I used to write cheats. Now I get paid to stop them.

It started before the Xbox 360, with trainers I wrote in C# for Flash games. Find the address, freeze the value, change it, and watch the game just believe you. I've basically been asking "how does this actually work, and what happens if I lie to it?" ever since.

Then the Xbox 360 came along and things got serious. I modded Halo maps and got them onto the console by talking my way into a hard drive transfer cable. I was one of the first people running modded lobbies in Modern Warfare 2, on a JTAG'd console with patched FF files and a patched XEX so the game would actually run them. I also found UFO mode working online in Call of Duty 4 by messing around with the save game format until it let me use leftover developer cfgs in the options menu. None of that was me breaking the console's security - the JTAG hack already did the heavy lifting there. It was mostly poking at file formats and seeing what the game would let me get away with.

Modding one game teaches you that game. Modding a bunch of them teaches you how games are actually built. I worked my way through every major engine of that era: the Quake lineage under Call of Duty, Unreal in Gears of War, CryEngine in Crysis, and Anvil in Assassin's Creed. Different studios and different decades of code, but once you know where to look, it's pretty much the same handful of patterns underneath.

My first PC cheat was for CS:GO, and I built it because I was sick of smurfs. From there it escalated the way it always does: user-mode stops being enough, so you learn kernel drivers, and to write kernel drivers you have to actually understand Windows internals. Then the kernel stops being enough too, so you go lower: hypervisors, then bare metal. I wrote cheats, and for a while I helped run them too - behind the scenes, not as a name anyone would recognize.

I learned a lot of it in public, in communities like se7ensins, TheTechGame, and UnknownCheats. I'm not going to list the handles I used there - they're retired, and they're staying that way :3

Every cheat has someone on the other side of the match. For a long time I told myself it was just me versus the anti-cheat, a technical puzzle and nothing more. It wasn't. It was me ruining people's nights when all they wanted was to play a game, cutting into the bottom line of the studio that made it, and keeping their employees up at night or stuck in overtime cleaning up after me. Once that clicked, I was done.

I stopped before I took my first anti-cheat job, and I haven't built a cheat to use against anyone since. The only cheats I build now are against systems I'm authorized to attack, so I can find the holes before someone else does.

I learned reverse engineering from other people's write-ups, so this is me returning the favor: deep dives done the old-fashioned way, experiments with AI in the loop, side projects, and the occasional opinion. If you're just getting started, you don't need much. Writing trainers for Flash games was enough for me back then, and a single-player game, Cheat Engine and Ghidra will get you just as far today.

And if you're writing cheats right now and wondering whether those skills could ever pay for a legit career: they can. The industry hires people like us. I'm one of them. Switch while it's still easy to walk away. It only gets harder the deeper you're in.