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.
Ken was born in 1994, and before the turn of the century, he was already a gamer for life, starting with Pokémon Blue Version. He has a passion for storytelling, especially in the gaming medium. Growing up on a healthy diet of JRPGs and point and click adventure games, young Kenny grew up playing Nintendo and Sony consoles, before becoming a snobby member of the PC Master Race. Nowadays, he resides in a time warp, refusing to believe the nineties ended as he fills up his Steam library with old point and clicks and cRPGs.
