In what appears to be a slip-up by Rockstar developers, a cracked version of Max Payne 2 was distributed through Steam for a brief period of time. The origin of this embarrassing gaffe is unknown, but laziness may be to blame as Rockstar was purportedly intending to remove the DRM from the sequel of the PC gaming classic.
As reported here by Steam community members and confirmed by other reliable sources, Max Payne 2's main executable was actually an unprotected copy courtesy of "Myth", a prolific group of crackers responsible for many no-CD game patches. The evidence was clear: an ASCII myth logo found in the Max Payne 2 binary.
Reportedly, the cracked version was swiftly pulled from the Steam store and silently replaced with a genuine copy of the game albeit with one caveat: the latest legitimate version is older (1.0.98) than the latest release of the game (1.1.102). Steam members note that even though Rockstar covered their mistake, the "Myth" logo is still apparent in another binary bundled with the official download.
Below is the actual binary code with the "Myth" logo in ASCII art:
