Did you ever wonder how players are able to set up private servers for games that require original source code or assets? Well, pirating or hacking is the most obvious explanation, but apparently sometimes it’s as easy a patching your favorite title. At least that’s what an unnamed former Cryptic employee said happened back in the day with City of Heroes.

It seems to be one of those stories that nobody believes. Apparently Cryptic misconfigured their patcher and accidentally included all original assets and source code with an update. When they realized their mistake, a couple thousand players had already downloaded the full thing. They then pushed out an emergency patch that really deserves its name and included a routine to find their own source files and assets on the players’ computer and delete them.

Allegedly that worked, despite in one particular case where logs showed that the deletion hadn’t happened. So the Cryptic CEO actually called that player (how did they get the number by the way?) and “convinced him” to delete everything. The game is long dead, so this is just a cool story from back in the day. But the devs that were present probably will remember the moment they found out about their mess-up forever.

We’ve attached the Bombcast below. They read the e-mail after the 2:30:00 mark.

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