I was 14 years old when Galaxies was first announced, two years prior to its release. Like the author of this article, I too was crazy excited about this game when I first heard about it. My friends and I did all the same things that the author said he did, such as fantasizing about being a bounty hunter, or chillin' with Luke, etc. The idea of the game excited me more than actually wanting to play it, though. I've never been much of a gamer but games were how I learned to program. So, my approach to Galaxies took me to similar places as the author, but I got there a different way.

When Galaxies was announced, I was in my peak of reverse engineering Blizzard games. I had been reverse engineering the Battle.net client protocol since Diablo 1 and StarCraft. Battle.net had a community full of people who reverse engineered the Blizzard games and there was somewhat of a competition as to who could write the coolest bots, as we called them. Bots were apps that emulated the official clients and could completely sign into Battle.net without using the actual game. Most of mine were just console apps, because I enjoyed the reverse engineering more than the coding.

So, when Galaxies finally came out in beta, a friend of mine luckily got a copy. The computer that I used at that time, which was a shared family computer, was terrible so I didn't expect to play the game, but I did ask him for a copy of the game's directory so that I could start writing Galaxies bots. I focused all of my time on reverse engineering the Galaxies client protocol. I would stay up until the sun came up, staring at the game in a debugger. When a family member need to computer or I had to go to school, I'd hit print on IDA and print out an entire dll - tons of paper. I'd basically annotate the printed out assembly with what I thought was happening and then I'd get home and confirm or deny it with the debugger at run-time. I'd borrow my friends account so that I could see the sign in process in real-time and get packet dumps. I did this for months straight and it never got old.

The end result was a console application that could emulate the official client and sign in to Galaxies, select your character and respond to various events. My friends would level up new character's professions and I'd run them on my terrible computer while we were at school, and over night. I could run many at once with no problem.

While we did not have the in-game success with making tons of money, I did save a lot of money up front on a lot of new computers and tons of copies of Galaxies. :)