games

I played a game called “hack mud” when it came out and it might be the most unique and rewarding video game I’ve ever played.

It was a text based, MMO, hacking game. You wrote, ran, and shared JavaScript in order to do basically whatever you want. It was incredible.

One user made a little app called “Haunty Mall” which was a play on the Monty Hall problem. You could run the app once a day, you picked one door, and if a little ASCII ghost was behind it payed out a bunch of money. It was probably the most run app in the game at the time.

I decided that I was going to steal that persons code but instead I changed two things. First instead of it paying out, win or lose it took money from your account and deposited into a dummy account that only I had access to. The other change I made was the name you had to type in to download and run the executable. It was a bit of social engineering. I made it one letter different so it looked identical at a quick glance, knowing coders like to just type two or three letters and press tab to execute commands I just made sure mine came up before the real exe. It worked even better than I expected.

What I didn’t think about was the war I was committing myself to with the person good enough to have unlimited free money to give away to people.