[jjoonathan]

The US Army has them beat.

About 10 years ago they released a first person shooter called "America's Army." It was free, it was mac compatible, and for a kid that wasn't really supposed to be video gaming that was a killer combination. When they stopped updating the mac version I started poking around the files to see if I could backport some of the maps from the newer PC version to the older mac version. One of the first things I implemented was texture import/export. I wanted it to work on entire folders at a time and I didn't want to rely on EXIF annotations to store the pixel format of textures so I relied on the hack of looking at the histogram to see if an image should be stored in the compressed format.

At first I thought I had a bug: I knew for a fact that some textures were stored uncompressed (RGBA8) and some were stored compressed (DXT3,5) but they were all importing as compressed. Turns out the bug wasn't in my code. Someone had lossfully compressed the textures and then stored the compressed images in an uncompressed format.

I sent the devs an email letting them know how they could save ~50% of their download size at no further loss of quality by re-enabling compression. I never got a direct response but the next day they banned me for hacking. Naturally, when the next version of the game came out the problem still wasn't fixed.

A few years later I told my parents. My father, who had served in the army, just laughed and said "Now that's the Army I remember!"