. Well, maybe the broken radar and other  strange stuff might anger the pirate more, but as we previously found out, even if the  game was infested with all those booby traps, you could still play it, and even enjoy it! Was  this the best they could do to ruin an experience? Either way, the plan of implementing booby  traps

for pirates miserably failed. No one had ever experienced nor heard  about these measures as they were fully deactivated by the  people who cracked the game. What’s more sad for Rockstar is that  these guys released a cracked game 4 days faster than people could  officially buy it in stores! It seems that Rockstar were pretty  pissed about that, and they went berserk with anti-piracy measures in  Manhunt. How do we know this? Well, just try to play the official Steam version  of the game withou

t any fan made patches or fixes. I bet you heard that this version is  known as the most broken version of the game! And how can you argue with that?!  No one enjoys the game crashing constantly and having to replay the  same stupid level over and over again. Did you hear that only in this  version of the game can the keyboard and mouse controls suddenly become  disabled? Is it an endurance test? Trust me, the unmodded Steam version of  the game makes people suffer and cry. No matter how hard yo

u try, it’s impossible  to even beat the first half of the first level in this version. I’m not even  joking, there are countless reports on Steam about the “gate glitch” and  other moments of irritating weirdness. Well, ladies and gentlemen, it turns out  these are not just some lame bugs caused by mysterious compatibility issues, as  the community always believed. These are anti-piracy measures in all their  glory, intended for pirates. You know, people who decided to not pay for the game.  An

d yet somehow you experience this as soon as you buy the game and launch it on  Steam. How is that even possible??? Well, it’s quite simple, but first I should  explain things. This game has two layers of protection; copy protection  and crack protection. Basically, nothing has changed since  the release of GTA Vice City. The copy protection is once again achieved by  implementing Sony’s famous solution - SecuROM, which requires you to have the original  disc in the tray in order to play the gam

e. The crack protection is an  additional layer of protection made by the developers. Something  like deeply hidden authenticity checks in the code to ensure that the copy  protection is still present in the game. If these checks fail, then this protection  silently activates anti-piracy measures, something that the developers  made to break the game. To prevent this from happening, whoever cracked  the game had to get rid of SecuROM as well as track down Rockstar’s booby traps and disable  thei

r triggers. And they successfully did that. Therefore, someone who didn’t even pay for  the game had never experienced any issues in their pirated copy, something that can’t  be said about those who actually did pay for the official Steam version of the game.  But how did they screw this up so badly? Well, as stupid as it sounds, Rockstar got  rid of copy protection, but they didn’t do anything about their stupid crack protection.  Because of this, the game freaks out and spits out all those ant

i-piracy measures at you as  if you, a paying customer, had pirated it. This is what Rockstar Games have  been selling on Steam for more than a decade! This is how much they care  about the game and its loyal customers. And to understand how bad these booby  traps for pirates are, let’s look at them separately from one another.  This might give you a better idea of exactly how they were meant to  make your experience miserable, not to mention that someone releasing a crack  could probably just m

iss something along the way. To start this analysis off, let’s talk  about the worst measure in this game. It involves opening various doors and  gates, which at some point simply break. And it’s no surprise why the developers  decided to do this. There are tons of doors and gates in this game, and you  have to interact with them starting from within the first minutes of the game,  meaning they have to work flawlessly. Unless the game thinks you’re a  dirty pirate. Because as soon as any door on

a level opens at the maximum  possible angle, the game immediately locks all current and future in-game doors,  prohibiting anyone from using them again. And the sad thing for the pirate is,  there is no way to avoid triggering this measure. By hacking the game we can  perfectly see that the door will always hit the hinge at maximum angle no matter  how strong it was pushed. As you can see, there is even this special and hidden  variable in the door class, which tracks that! As a result, it doe

sn't really matter  for the game who opens the door first; the player or a hunter. The only thing  that matters is that this measure remains active during the play session, or in  other words, until you exit the game. It means if you restart the  level, you’ll see that the gate, which could previously be opened at least  once, is now jammed for no apparent reason. This is exactly where most of the  Steam players got stuck during their playthrough after buying  the game. Just think about it, you’

re only 5 minutes into the game  and already it has serious issues! It might sound obvious, but there  is absolutely no point in using someone else’s save games. You won’t go any  further with the ability to open one freaking door before restarting the game. Every  single time, you’ll end up being trapped, wondering where to go and what to do, wasting  time trying to figure out the impossible. Oh, and don’t even think of saving the game  with this measure triggered. These closed doors will sink

into a savegame, making  them broken and useless on the next load, even for those who have no anti-piracy measure in  their game. What can I say? This is pretty evil. But what if the pirate decides to bypass this  measure by using the famous speedrunners’ “Out of Bounds” glitch? Well, then they  should be prepared to experience some very bizarre and unique moments in  a broken game. Here are some of them. Remember the intense shoutout during the first  minutes of the mission “Kill The Rabbit,” w

here enemies suddenly run out of their cells?  Well, there is no such thing for pirates, as everybody remains locked behind the bars  waiting for you to end their role in their film. You know what’s more ridiculous? The bunny  you’re supposed to chase won’t be able to run very far away from you, because of the same  issue. What’s really funny is that you can just eliminate him right here! But don’t do it,  because later on the game freaks out and crashes, not to mention he won’t drop the  key th

at you need at the end. Just ignore him standing here  and glitch your way further. Fun fact. Firearms won’t deal  any damage to him. I guess the developers wanted to make sure that  the Rabbit will survive till the end. The final cutscene in the mission  “Mouth of Madness” looks goofy, because James is stuck behind a locked  door, and you’re left staring at an empty room… until he materialises out  of the blue, as if nothing happened. And then it happens again. Seeing that  James can’t open ano

ther door seconds later is ridiculous. Luckily, you can still  beat this level without even going through it! You know what looks even goofier?  The mission “Divided They Fall”, where we have to chase Ramirez through a  multistory apartment building and into a yard. This is something that a pirate with locked  doors would never experience, as Ramirez will be trapped in a small room on the floor below,  where he seems to be totally safe from us there! So what now? Well, you have no other choice 

besides squeezing in there with the glitch! But be very careful! This room is very tiny  and you have to be very gentle with it. If you succeeded, then what? Well,  you gotta improvise, I guess! But, please, do remember that if the timer runs  out, then more enemies will show up. Do you really think that you’re safe just because they can't  go through the closed gate in a cutscene? No, no, no. The scripts will teleport them  to their positions later in the game, and you’ll still have to deal wit

h them. There is also another way of doing  this sequence. Just restart the game and use the latest checkpoint. If you  manage to survive going downstairs, then you will see that Ramirez  is stuck in front of the entrance door. Much easier to finish the job right here.  See as a pirate you have to improvise a lot! How about this? During the opening scene in the  mission “White Trash”, you’ll see that James can’t open the gates, and you would expect  that the scripts will teleport him anyways. Bu

t nope. In this case, you’ll be trapped in  the out of bounds area with an opportunity to explore this unfinished secret alleyway.  Isn’t that cool? Just don’t go where the road ends. There’s no collision,  and you’ll fall through the map and eventually die. But that shouldn’t  come as a surprise to you. You weren’t supposed to be able to get there, you know? But hey, at least when you load a checkpoint, you won’t need to use the glitch  anymore. You’re already behind the gate. As you can see, t

his pesky anti-piracy  measure does its job well in stopping pirates from progressing further. But  oddly enough, there are flaws in it too. For instance, during the mission “Drunk  Driving”, the gates, which are opened by Starkweather, are accessible in the first  milliseconds after the scripts unlock them, meaning you just have to run through  them before hearing the buzzer. If you are a second too late, then the  game will lock them up as usual. Furthermore, some doors in the game  do not aut

omatically lock up when the measure is triggered. You can open  them once and continue your journey. Maybe the scripts somehow prohibit  locking them up by measure. No clue. But let’s be honest, no one is that crazy to  play that far into the game with these issues on their end. There’s no way to complete the game  casually, nor play the story seriously. There are too many doors and gates… and even the turnstile  in your way. Rockstar clearly nailed it, no joke. Did you know that they also left

a booby trap  in the painkillers? But how can you blame them, painkillers in this game are like a first  aid kit. They are an item that the player will definitely use at some point in their  playthrough to regain some health. And what they did to them is beyond evil,  but it depends on the situation. The first one is when the player is unarmed.  If they step into the painkillers, then the game would simply crash. Did you really  think that the game would let them heal? This is something that Ste

am players  are perfectly aware of. If they managed to squeeze through these gates and then  eliminate the hunter with a plastic bag, then they’ll be greeted with a tutorial on  how painkillers work in this game. And what do they do right after it? Of course, they’ll  step right into them, and the game will crash. They might try to repeat these steps  over again and over again. See, the developers knew where to perfectly strike! If  only they knew who would really suffer from this… But anyways,

if the player has any  “green class weapon” in their inventory, then the game won’t immediately crash like it  did before. Instead it offers to replace the weapon with… a question mark? Showing that  maybe you’re getting painkillers in return? Should I mention that there is  no such oddity if the game is not rigged? That’s because this is a  trap. As soon as you confirm a change while holding a “green class  weapon”, the game will crash. However, if the player has no “green  class weapon” in the

ir inventory and James is holding something else in  his hands, then they can actually pick up the broken painkillers, and  they’ll waste a spot in the inventory. And this is something unique, because you will  actually see the pills around James’s belt as if it was an ordinary “green class weapon”...  something that never happens in the unrigged game. Just remember to not choose these  stupid pills in the inventory. It will still crash the game unless  you scroll through your items fast, but no

one is that mad to play with fate like  that… unless you want to play Russian roulette. And by the way, don’t forget that sometimes  enemies will drop painkillers, too. Which basically turns the environment  into a minefield for pirates… The most important item in the game  became the most annoying thing on earth. Instead of healing you, its  only purpose now is to crash the game. Another anti-piracy measure was  left in the level loading code, which you can easily trigger  in two different way

s. The first way is quite trivial. All you need to do is to exit any level three times. You  can do that by either completing it, or simply quitting from the pause menu. When  the counter hits 3, the measure is triggered. As soon as the game loads the next level, it  will either crash or be broken and empty. And no, the outcome is not random. It actually depends  on the scripts, which always break a level in the same manner. Here’s a list with all missions  and their possible bugs that I managed

to notice. Sure, the crash as an outcome isn’t  interesting at all, but an empty level is a different story! You usually start at  a level where you aren't supposed to be. There are no enemies around, and no  objectives on the minimap. All you can find are tons of pickups around. And  there’s nothing to really do with them. As expected, the scripts do not work. You’re  just left wandering around on your own, not knowing what to do. In short,  you are once again dead stuck. And when you finally

decide to quit the  level, the game crashes. How lovely. If you triggered this measure right before  the mission “Strapped for Cash”. I bet you would be surprised to see that James’s relatives  aren’t even tied up. They’re just standing around, chillin’. So tell me, how can you resist not  getting into a fight with them? Who can blame you, there’s nothing else to do here anyway.  But if you continue to beat them up, the game will eventually crash.  What else were you expecting? Remember how I sa

id there’s another way of  triggering this anti-piracy measure? Well, all you need to do is to play on a level for at least  5 minutes straight without reloading a checkpoint. In other words, if the pirate is constantly  failing and reloading the checkpoints; they might not even trigger the  measure as the internal counter, which the measure is tied to, resets every  single time they hit the “continue” button. But if the pirate takes their time and isn’t  failing for at least 5 minutes straight,

then the game is more than happy  to enable the measure leading to the same consequences as we discussed before. If you think that it makes no sense to reset the  counter then you are clearly wrong. Less chances to experience weirdness meaning less chances  for a cracker to find and patch the trigger. But what if someone decides to freeze the counter?  Well, then it would lead to game breaking bugs as the game physics break. See, they perfectly knew  where to strike unless it happened by an acc

ident. Just think about it, if both  of these triggers are active, ideally the player with this measure can  complete 3 levels in a row, but only if they were alive for less than 5 minutes between the  checkpoints on each of them. This is so cruel. But what if the pirate is playing very  carefully exploring the level? Well, there’s yet another measure to stop them  tied to the same internal counter as we discussed before. If they’ve been alive  for more than 15 minutes on the same level between

the checkpoints, then the game  will simply disable all in-game controls. As funny as it sounds, the game suddenly stops  processing keyboard and mouse inputs, leaving you with no other choice than to use ALT+TAB,  or kill the game’s process in the task manager. But what if the pirate somehow doesn’t know about  doing either of those? Well, then they might just end up restarting their PC by either unplugging  the power cord or holding the restart button. Most might consider it as a stupid bug, e

specially  seeing that this moment is always followed by the crosshair disappearance, but if anyone  playing just happens not be computer-literate, they might think something’s wrong with  their computer, which is also cruel. Funny enough, if you die having this measure  enabled, then the game will actually allow you to choose “continue” to restart from  a checkpoint or to exit to the main menu. But don't expect a miracle. The controls will  still be busted and you will be stuck as before. Did y

ou know that there’s a second and more  trivial way of triggering this measure? All you need is to make 5 headshots during  the play session, something that you would definitely achieve by loading someone's  save and replaying your favourite moments. As soon as you get the fifth headshot, the game disables the mouse and keyboard  inputs, making you feel like an idiot. Just to be clear, when I say “headshots,” I  mean any elimination that makes their head go boom. This can easily be pulled off by

using the  Bat, Shotgun, Sawn-Off Shotgun, or Sniper Rifle. Another anti-piracy measure was left in the sacred  checkpoint system. Yes, you heard that right! They screwed the cassette pickups that you’ll  usually find at least three to four times on each level. And to understand this measure better,  let’s remember how this system even worked. As soon as you pick up one of  these cassettes, the game saves your current progress into the RAM by making  a so-called “Save Point”. If you fail or die

, the game offers to load it. Funny enough, it  does work for a pirate too. So what’s the catch? Well, the game also gives you an opportunity  to save this checkpoint on the disc, too, so you could return to it at any time you want. And this is what the developers  decided to break. No matter how many times the pirate clicks on  the “SAVE” option in the menu, nothing will ever happen. All they hear is this  annoying clicking sound from spamming the button. I can’t stop wondering why the develope

rs  didn’t just break the saving feature after completing the level. I mean, nothing stops  the pirate from saving their progress on the disc at this point. Were they that  sure that no one would ever get this far and actually complete the levels with  other booby traps enabled? Who knows. Remember the closed doors measure, which  didn’t let you complete the level? Guess what: there’s yet another similar anti-piracy measure,  but this time involving interactive items. These are various levers, w

hich you have to  use to enable or open something on a level. There are tons of them in fact. And don’t forget about the countless number  of buttons, too, which are scattered around the levels. It’s basically the same thing  as the lever, it just looks different. There are also various locks and  padlocks, which you have to break or bust… And there’s ropes that you’ll have to cut… and the ladders, which allow you  to climb up or down somewhere. You can easily identify the interactive  item by s

tanding next to it. If you see this specific status icon on your  HUD in the bottom right-hand corner, then you’ll know it’s an object you can use. If you didn’t know, the game  should also highlight them, but sadly, this feature does not work  in the PC version. So make sure you install the patches from Fire_Head to  bring this back. I highly recommend it! All these items have one thing in common. There  are tons of them scattered around the levels, and we have to interact with them in  order t

o progress further. It makes perfect sense why the developers rigged them. As soon as an interactive item is used for  the first time during the play session, the game immediately disables  them, which is very easy to notice. The game doesn’t show the special HUD icon  anymore, and the items aren’t highlighted anymore. James doesn’t look at them either,  it’s like he’s ignoring them on purpose. Ideally, before triggering this measure, the  pirate can use the interactive item once, only if they d

idn’t interrupt James’s animations.  If they did, then there won’t be a second chance, because the developers hid this booby  trap in the animation. So you’ll have to restart the game and try again,  which obviously won’t help them much. Like I mentioned before, there are way  too many of these items in one level. It’s just a matter of time before a pirate will  eventually be stopped either by a closed door, or by an elevator that won’t work that they  had to use to keep going further in a missi

on. And once again, it doesn’t really  matter who uses the item first; you, or an NPC controlled by the scripts. For instance in the first minutes of the mission  “Kill the Rabbit”, a stupid hunter pulls the lever and closes the gates on your way. Now you know  that nothing else from this point on will work. Sometimes you won’t even see someone using an  item. The mission “Border Patrol” starts us off with an activated booby trap too. But  at this time we should blame the scripts, because they a

utomatically switch a lever  somewhere before we take control as James. But you know what can make things worse? If you  already have the ‘closed doors measure’ enabled. In this case, if an interactive item involves  opening a door, then there will be absolutely no point in using it. Have a look for yourself. If  a normal player sees that the gates are opening, the pirate sees that they remain closed, and  there’s absolutely nothing they can do about it. Imagine how a player feels busting a padl

ock  like the game told them to do, but then it didn’t do anything. The gate stays closed and  you have no freaking idea what to do next. The same goes for the rope too. Of course,  you can cut it, but what did that actually do? Nothing really, because the gates  are still locked as they were before. The game is pretty much laughing at you,  especially if you try to complete the mission “Fuelled by Hate”, where you have to pour gas  into a crane’s gas tank. Can’t do it? Well, that’s because the

gas tank  is an interactive item too. But what if next time you came prepared  and wasted your only try to put gas in the crane? Well then good for you! Now you  won’t be able to get inside the crane, because the crane itself is yet another  interactive item. Not a ”crane day”, I guess. It’s also impossible to complete the  mission “View of Innocence.” First, you need to use a lever to get the electricity  on again. And immediately after that, you have to use a TV to trigger the final cutscene.

How can the pirate do the second thing if he wasted his try on using the lever? I’m  not sure. This might be the place where no glitches or exploits can help you bypass  the anti-piracy measure, but who knows. There is also the mission “Wrong Side of  the Tracks,” where in the opening scene, the SWAT member shuts down the electricity  in the subway. Now how are we gonna get the power back on to move the train, if  the power switch doesn’t work anymore? You would be surprised, but easily.  At thi

s time we can just restart the game from the fresh checkpoint and pull the  lever triggering the measure. Unfortunately, this won’t work for the Steam players  as they have no working checkpoints. Other than that, you can definitely  forget about the optional stuff too. With the measure enabled, it  would be stupid to waste a try on using the generators that are  supposed to distract your enemies. Also, it would be pretty foolish to  open the back of one of these van to retrieve some goodies. He

y, did  you even know about this feature? There are some interesting exceptions  in this measure too. For instance, the crane and ladders are unique. They do not  have animations tied to them, so they can’t trigger the booby trap if you use them. You can  basically use them as many times as you want. However after you trigger the measure, they  become as useless as the rest of those items. There’s also something wrong with the  locks. If the measure isn’t active, then by shooting and breaking th

em, you’ll trigger  the measure, and there is nothing wrong with it. However! If the measure is already activated, then you can still break the lock! That’s  an interesting exception to the rule. And this is how they tried to stop the pirate from beating each level. Yet another  clever measure on their end. I think you would all agree that the  most important aspect of this game is its stealth mechanic. And you might be  asking, what did they break that too? Yes, they did. But they did it very c

leverly by  butchering the so-called “vision” mechanic, one of its core components. Let me explain. The “vision” is something like a player  visibility gradation for the hunter, by which the artificial intellect  adapts their behaviour towards James. In other words, it’s responsible for these  dark spots on a level. Here we can stay in the shadows and hide from the hunters  without arousing any suspicion. So if we see our status icon going blue, then  we know that the hunters won’t see us. And d

on’t forget that if we were spotted  and being chased, this is where we can shake them off our tail too. If you do  it right, they’ll just give up chasing, and rather comically showing that  they have no clue where James went. Moreover, the “vision” utilises  6 different anxiety levels, which you see on your screen right  now, utilised in various calculations. Actually, the “NONE” state isn’t really  an anxiety level, because it’s basically a searching mode, when a hunter isn’t  chasing James, b

ut looking for him. The magic begins when we’re being  pursued. This is when the anxiety level switches back and forth from “VERY_LOW”  to “VERY_HIGH,” and this is how it works. The closer the hunter is to James during  the chase, the more persistent he is in wanting to catch him. And vice versa.  The more James breaks away from him, the less eager he is to continue running  after him and more willing he is to give up. Thanks to that, the chases feel  more dynamic and less clunky. So, this is wh

at the “vision” mechanic is, and this is where the developers  deployed yet another booby trap. What they did was maximise hunter’s  senses by setting them to the “VERY_HIGH” state in every single instance, which  broke the iconic shadows on a level. When the hunters are looking for James, no matter  how good you hide, they will always find him in the shadows. These places become unsafe and  completely useless with this measure enabled. You might as well imagine that every  single corner is lit

up or something. This is how the hunters probably see  them, which is a huge bummer for pirates. But not just the corners, the whole level is  probably lit up for them too. At least this is how it feels now and this is what we tried  to show by hacking the rendering like that. Since there are no more of the other anxiety levels in the middle during the  chases, it made them nightmarish. Firstly, hunters spot James  faster at any distance. Call it a quicker NPC reaction time, if you want. Secondl

y, they’re always very persistent to chase  James down at any distance too. They won’t give up as easily as if they knew where James ran away  meaning it’s now more difficult to shake them off. Usually you’ll end up running around in  circles without seeing an end to the chase, and it’s so annoying. As a result, the whole  “vision” mechanic feels very downgraded and basic. I want to assure you that it has nothing  to do with the hardcore mode and its key features. This difficulty just  slightly

increases a “field of view” for the enemies in the “vision”  mechanic, and that’s it. The anti-piracy measure makes the chases harder than  the “hardcore” difficulty itself. If this measure isn’t deactivated by whoever  cracked the game, then it’s always enabled by default. This means there are no time  counters and no specific actions needed to trigger it. The pirate would never know  that something is wrong with the stealth mechanic. At least I’ve never heard Steam  players mention it. Just mo

re pure evilness. At least the pirates still have an opportunity  to get rid of enemies quietly. I mean, to sneak up from behind and commit an execution,  which is yet another iconic feature of this game. Of course, they intentionally broke this, too. As soon as the pirate commits 3  executions during a play session, the game will silently increase damage taken  by James by 50% from any source of harm. It doesn’t matter if he gets punched or shot.  The game literally enables a damage debuff, whi

ch is almost impossible to notice. I  mean, who would even compare the damage before and after the measure is triggered if  they don’t even know that they activated it? But, as we all understand, the pirate would  enable it quite fast in his play sessions. Usually you’ll end up doing three executions quite fast,  considering that it is a core feature in the game. Even more interesting is how the developers hid this anti-piracy measure quite well in the  code. When Fire_Head was investigating it,

he couldn’t understand what it actually  does and how it affects the gameplay. This is why he thinks the developers hoped for  someone cracking the game to miss this measure in the code and release the game with  the damage debuff, but it didn’t happen. It looks like the developers  enjoyed making these silly debuffs, as they made another one involving disappearing  ammunition. To better understand this measure, let’s divide firearms into two major groups. The first group of weapons are those 

which James loads one round at a time. It includes only two firearms;  the Revolver, and the Shotgun. The second group of weapons is basically the  rest firearms using magazines. It includes, for instance, the Assault  Rifle, and even the nailgun. Since the outcome varies, let’s start with the worst one featuring the second  group of aforementioned weapons. If the sum of spare bullets after  reloading a gun can be divided by seven, then the spare bullet count will decrease by two. To demonstrate

this measure, let’s fire off two  rounds with the Assault Rifle. After reloading a gun, a normal player is left with 21 bullets  in reserve, but a pirate is left with just 10. This is because 21 can be divided by 7, so the  game takes all these spare bullets and divides them by 2 and gets 10.5, which they round  down to 10. You don’t even get half a bullet! But there is a huge catch! The booby trap is  sitting in the reload function and for some reason, the game calls it around 40 freaking  tim

es during one single reload! It means, if you get another number, which divides by 7, the spare ammo will be recalculated again  until the conditions do not meet anymore! Just look at this mess. If you get 56 bullets  in reserve after reload, you will get 3 bullets in return and this is an insane loss! The  ammo in this case was recalculated 4 times! To understand the measure better, I made this  table, where you can see when and how many times the ammo is recalculated and how many bullets the 

pirate loses with the measure enabled. However despite the fact that the losses look wild,  the measure is actually triggered very rarely. I mean, the number 7 is a relatively big  number in the equation, meaning there is a small chance of triggering it while reloading  a gun. And don’t forget that the player usually has few full clips in spare at best. In this case  their worst enemies are like 3 different numbers. The walkthrough you see on your  screen was re-played by me around 25 times behi

nd the scenes. By randomly reloading the light handgun around 4 times in a run  I triggered this measure only three times! You would be surprised, but we didn’t even know  that the ammo can be recalculated multiple times until I noticed that the game took too much  from me and Fire_Head decided to dig deeper, because it contradicted the  code from the measure. See, it perfectly shows how evil and  sneaky these measures can be! But don’t forget that there is also the first  group of weapons I bri

efly mentioned before. In their case every single time when the sum  of spare bullets after reloading a gun can be divided by three, one spare bullet will vanish,  making it even less noticeable, but more frequent. Let's say I fired the last bullet in a chamber  having 29 in spare. After reloading a revolver, a normal player gets 23 bullets  in reserve, but a pirate 20. This is because 27, 24 and 21 can be divided  by 3, thus the game took one bullet away three times. And losing three bullets wo

uld be  the worst case scenario with a revolver. Since the shotgun has more shells to fire,  you can lose 4 shells per one full reload. So the more bullets you have to load in  these guns, the more spare ammo you lose. And no, it doesn’t have anything  to do with the reload function I mentioned before. The game calls it once per  bullet reload and, to be honest, we have no idea why those weapons act differently.  Maybe it was done on purpose, who knows. In either way, don’t you find it hilarious

  that the developers decided to secretly steal ammo from people who pirated their game? I  wonder what they were thinking back then. If a game cracker didn’t get rid of this  measure, then it would be always enabled by default. I guess this is what  they were aiming for, but failed. Do you know what else a pirate should  avoid doing in this game? Dragging items from one place to another. Something  you can do with both gasoline cans, and fallen enemies, which many consider  to be a pointless th

ing to do anyway. To remind you, these exact items or  activities can be easily identified by this unique status icon on your  screen in the bottom right hand corner. If you see it and the game thinks that you’re a  pirate with the specific measure enabled, then don’t pick any objects up, it’s just another trap!  Because as soon as you put it back on the ground, the game is tasked to stop cleaning its virtual  memory. It becomes clogged, and the game crashes. Just think about it, the developers 

coded a memory leak on purpose, something that others try to avoid at all  costs. And they hid it in the camera’s code to make sure that it definitely  would eventually crash the game. But how can you avoid using this feature, if at  least three missions require you to utilise it? The first mission where the pirate will definitely  face this crash is the fifth mission by the name of “Fuelled by Hate”. As we established before,  this is where we have to put gas in the crane. And in order to do t

hat, you need to drag a  gas can from another part of the junkyard. Sadly, this scripted scene with  James throwing away the gas can initiates the memory leak too,  so expect the crash very soon. However if the pirate is quick  enough, they can enter the crane and the memory clogging will stop. That’s  because it changes the camera mode, which doesn’t “leak”. But as soon as you exit,  it will continue to drain the memory and crash. If a pirate used someone’s savegame and  skipped that moment, th

en they’ll face the same issue during the 11th mission, too. In the mission “Mouth of Madness,” the gas can is used to blow up a doorway  that’s been bricked up. And without it, there is no other way to break the  obstacle and go further… unless you are a cheater and you know the right corner  to use the glitch. As you can see, I didn’t. In this very mission, don’t even think of showing  the Smiley’s body to Starkweather. If you forgot about the measure, then watch how James throws him  on the g

round later in the cutscene. As funny as it looks, the game will crash seconds before you  complete the level and get to save your progress. Fortunately, this exact crash can be  easily avoided by just showing the Smiley’s head instead. This is actually an  alternative way of completing the mission, and you’re rewarded by Starkweather  in the future. So it’s canon as well. The next time the pirate will encounter the  problem is while solving a puzzle in the 13th mission, “Kill The Rabbit.”  At o

ne point during the mission, we encounter these closed gates, which we  can open by putting someone on a platform. If the pirate doesn’t know about the glitch, they  have no other choice than to push an NPC onto the platform and maybe even eliminate him there  and run inside while the gates are open. But the truth is, I think, it is nearly impossible  to do unless you have a God mode or something. If you think that it is possible to lure  them on the platform, then you are wrong. The pirate will

quickly realise that they stay in  one place for the most part. Hats off, Rockstar. As you can see, if the game cracker didn’t  patch this measure, the pirate would face these problems mainly in the middle of  the story. And if the rumours are true, people cracking games don’t usually play  them for that long. Luckily for everyone, it was fully deactivated, but it doesn’t  mean that this measure isn’t cruel. The next anti-piracy measure we’re going  to look at is a weird one. You see, every sin

gle time we change weapons by  picking up something else, we create a pickup on the ground. Funny enough, the game  keeps track of how many of them were created during a game session. This is something  that the measure is eagerly tracking too. As soon as the pirate creates 8 pickups  like that, the game enables a booby trap. Now, every single time an enemy drops a pickup, it will vanish after 10 seconds as  on this footage I am shoving you. As you can see, this is something that  the game even

warns you about by informing you that “Dropped item marked to delete in 10  seconds”. And it definitely begs the question, why would they inform you about  this in such an obvious way? Under normal circumstances, such pickups stay on  the ground for a while. So nothing is stopping you from picking them up later in a playthrough,  which is something we all did in the past. So the developers probably thought,  "Why should we wait for a pirate?" If they want to get an item, then they’d better  get

it as fast as they can. This, of course, makes them take more risks, and do more  stupid things, which would probably lead to them failing a mission more often. I guess  now it’s more wise to sacrifice these pickups. You know what’s clever about this measure? You’ll  probably create 8 such pickups quite late in the play session, meaning there will always  be a delay before you enable this measure, meaning less chances to spot it for  a game cracker. In theory, of course. But remember how I said

that  it’s a weird one? Well, this is because the developers slightly screwed it. First of all, it doesn’t break the special dropped quest items in a light green sphere such  as the key in the mission “Kill the Rabbit”. No joke, it would be a perfect place to  strike. After you get rid of the rabbit, the scripts activate this unskippable cutscene, which lasts more than 10 seconds. Luckily for  a pirate, the key stays on the ground forever while his shotgun has already disappeared.  That’s a miss

ed opportunity, Rockstar! The same thing can be said about the dropped  painkillers. They don't seem to disappear either, which is a good sign unless these are not  stupid mines, which can crash your game. What’s more weird is that if you step on such  an item and the game offers to replace it, then the despawn timer resets and it  won’t vanish after 10 seconds as the text warned. Makes it much easier for  a pirate to save an item for later. Thanks to this oversight, it would be much  harder to

get stuck on the second mission “Doorway into Hell”, where we have to get  a crowbar and bust a padlock on a gate. Of course, it’s still possible  to make the crowbar disappear, but who wouldn’t walk into it to pick  it up after the game asked you to? The same thing can be said about the  knife in the mission “White Trash”. It’s even harder to screw the 12th mission,  the one by the name of “Doing Time”. Since you have no Red Class  Weapon from the beginning, you pick it up automatically. So not

hing will stop  the pirate from completing Starkweather's task. You know what’s more strange?  They coded the heads to be excluded from despawn, but they did it poorly. Despite the fact that you still see the warning during the executions, the head will never vanish  from the level. And you might ask, what was the point of making this strange exception, especially  for a thing that should ruin an experience? The truth is, there wasn’t any. According to the  game’s code, some pickups in this game

vanish after 60 seconds, and this is where they coded  an exception for the heads. Don’t ask me why, but this is why they won’t ever disappear  from a level during a playthrough. As simple as it is, the developers  just reused this chunk of the code and decreased the despawn time for a measure. So we thought maybe this weird  exception was done on purpose, so we removed two flags from this item  and made the head disappear by simply creating a pickup. Stupidly enough, we saw  absolutely nothing

suspicious afterwards. This item just disappeared from a level and  that’s it. Not sure why we tested it though. But anyway, I still don’t understand why they  decided to inform pirate players about the pickup deletion. It’s always shown in English,  even if you play in a different language. This is because this string is stored in the  executable, and not in the text container. What if this hint was a debug leftover?  Something like a hint for a developer that the measure is triggered  to see

that it really worked? Or what if it was done on purpose?  Fire_Head thinks that by hiding this measure under the gameplay’s code, it would be  much harder to find and clean it from there. Or what if they were in a rush and  didn’t finish this measure? Who knows. And now we’re done looking at all anti-piracy  measures, which are present in the game without having the SecuROM. Just to remind you, we’ve  been looking at them separately. In reality, all those measures are present in the game  all a

t once, as it is in the Steam version. The developers expected that the person cracking  the game would analyse the code manually and remove them one by one if noticed. So, to make  their life more miserable, Rockstar decided to implement 3 more unique measures, which are  actually disabled by default in the code. The idea was that whoever cracked it  would find and enable them thinking that they actually disabled them.  Call them the “inverted” measures, if you like. They were meant to fool  th

em into releasing a broken crack. The first “inverted” measure was sitting  in the painkillers code. If enabled, and if the game sees that the painkillers do work,  then it waits for a command to break them again. You would never guess. As soon as the pirate steps  into the cassette pickup, the painkillers become broken again, meaning the player would experience  the same issues that we discussed before. In other words, you can eat as many  pills as you want until you step on a VHS tape. Isn’t t

hat hilarious? It seems  like the developers tried very hard to prohibit people from using the sacred  painkillers, and there’s no wonder why. The second “inverted” measure was  left in the code, which executes the text you see in the upper lefthand  corner, better known as a “help box”. If the measure is active, as soon as the  game displays a mission related hint for you, it immediately stops cleaning  the virtual memory. Once again, it becomes clogged and the game crashes  when there is no fr

ee memory left to use. This inverted measure initiates the exact  same memory leak we discussed before, hidden in the camera code, just triggered in  a much different way a cracker had to enable. And just to be clear, I am not talking about the  ordinary hints telling you how to swap a weapon… Or a warning that you’ve hit a save  point by picking up a VHS cassette. I am talking about the mission related hints, which is something you see quite a lot  by playing the first levels of the game. This

measure is so cruel that it makes them  crash in the first seconds after you finally take over James' controls. And you might  ask, wouldn’t it be that obviously for a cracker that something isn’t suddenly right  in their game? Well, it isn’t that simple. If someone gave them a save game, and they  loaded a level from the scene selection screen, then they would see far less mission related  hints during their playthrough, meaning there would be a smaller chance to experience the crash  and highe

r possibility to release a broken crack. Even if a cracker does experience a crash, it  would be an impossible task to debug it and find the cause. If you want to know why, be  sure to read Fire_head’s thoughts about it. The third and last “inverted” measure was  once again left in the beloved checkpoint system. If the measure is enabled, the  game will always create a broken save point. As a result, every single time  the game tries to load it, it’ll crash. As obvious as it sounds, there is  no

point in saving it to a slot, either. There’s no chance for the game to  load to it, even if you restart the game. For the most part you don’t even need  to pick up a cassette to make a broken save point. The game already creates it  for you as soon as you start a level, so expect the crash if you failed and loaded it. Fortunately, if you want to avoid  a crash, you can simply exit to the main menu and reload the scene. All of  that means that you have only one try to complete the level and you

might say, why  even bother trying to complete the level? You will be surprised, but this measure doesn’t corrupt your save games made  after completing the mission. This is because the developers break very  specific pieces of data in save games, something that’s used only by the checkpoint  system. If you want to read more about it and also Fire_Head’s thoughts about his measure,  be sure to pause the video right now. With that being said, we have now covered  all anti-piracy measures left by

Rockstar in Manhunt. As Fire_Head told me, this  time around the developers tried their best to make it nightmarish for both people  cracking the game and people pirating it. The developers expected the person cracking it  to analyse the code and remove these measures one by one if they noticed them manually. But  even if they did, the developers made sure that it would be very hard to deactivate them, and  they made everything as cryptic as possible. The developers also thought that someone  c

racking it would definitely make some mistakes or miss something and release a  semi-functioning game without even knowing it. For instance, someone playing a pirated  version might not have the closed doors measure and broken interactive  items, but they might have damage debuff and disappearing bullets, because  whoever cracked it didn’t notice them. What I’m trying to say is that it doesn’t  necessarily mean that you might have all of these surprises, maybe there’ll  be a couple, or even just

one or two. Most of the stuff I showed can’t be experienced  while having other measures enabled. It’s just impossible to get there unless some measures  are deactivated or somehow bypassed. This is why I showed them one by one, to give you a  better idea of how bad they are even separately. But was it really worth all that time and  effort spent on making these measures? You might be surprised, but the answer was clearly NO. You see, this technique would only stop  the newcomers from cracking

their game. For the veteran warez groups, it was  a piece of cake. These guys were too experienced to be fooled by some  lousy crack protection and SecuROM. The game was fully cracked on the European  launch day by the famous warez group “Razor 1911”. It was just 3 days after the launch  day in North America. No one even knew about the existence of these anti-piracy measures, as  all triggers were found and fully deactivated. And you know what’s even dumber? The game was  cracked in the same man

ner that “FairLight” did with GTA Vice City: This was by emulating  trigger behaviour by giving an answer to the game every single time that the SecuROM wasn’t  tampered with, even if it isn’t true at all. In other words, there was ABSOLUTELY no point for the developers to waste more time and  effort by making these measures worse, if the crackers once again didn’t do  anything in their code to disable them. It’s like how there would be no point in  putting multiple sophisticated locks on a gate

if you can just walk around  it. That’s what I am trying to say. Ironically, these anti-piracy  measures pretty much wound up being made for those who would  buy their game on Steam in the future. Now let’s finally talk about how  they managed to screw that up so badly! First, let's keep one important fact  in mind. Razor1911’s crack wasn’t that perfect. It didn’t work on Windows  Vista and higher operating systems due to newly added security measures around Data  Execution Prevention in the Wi

ndows core. But honestly, you cannot blame them. At that time, Windows Vista didn’t even exist  until almost 3 years later. And it was specifically a problem  in the crack. The disc version with SecuROM worked flawlessly on newer  operating systems. Keep that in mind. Now a few years fly by, and the Steam  version officially releases on January 4th, 2008. This was about one year after  Microsoft launched Windows Vista, and what did players notice? This release  didn’t work on the new operating s

ystem, which led to loads of people on the Steam forum  asking for a solution on how to make it work! Luckily for them, after some time the fix was  found. All they had to do was to change one value in the executable with a hex editor, and then the  game would finally launch on Vista. And now the important thing. The same fix can be applied to a  crack from Razor, which already sounds suspicious. A couple more years went by, and on May  11th, 2010, a user under the name “Liamaj” noticed that the

Steam version of Max Payne  2 uses a crack from the warez group “Myth”. Because how else can you explain the existence  of their logo in the official Steam executable? Of course, the news went viral. So viral that  on the second day people noticed an update, which replaced the controversial executable.  In other words, they were covering tracks in using the crack. But they did it very strangely.  The old executable was still left in the game, just under a different name. Now it was  called “tes

tapp.” As of this recording, it can still be found in the root folder.c Nine days after the weird Max Payne 2 update,  they suddenly released an update for Manhunt. People immediately noticed that the old tutorial  on how to fix the game for Windows Vista didn’t work anymore, as the hex value you needed  to change was different. Luckily for them, there was no need to do it anymore,  because now the game started to work on both Vista and Windows 7 right out  of the box. Which is a good sign, righ

t? Well, not really. People began to complain about  how it was impossible to complete the game, reporting closed doors, countless crashes and  other annoying bugs. People basically reported experiencing the game’s anti-piracy measures, and  Rockstar Games did absolutely nothing about that. But at least they decided to keep an old  executable, too, by renaming it to “testapp”, and this is where the fun begins. If we open it with  a hex editor, we can find a freaking watermark from Razor 1911 in

the field “TimeDateStamp”!  “RzR” is their short name around the scene! Need more proof? In the encrypted area of the RAM, we can find this message from them too! “Razor  1911: Sharper than a blade, or your money back!”, which probably has something to do with their  slogan “Sharpening the blade since 1985”. Just think about it, Rockstar Games used  a freaking illegal crack for the official Steam release, which was never compatible with  the newer operating systems in the first place! And we eve

n have an answer why! This  is because there was another secret signature in the code. This signature  later screwed their old cracks on the newer operating systems. If you want  proof, be sure to pause the video! And to prove that even further, I installed  Steam on Windows XP using a trick, and then I launched the game via the “test app”  executable. As you can see from this footage, it works flawlessly, something  that you can’t say about the game when it’s running on Vista or anything  highe

r, where it doesn’t even start up. So, what do we have? As soon as someone caught  Rockstar for illegal cracks in their official digital version of Max Payne 2, they suddenly  decided to cover tracks in Manhunt as well. It seems that they found an executable in  their archives before applying SecuROM, then they just launched the game to see if  it worked and called it a day. This is the same freaking executable as the disc version,  but without the copy protection. They didn’t experience their o

wn anti-piracy measures because  they didn’t even try to play the game for at least 5 minutes. There’s no other explanation  I could think of for how this happened. Thanks to this carelessness, legitimate  players who actually spent money on the game have now been experiencing  anti-piracy measures for 13 years, thinking that these are just stupid bugs caused  by incompatibilities on newer operating systems. And how can we blame these people?  If you browse this game on Steam, you can see a warn

ing that the game is from  2004 and that it does not support Windows Vista, 7 and 8, and you can guess that the  same applies to Windows 10 and 11. You know what’s even dumber? They added Windows  8 to this list after that stupid update. And, for some reason, it’s only in English. So instead  of getting rid of this warning because it became false for years, they added another operating  system to the list. One that’s actually supported with the new executable too! But it doesn’t  mean that the g

ame is free of any issues. You still need community made fixes to make it  playable on modern PCs and operating systems as the rest R* classics. You can, for  instance, use the famous “Manhunt Fixer”. And here is what is funny. If you choose the Steam  release, then it takes the “testapp” executable, patches two bytes in it to make it  run on all newer operating systems, and then replaces it with the main executable. After that the patcher puts a  few crucial plugins in the root folder to fix th

e major issues in the  game, present in every single version. All these years we were fixing Razor’s  crack making it bootable on newer operating systems. And hey, did I mention that Rockstar  shipped the crack having the Steam Stub DRM? Even the author of this famous patcher didn’t know  the real story behind the Steam version and its weirdness. It was much easier to use a less broken  executable and this is what he told me directly. The community in general had no freaking clue that  they were

fooled by Rockstar, which is a shame. I actually started to wonder  if it’s possible to complete the game with anti-piracy measures  enabled. Just think about the new speedrunning category by playing the  unmodded Steam version of the game. First condition: The player has  to use the “out of bounds” glitch, because it’s otherwise  impossible to progress further. Second condition: The player can waste no more  than 5 minutes on a level between the checkpoints, otherwise the next level breaks and

you  lose precious time restarting the game. Third condition: It’s important  to save a game after completing every single level and restart the  game after completing 3 levels. Fourth condition: Don’t do headshots,  otherwise the game will disable your controls. Fifth condition: Be prepared  to experience crashes, but since we know how to trigger  them, you can basically avoid them. Right now, I’m not sure about one thing.  How can you complete the mission “View of Innocence” if you can’t use

the TV after  switching on the electricity. The game requires you to use two interactive items,  but in this version you can use only one. But this is the speedrunning community  we’re talking about here. I would not underestimate them, since they  do incredible stuff in games. The rest of it is not a problem,  since you can skip most of the broken things. Is it possible to make such  a speedrun? Time will tell, I guess. As always, I want to give a huge thanks to  Fire_Head for helping out with

this video. He managed not only to find  these booby traps in the game, but also to activate and explain them  in detail, so we could show them to you. He also managed to disable these  anti-piracy measures in the Steam version of the game. So if you want  to make sure that they were selling us a game filled with measures,  be sure to check his github. For more videos on Rockstar Games be  sure to check out my channel “Badger Goodger” right here on Youtube. And don’t  forget to follow Vadim and

I on Twitter. This has been Badger. And I hope you have  a great day out there. Peace out, everyone.