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Game Dev Starbreeze Reaches Out to Pirates, Offers Jobs
Alongside the release of the Xbox 360 version of EA’s Syndicate came the expected releases from the warez Scene. With each upcoming release of a game, the warez community does its best to beat the release date to the wires of the Internet—and with Syndicate they managed it by days. In a fun little bit of subterfuge, the Sweden-based developer of the game, Starbreeze, left an Easter egg for pirates.
The initial discovery was by Redditor MikkelManDK and TorrentFreak broke the story about a special NFO file found amidst the Syndicate binary files on the DVD titled “Syndicate-SBZ.nfo.” The concept of NFO files has been mentioned before on SiliconANGLE when referencing the pirate Scene’s swift adoption of superior video format standards, these files are usually left as a calling-card by a warez group to take credit for releasing the crack of the game. However, this time viewers were treated to something unexpected:
After the ASCII version of their logo and some suspiciously simple instructions on how to break the copy-protection (1. Insert disc, 2. Play), Starbreeze took the opportunity to address the pirates who would be actually cracking and distributing their work with a job offer:
Are you bored with watching from the sidelines? Ready to make the switch? Do you have considerable talents in any of the following areas? Art, modeling, texturing, sound design. Programming. Game design?
If you meet one or more of those criteria, and want to be a part of the fun, email us at jobs@starbreeze.com today!
The TorrentFreak article mentions that Starbreeze hasn’t responded to queries about if anyone has taken up their offer since the Feburary 21, 2012 release date of Syndicate.
Also according to the article, this wouldn’t be the first time someone well known in the warez Scene “switched sides” and went legit. Such as the mention of three warez crackers who jumped ship “from the 1980′s Commodore 64 demo scene to land decent jobs at Ocean, Imagine and distributor Mastertronic.” Or the famous example of a warez cracker in the 1990’s when SS Captain of Katharsis eventually became known as Marcin Iwinski, CEO of CD Projekt.
[Image credit: Starbreeze logo and ASCII logo, TorrentFreak.]
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