A few years back I downloaded a cracked version of Crazy Taxi 3: High Roller (A game I would gladly pay money for if it actually had a digital release on any storefront). Super fun game, but something about it struck me as odd. The Crazy Taxi games are known for having soundtracks filled with punk rock and stuff like that, but the song that was playing was uh… Well, listen for yourself. (this sounds like the start of a lame creepypasta, I know, but just bare with me)
A far cry from rebellious vibe these games typically go for, to say the least. My assumption was that Crazy Taxi 3's PC port had issues with the licensing, and so they just grabbed whatever music they could to throw in. In fact, for years that's what I assumed, until yesterday, when I made a shocking discovery.
If you look up the official track list for the PC port of Crazy Taxi 3, you'll find that while it's not identical to the Xbox original, it's much closer to what you'd expect. What exists in the version of Crazy Taxi 3 I played is a unique soundtrack modded in by (presumably) whoever cracked the game back in 2004. Why? Not a darn clue.
What fascinates me about this is that I'm not the only person who played this version and just assumed this was the official OST. With the game not being available through digital storefronts, and likelihood of someone buying a physical copy of the PC release being slim, it means that if you wanna play Crazy Taxi 3, this alternatively scored copy is sort of the de facto version of the game. That's nuts to me!! You might have even noticed that Youtube link I sent of the song Bring it all back now is labeled as "Crazy Taxi 3 OST" by the uploader, and that the comments are filled with people complaining about how bad the PC ports soundtrack is. They tricked an entire generation of people!!
This whole Crazy Taxi 3 OST debacle has me curious if this type of shenanigans has occurred before or since, thus my question to the fine people of insert credit is this: Are there any other video game cracks that had content altered by the crackers?
I found some gameplay on youtube with the modded soundtrack you mentioned and I was skipping through it just to hear the rest of the tracks, and now I kinda want to play a Crazy Taxi with Cascada's Everytime We Touch. It makes the game look more insane,
@穴@Arino4u Yeah not really a response to the whole cracked games thing, but I love the idea of putting any music you want into Crazy Taxi. I don‘t mind Bad Religion and The Offspring, and they help flesh out the context around the game’s release, but after you hear those songs so many times, they grate on you.
@rearnakedwindow" Yeahhh, I‘m with ya. Those songs get old quick. It turns out it’s pretty easy to mod in your own OST though, all you have to do is replace the .ogg audio files with your own and you're golden.
@穴 Yeah like almost all the music choices are just so bizarre, and the juxtaposition weirdly amplifies the chaos of Crazy Taxi IMO. If you wanna play it though, it ain‘t hard to find! In fact, I’d argue it's much harder to find the original version at this point-
I feel like I should have many examples here, but I’m struggling to think of them.
Half counts: in the late 90’s there was a pirate/cracking group trend to do things like remove all the videos from a game (replacing them with one black frame, for example) to try and lower overall file size. (The idea of releases being split by “disks” (1.44MB chunks!) hung around for far too long). Some release groups were more aggressive than others at this. I remember “the community” being upset any time CLaSS won a race to release something, because they absolutely hacked the games to pieces to get them out. Usually, there’d be dupe releases by some other group that everyone agreed to move around anyway — even when usually there was a brutally harsh rule about if you lost the race to “pre” then your release got deleted and nobody couriered or traded it.
So — there were a lot of cracked releases of 90’s games (mostly for the PC) that were significantly different from the regular retail release. Most of them were just cut down rather than altered as in the Crazy Taxi example.
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I’m assuming things like loaders don’t count, or we’ll be listing every game made
it‘s weird that this pop group keeps coming up lately (for me, anyway) given that i hadn’t thought about them for one moment in about 20 years. has the simulation we i live in developed an S Club feedback loop?
@rejj I had a school friend whose PlayStation library was mostly bootleg compilation discs. Most of them modded the games in some way to fit multiple titles on one disc - usually cutscenes and/or music were missing or shortened.
@rootfifthoctave Across the internet, on seemingly unrelated forums, social networks and news article comment threads, AI simulations of internet word-typers are convincing unsuspecting chumps to buy tickets for S Club 7’s upcoming tour as a final test before the next US election.
This maybe doesn‘t count as changed assets, but a former coworker of mine wanted me to play one of the Civilization games really badly back around 2010 or so (I can’t remember which one), and to get him to stop asking I agreed to try it even though I wasn‘t especially interested. He gave me a cracked copy to install, and whoever had cracked it had changed the loading screen to an anti-Iraq war message that also played extremely loud machine-gun and explosion noises that were way louder than the in-game soundtrack. I also found out after the fact that this same copy included malware that was so difficult to get rid of that I had to spend a whole weekend reinstalling my OS and everything. Thanks former coworker! But the joke was on me because he still never shut up about Civilization even after I didn’t really like it!
@Karasu I feel like there's some kind of irony to putting both an anti war message and a weapon of digital destruction in your cracked version of civilization
I don‘t know if this really counts, but the yearly updated team rosters for Tecmo Super Bowl have always been interesting to me. The changes are clearly labeled as such so the sort of confusion described in the Crazy Taxi example doesn’t really apply, but it is still technically altered content, though not presented as a bootleg/cracked iteration as much as a community-driven update.
There were all those cracked and hacked versions of marvel vs Capcom. I especially remember the “Knicks” version where all the characters got orange and blue color swaps. And if course there's the MJ version: