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Comment by jgeralnik | Hacker News Reader

I spent middle school hacking games on Kongregate to obtain badges and high scores. There were incredible tools available for hacking flash games - debuggers, decompilers, cheat engine like tools. Most of the tools were dedicated to kongregate games and allowed easy interfacing with the website. Years later I tried to remember exactly what tools I had used and what communities I participated in and was never able to find them.

Anyone else do the same and have a better recollection of the tools you used?

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Yes! That's how I spent a lot of my spare time too in adolescence. There was a forum called Kongrehack run by a Swedish guy where game-hacks were shared. Initially we used Cheat Engine to modify select memory locations in games, but the game creators came up with better defences to obscure the easy hacks.

Somebody created an entire browser - called something like Niflheim but I can't remember the exact name - designed for the purpose of cheating Kongregate APIs. Finally, a subversive guy found a way to submit directly to the "I have won a badge API" and wrote a program to submit all the badges in batch. This took the fun out of winning achievements in games, but introduced many of us to the world of coding, automation, and hacking. Why grind for hours when you can cheat the scoreboard in seconds?

I also developed a way to cheat on Kongai, which was one of my favourite games on Kongregate. However I got bored and moved onto other things in life shortly after. If you were active in this community around 2008, we probably talked to each other back then.

Is this the forum? https://konghack.com/

I don't think so, that website looks a lot newer. And I'm pretty sure the original was called KongreHack or KongregateHack.

Yes! I was definitely on Kongrehack and used Niflheim. I never used mass submission of badges, I would break each game individually. Hacking the game became the challenge, and games that nobody else on Kongrehack had managed to cheat at were the best challenge of all

Some more information - I found this YouTube channel which has videos of various hacks of Kongregate games. I don't think I ever saw it as a child but it brings back memories of various things we would do.

Here is a tool called Ragnarok that let's you edit values based on their name. You would open the reversed actionscript and could play with things based on the variable name:

https://youtu.be/B4GhD8Ets8U

Editing save files was big. The files were in a proprietary format called sol. All of the videos I see on that channel are just "download this save file with a completed game state", but there were tools for editing the save file yourself. Some games introduced obfuscation of data in the save file and the cat and mouse game began.

Oh, here's an example! Apparently the sol editor was a feature of Ragnarok, and maybe the disassembler too:

https://youtu.be/wLaMZoqI-_Q

Here's a video of Niflheim, seems similar to Ragnarok. Maybe Ragnarok replaced it as a better tool?

https://youtu.be/fgqHarxwv64

Other than that it seems most of the cheats on that youtube channel are using cheat engine. While I definitely used that, I don't recall it being part of my go-to arsenal.

Nice find! That brings back memories. Yeah Ragnarok was the replacement for Niflheim, although both were buggy and stopped working altogether at some point.

KongregateHack was really young, impressive that he ran a whole online community aged 14 or 15. Wonder what he's up to now.

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