Reverse Engineering Game Hacks - Game Hacking Archaeology
In this new video series, our reverse engineers are sent a random 15 year old game hack and they are challenged to reverse it back to the original source code.
Join us as we explore the history of game hacking!
Rake had a fun idea for a new series, he'll send me a random 10 year old hack binary without telling me what it is and I'll reverse it and figure out what the hack does, how it works, and perhaps we'll learn how hacks have changed in the past 20 years. Rake sent me this random 10 year old cheat DLL, I have no idea what it does, but we're gonna drop it in IDA and figure it out. Not only will be discover what game it's for, we will re-create the complete original source code! Check out the entire series here: Game Hacking Archaeology.
The goals of this video are:
challenge our reverse engineering skills
create a fun and entertaining video series
learn how cheats have changed over the past 15 years
showcase real world reverse engineering
Showcasing real-world reverse engineering could involve anything from simple memory edits to complex analysis, like you might see in this tutorial about achieving one-hit kills.
Ever wondered how writing C++ cheats worked in the past? Let's drop this 12 year old cheat into IDA Pro and find out!
Diving into these older hacks is always an interesting experience. You get to see the kinds of techniques and tricks that were common back then, often before sophisticated anti-cheat systems were widespread. It's like looking at a snapshot of that specific era in game security and cheat development. Sometimes the approaches are surprisingly simple, and other times quite ingenious, skills valuable beyond just game cheats, extending even to analyzing tools like HWID spoofers.
Reconstructing the source code from just a binary file is the real challenge, but it's also incredibly rewarding when you manage to piece it all together. Following the process hopefully gives viewers a good look at practical reverse engineering concepts and how these skills apply to understanding software history. These same core skills are relevant whether you're looking at old software or tackling reverse engineering challenges in modern games like Black Myth: Wukong. We think it will be an engaging journey, tracing the logic and seeing how these old programs worked.
Game Hacker's LOST Source Code REVERSE ENGINEERED After 12 Years?! (YouTube)