Bully's BB Rifle Unlocked 20 Years Later by a Pacifist

For six months, YouTuber JustGarrison has been trying to beat Bully without harming a single NPC. The irony of a pacifist run being the thing that finally cracks open a hidden weapon after two decades is almost too perfect.

In a video uploaded yesterday, JustGarrison detailed a convoluted but entirely mod-free exploit that lets players bring the BB rifle out of the shooting range minigame and into Bully's open world. The process involves escaping the school during the Complete Mayhem mission, traversing multiple districts to grab firecrackers, deliberately draining Jimmy's health on a bike ramp, then triggering a specific interaction at the carnival shooting range that overlays the minigame UI onto a cutscene. When the timer expires, the rifle stays in your inventory.

The rifle actually deals damage to NPCs, which strongly suggests Rockstar originally intended it as a usable weapon before cutting it. Its animations are broken and it can fire during cutscenes, so whatever free-roam implementation existed was either unfinished or deliberately stripped. JustGarrison speculates Rockstar pulled it to protect the game's T for Teen rating, but the more likely reason is simpler: Bully launched in 2006, roughly a year after the Hot Coffee scandal nearly buried Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. A student running around a school campus with anything resembling a rifle would have been a PR disaster, even if it only fires pellets. I think that's a reasonable call for 2006 Rockstar, and the fact that it took a pacifist speedrunner two decades to find the workaround suggests the cut was thorough.

The BB rifle isn't the only thing JustGarrison has pulled out of Bully's code through legitimate exploits. His pacifist challenge has also surfaced methods to access the sledgehammer and explosive football in free roam. None of these require mods or external tools, and all work across every version of the game. Students can steal the rifle from you, and moving with it requires a secondary exploit involving getting punched into a wall or jumping off a moving bike.