8 Best Hackers In Gaming History

As Watch Dogs weaponises the age of social media, we look at which other hackers have been picking cyberspace's back door for years.

By Kenneth Cummings /

With the recent launch of Watch Dogs, being a hacker has never been a more captivating idea to the mainstream gaming audience. The video game medium has seen various incarnations of hacking mini-games, and a large number of gaming protagonists who occasionally like to moonlight as hackers in their adventures. In many cyberpunk and science-fiction titles, hacking mini-games aren't unexpected, yet gaming's representation of the activity runs the gamut from word-based recognition games to Tron rip-offs, and everything in between. With such a large variety of characters and mechanics it's easy to view these as convenient filler, placed there for the sake of advancing the plot where it would otherwise be impossible. As a result, the fine art of digital infiltration has seen a large variety of interpretations, with some being closer than others. On one end of the spectrum, you have puzzles such as the infamous Pipe Mania-inspired mini-game in the original BioShock, and on the other you have far more accurate representations; such as that seen in Uplink, a game all about hacking. To narrow it down, this list will focus primarily on the hackers themselves, and each of their respective mini-games, with the notable exclusion of Aiden Pearce, a very obvious pick who has been taken out of the running in interest of fairness.