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Nikola Brežnjak blog - Tackling software development with a dose of humor
Hacker Games

Help me create a list of Hacker Challenge Games

TL; DR

I’m looking to create a list of so-called Hacker Challenge Games that were popular in the last century. Since a lot of them are no longer available, some may light up like a Christmass tree when they see their favorite ‘games’ from a time that now seems soooo far away. ?

Come and help me gather them in the comments or, if you feel like it, submit a Pull Request ?

Nostalgia

Picture this: it’s somewhere around Y2K, and everyone is talking about how those big white boxes aka computers)are gonna lose it and that the world is better of without them (ah, dear haters…).

It so happened that I was fortunate enough to own one of those boxes. Not only that, but one dad’s friend got us all set up for this thing called The Internet. Now, mind you, I used that good ‘ol awesome cool sound making 56 Kbps modem.

Anyways, I honestly don’t remember how I found about these ‘games’. Maybe I wanted to be a hacker after watching the cult movie with Angelina Jolie, so I Yahooed (no wonder that never stick) ‘hackers’ and there I was.

But what I do remember is how many countless hours I spent solving these challenges.

This was not only great because it strengthened my ability for problem-solving and never giving up, but also it made me learn new stuff like Cryptography, Steganography, Web, Cracking even ?. Of course, it also made me learn various programming languages as some tasks were designed like that.

I was so into it, that I even made my own version – Hitman’s challenge as a bachelor thesis. Those interested in it, can read it here (note: it’s in Croatian).

Ah, don’t ask, I think the code is awful and I’m ashamed of it now. But, a wise friend told me that that means that I’ve probably progressed as a developer, and progress is always a good thing. He even went so far to say that if you look back at your code from six months ago and you’re happy with it, you probably haven’t grown as a dev… No worries, with all the new frameworks popping up these days, you can stay busy just evaluating them, but that’s a rant for some other post.

A bit later I earned my masters degree in computing, got a job and started writing REAL software. I’ve officially ‘grown up’. Little Prince would be disappointed. ?

However, I loved it and still to this day remember those days with joy and nostalgia. Just the other day I got this idea of checking if these old sites still exist. I was sad to find out they’re no longer around. R.I.P.

So now, please help me remember what all was ‘out there’ back in the days. But also, please by all means – list any new that are popular these days.

The ‘Hacker’ games

Here I’m listing few that I remember:

Still LIVE
+ http://www.try2hack.lt/en/
+ http://bright-shadows.net/

R.I.P.
+ hackits.de
+ hackerlab.org
+ slyfx.com
+ gild.com
+ arcanum.co.nz

Back in the day, there was this one web directory that listed all of these sites, and even though the site is still up (http://hackergames.net/), it doesn’t seem like it’s working anymore.

Sure, nowadays we have things like:

  • https://projecteuler.net/
  • https://adventofcode.com/
  • https://www.topcoder.com/

but these sites just offer the programming challenges as far as I know.

Conclusion

I hope I sparked some joy with this post and am really looking forward to seeing what you come up with in the comments.

As for some lingering idea: oh wouldn’t it be great if we could make an open source hacker challenge game #wishfullThinking

Hacker Games, JavaScript

JavascriptBattle

Lately I’ve been playing at JavascriptBattle, which is

a fun and engaging web application intended to make artificial intelligence (AI) design accessible to all. Every day, your code will be pulled down from your “hero-starter” repository on Github. Your code (along with every other user’s code) will be run daily, behind the scenes, in our game engine.

Basically, you write JavaScript code for your hero in order to instruct him how to behave when for example his health drops to a certain level, or when enemies are close, etc. and then you participate in a daily battle. They have various stats, and as it turns out I’m currently on position #3 for average damage dealt, yay me!

JavascriptBattle

 

Anyways, it’s cool so feel free to check it out and take me down from the pedestal :P. If you happen to like these “hacker games” then do checkout the one I made for my university project back in the old days 1415131129_smiley-evil.

Hacker Games

Topcoder Scavenger Hunt

I just competed (and finished! – I’m Hitman666) a Topcoder Scavanger Hunt.

topcoderScavangerHunt

Anyways, you have the instructions on how to play on the link above. I’ve really missed these kind of “hacker games”, like back in the days I was very active on hackits.de, but that site is long down now. Anyone playing similar games today, which you can recommend? I made my own for the project on university: http://nikola-breznjak.com/challenge/.

The questions were quite cool (no, no answers here, you’ll have to research it yourself):

  • How many ‘Albert’ monkeys died in the US Space program?
  • What was the original name of Nintendo’s Super Mario?
  • How many female fighter pilots were there in the original Star Wars trilogy?
  • How many different combinations of coins are possible for the US dollar?

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