Over the past six months, one man has essentially dedicated his life to attempting to beat Rockstar Games’ 2006 open-world classic Bully without hurting a single NPC. Ironically, his pacifist quest has resulted in him discovering several never-before-seen exploits that allow you to use some of the game’s most violent weapons outside of specific missions, including the sledgehammer, the explosive football, and, as of yesterday, a rifle.
Content creator JustGarrison uploaded their discovery to YouTube last night, which includes the specific steps required to bring the rifle into free roam. Just to clarify, while this is an exploit, as Rockstar Games obviously didn’t intend for players to be able to use the rifle to shoot people, JustGarrison didn’t use any kind of mods or outside tools to pull this off and states in his video that the weapon can be accessed in any version of Bully.
As the rifle in question can normally only be temporarily used by accessing the shooting range minigame, you might be surprised to learn that it does actually deal damage to NPCs. This does imply that the rifle was intentionally programmed this way, and a way to access it in free roam was possibly cut from the game at some point in development. However, if that is the case, the buggy animations and the fact that you can fire it during cutscenes suggest that it was either unfinished or that Rockstar Games removed its third-person assets from the game before launch.
Even though, as implied in the shooting range minigame, the rifle only fires BB pellets, I understand why Rockstar Games potentially chose to remove access to the weapon outside the minigame, as the optics of shooting inside a school would almost definitely have resulted in scrutiny from the media. After all, since Bully was released in 2006, it dropped roughly a year after the “Hot Coffee” minigame was discovered in the PC release of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. Considering how much scrutiny they were under at the time, I can see why Rockstar Games may have thought it was wise to play it safe with Bully.