I can't believe this worked: There's a Task Manager trick to get into Modern Warfare 3 multiplayer hours before launch on Steam

pcgamer.com:

People say a lot of things on the internet: They say they have screenshots of Half-Life 3. They say it was actually their little brother who said all those terrible things in Fortnite. They say there's a magic Task Manager ritual you can perform to play Modern Warfare 3 early. You don't expect them to be true, but now and then, it does happen.

In this case, it turns out you reallycan get into Modern Warfare 3 multiplayer hours before its PC launch tonight by performing a three step process involving a Steam copy of the game and the Windows Task Manager. I just played a round of Hardpoint on Invasion.

The trick only works with the Steam version of Modern Warfare 3 as far as we can tell—we tried it with the Battle.net version, no dice—and you have to also own Modern Warfare 2. The steps are as follows:

I have no idea why this works, but I can confirm that it does: I did it on the first try. The method came to us from Evan Fox on X, who demonstrates it in the post below.

this method was sent by @lachlanisdumb but only thing i realised is closing thru task manager makes it more doable. pic.twitter.com/OsQIw66QPRNovember 9, 2023

Call of Duty's console versions release time zone by time zone, so it's already out in other parts of the world. The PC version of MW3's multiplayer, however, isn't supposed to be available until 9 pm Pacific tonight, in all regions. This One Weird Trick gets around that, somehow.

I don't know if Activision will look unkindly upon players who sneak into Modern Warfare 3's PC release early. It's hardly the most devious bit of mischief a gamer can get up to, so I'm not too worried about getting banned for life. Follow the steps above at your own risk, though.

The Modern Warfare 3 campaign has already