The Steam executable for Rockstar's Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne bears a striking resemblance to a no-CD hack released by now defunct piracy group Myth. Could it just be a coincidence?

Several Kotaku readers have pointed us towards a post on the Max Payne Steam forums, in which Steam user Liamaj points out the Myth logo he discovered after opening the Max Payne 2 executable in notepad.

I downloaded my own version of Max Payne 2 from Steam, and the logo is definitely in there.

Check out this image to compare executables. At the top, we have the executable downloaded for Max Payne 2 via Steam, with the Myth logo displayed prominently at the top. On the bottom, the executable file I found while searching for Max Payne 2 hacks in Google.

The Steam executable weighs in at 1,460 KB, while the 1.01 no-CD hack from Myth is 1,452 KB.

Now there's a chance this is just a prank from some Rockstar programmer, perhaps playing off the trouble Ubisoft ran into in 2008, when a no-CD hack from piracy group Reloaded was used in an official update to Rainbow 6: Vegas 2.

Or it could just be a lazy programmer. If the tool exists that gets the job done faster than creating a new one, why not use it? Of course, speaking out against piracy becomes a problem when you use the products of piracy in your official releases, but surely this won't upset anyone at all, right?

We've reached out to Rockstar for comment on the similarities between the two files, and will update should we receive a response.