Rockstar Games, the developer behind the popular GTA franchise, has been reportedly selling pirated copies of some popular titles, including Midnight Club II, Max Payne 2, and Manhunt, on Steam.

The controversy surrounding this issue appeared when a Twitter user @__silent_, an avid modder and game developer, discovered that Rockstar Games was selling a pirated copy of the racing arcade game Midnight Club II (2003) on Steam rather than their own original files.

While looking into the .exe files for Midnight Club II using a HEX editor, Silent found that the Steam version of this game is the same version that Razor 1911, a software piracy group, cracked in 2003, which is directly stated in the game’s files. To be more precise, he discovered the signature of Razor 1911.

It contained files from a pirated version of the game cracked by Razor 1911 that they would have used to get around anti-piracy measures implemented by Rockstar Games.

For those unaware, Razor 1911 (RZR), a warez and demogroup founded in Norway in 1986, is the oldest software cracking group with an infamous history. It created cracks and distributed them for free, which helped users bypass digital rights management (DRM) protections and piracy protection systems in games.

The company may have possibly done this, as it was unable or reluctant to remove the old DRM from Midnight Club II, which had been in the game since 2003. So, instead of releasing the original version of Midnight Club II, it downloaded the cracked version and started selling it on Steam.

Rockstar Games stopped selling the cracked version of Midnight Club II on Steam in 2021; it is nonetheless true that the company was selling the pirated version for several years.x

This is not the first time that Rockstar Games has tried to sell cracked games on Steam. It has already applied this strategy in the past by selling cracked copies of Manhunt and Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne games.

Neither Rockstar Games nor its parent company, Take-Two Interactive have commented on the issue.