Fame: Non-existent, since you don't tell people.

Money: Non-existent, you don't get paid.

In retrospect, I think a major drivers for teenagers for a lot of activities is a sense of identity. You feel like one of the role models in [name your favorite hacker movie]. It's the same reason why punks wore spikes and mohawks, goths wore black, and people might pick a genre of music (even if privately). I'd guess a lot of more negative things, like vandalism, are similar too.

You become part of a community too.

And ultimately, you contribute to it. As much as it might be illegal, cracking software helps other kids who can't afford that software. Few real engineers will use a hacked copy of AutoCAD, and literally everyone I know began to pay for music once they could afford it. On the other end of the bell curve are kids who can't afford those. Providing them with access is a community service. And it's going up against The Man. It's illegal, but by the code of ethics we followed at the time, it was very ethical.

I did it because it was interesting, I wanted to prove DRM is a flawed concept and broken construct, and because the community which I built (as a result) was really great and a home to me when I didn't ever experience one.

It was never about money or fame, it was about providing something to people that had a value. People said the "thing" I provided was better than the "real thing", and that gave me a sense of pride: I'd never get hired by the company that made "real thing" to make their "thing" better because I didn't have the credentials on paper.

But at least my "thing" was better.

At least in the 90s there were lots of tutorials to learn how to crack/reverse engineer, from +orc’s documentation to fravia ´s fortress of reverse engineering - I’d expect similar tutorials to still be around.

Reverse engineering also happens to be a very useful skill as a regular software engineer ( debugging compiler bugs, figuring out why software X is behaving strangely and what it is doing etc ).