The publisher of vertical shooter Radiant Silvergun’s PC port on Steam patched the game Sunday after a player discovered a way to score endlessly during a boss fight.
Live Wire’s patch notes simply say, “We identified an issue in a specific boss battle where, under certain conditions, unintended behavior could occur and allow players to continuously earn score. This update adds a safeguard to ensure the process ends correctly, preventing unintended infinite score farming. We have also implemented this fix in a way that minimizes impact on the existing gameplay feel and replay data as much as possible.”
It’s unclear what Live Wire did to remove the exploit. And there’s no word on whether the company will patch its other Radiant Silvergun port on the Nintendo Switch.
The boss in question is in Route 2B. A Japanese player nicknamed VTF-INO found a way to lock the boss at the top of the screen and attack it endlessly with the Hyper Sword without destroying it, racking up points endlessly.
The method apparently works in any version of the game, including the original ST-V Titan arcade and Sega Saturn ones.
The exploit
VTF-INO posted his findings Jan. 29 to X in a now-deleted post. But the post and its attached video is preserved in a YouTube video from a Japanese streamer. In case the video is taken down from YouTube, here’s a recording cropped to VTF-INO’s post and video:
The video seems to show VTF-INO constantly hugging the boss at the top of the screen — constantly using the game’s “graze” mechanic to rack up points — while swiping his sword occasionally.
VTF-INO likely found the “eternal pattern,” as Japanese players are calling it, because he’d been practicing a sword-only run. The exploit seems to rely on using a sword to keep the boss in place instead of the ship’s projectile weapons.
It’s a slow process, though: Grazing only gives 10 points at a time, which, when it’s happening constantly, scores about 180 points per second.
VTF-INO’s post says in Japanese and is human-translated here: “Silvergun. 2B boss’ eternity. Correction: It seems to work even if the laser is broken on one side. Halfway through the video I use a save state in SSF.”
VTF-INO appeared to post again today about a question he had regarding the eternal pattern. It seems he found that the game eventually locks up, although he said he’s not sure if that’s an error with the emulator he’s playing on, SSF.
He said he wonders whether the game locks up because it reaches a programming-relevant score like 256 million — it’s hard to know what the true score is when it crashes, since the on-screen score stops updating at 99,999,999.
He tested his theory by discontinuing the eternal pattern and then playing normally, finding that Radiant Silvergun still locks up, as illustrated in a video he posted to X:
Players react
Even though VTF-INO’s original post showing how to do the infinite scoring exploit was deleted, there are still some posts that reference it, such as this one from a person named Tee Zero who said in Japanese that it would take nearly a week to max out a score:
Posted on Jan. 26 at 5:06 a.m.
Reached 61.31 million by Jan. 29 at 6:51 a.m.
I guess it’ll take about six days to max out
This is a historic moment marking the end of an era for Silvergun’s score runs
Regulations will undoubtedly be introduced going forward
I want to call it the “Ino-style eternal pattern” to honor its discoverer
Quite a few people on X expressed surprise that it took so long for anyone to find the exploit. “It’s amazing that in the Reiwa Era there’s talk of an eternal pattern discovered in a title as famous as Silvergun,” a person named Gaisen said.
“When I got the answer, I found it strange that it had never been discovered before,” Tee Zero said. “VTF-INO is too amazing for finding this.”
After LiveWire patched the exploit out of the Steam version of Radiant Silvergun, people on social media generally said it made sense — although one person named Noriyuki Shimoda called it a “troubling issue” to remove something that exists in the original game.
Thanks to GSK and Ohfivepro on Bluesky for pointing SHIRO! in the right direction for this story.
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