Real quick, before we get started, this is part 2 of a two-part series on Manfred.

If you want to hear how he hacks online games were fun, check out part 1 first.

The first hack I ever did was on a game called SimCity.

It's the original city building game.

My curious teenage self found where the saved game files were stored and began inspecting

these files.

It was gibberish as far as I could tell.

I decided to load the file into a hex editor.

This converts the contents of the file to a hexadecimal format.

I started changing a few numbers around.

I was just guessing and then loading the game back up to see if anything had changed.

I knew I was in the right area because I was changing things like the year and the name

of the town.

I kept tweaking values and loading it again and again.

Eventually I loaded the game and I was amazed at what I saw.

I had given myself 100 billion in game dollars.

The feeling I got from hacking the game was so much more exciting than actually playing

the game.

With that amount of money I built some very large cities.

Hacking the money system in a single player game is one thing.

But what if you could hack the money system in a massive multiplayer online game?

This is Darknet Diaries.

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