A normal boy, a strange job

Ikky was never a skilled person, that's the truth, neither in sports nor in what he liked most, computer or console games. No, he wasn't; he didn't have the ability to do hand-eye synchronization, nor the intuition for combat, nor the patience to transform his defects with hard work.

Whoever says that in this life everything can be achieved with hard work is lying, our skills, our abilities, can be polished, but if you are not born with certain gifts, if you don't have certain abilities, all your effort, even if it makes you advance, often only puts you at the back of the queue, seeing how other more capable people achieve much more by trying much less. Is it worth it?

This didn't make Ikky the typical nerd either; he was just a normal kid, not the tallest, nor the most handsome, nor the shortest, nor the smartest, nor the dumbest. He wasn't rich, but he wasn't poor either; he wasn't weighed down by the weight of orphanhood, nor a difficult family, nor the desire for revenge. He was not the typical novel character with a dark or violent past.

He was the typical boy who goes through classes without pain or glory. It's not that he didn't have friends, but he wasn't a boy who stood out for anything, neither in sports, nor in the grades he got, just another boy in Spanish public education.

Likewise, Ikky was just a boy who, as much as I liked video games, didn't measure up; he couldn't advance or get past the trendy games... That's why he soon discovered his second great passion behind video games themselves: cheating, looking for tricks, exploits or shortcuts. Only he could be the best at hacking games...

That was his true superpower; he was the best cheater that had ever existed in the history of video games. His simple ability consisted of finding the quickest way to obtain power in the simplest way, while what many found difficult, he obtained through mere intuition and analysis.

Many will judge his cheating behavior as a simple weakness of character; However, for an eight-year-old, was having to read hexadecimal tables in order to hack a game any less praiseworthy than simply being a good player? Was knowing how to take advantage of that pixel on the screen where you could hide worse than being the best in combat? In the end, he learned in another way to win in those fantasy worlds, in a different way, in a way that everyone would criticize, but in the end, they were his victories.

He spent a normal adolescence, with a conventional social life, and accumulated a lot of experience in the field of cheating and hacking games. Lion was a cheater; many times the games only passed through his hands with the challenge of hacking them, cheating or discovering the exploits in them.

Without being a great student, he managed to pass the exam and enter the computer science degree, and even within the online community he managed to make a name for himself with his game disassembly work. On the one hand, it was a bad name for good players, on the other, a help for those who didn't have the same skills, and thirdly, it was a headache for video game companies, who saw how their months of work to create a certain level of difficulty were wasted due to bugs that a twenty-something discovered and published...

So, one day, his first job offer came from a video game company. They required his services to find those bugs before even releasing the game... I won't lie to you and say that it was a great salary, but compared to the effort of many of his friends from school and high school, he wasn't making a bad living.

So he went from one game to another, charging for it and continuing to destroy the guts and efforts of those trendy games that didn't deign to hire him... His online name became famous in certain circles. Ikky the Cheater; his guides for beginners sold well; and life smiled on him.

He had become so accustomed to that name that sometimes he forgot that it wasn't his real name, he even felt more identified with that name than with his own.

He liked the comfort, and he loved the freedom to work remotely wherever he wanted. So when he saved up a little money, he moved to a town in the provinces, big enough to have a good internet connection, but small enough to make housing and living costs as cheap as possible.

He had a small two-story town house with three bedrooms, a good kitchen, a living room with a fireplace, and a backyard. What more could he ask for? Plus, he had a mortgage so small that by the time he was 32, he had already paid it off.

He wasn't stingy, but he didn't have any big vices or big tastes either, so little by little he built up a good nest egg that he kept in case things got tough. That was how he had been taught, not to spend more than necessary and to avoid an ostentatious life. His father had told him that would only give him headaches.

With the advent of mobile games, especially the paid ones, his services became more in demand... What company that relied on the difficulty of its game to encourage people to buy paid packages would risk having a cheater like Ikky dismantle the business by publishing the cheats that would allow everyone to reach their full potential?

And so he turned 35... The worst thing about his life was his hair loss. He was a bald thirty-something and had never been in a stable relationship. Most girls didn't see his job as something serious and promising; in other cases, it was his own social awkwardness. Did it scare them away? Over time, he began to see my lonely life as something normal. Occasionally, he would travel to the city to see his parents, or they would come over for a while - nothing out of the ordinary in the life of a geek.

It was a Tuesday, just another one of many, and I had just finished my last assignment a few hours ago... a disaster of a game for which I was paid a good amount. The game had great graphics, a lot of AI, and a lot of systems that seemed promising. It was full of holes, although the story was not bad, but in the end, it was just another RPG made to get the most out of 12-year-olds...

He went in, and ripped it apart in the three aspects that his job included... As for the security of the files, it was not bad at all. He was not able to find any security problems, neither in hexadecimal, nor in static, nor in the processes in play; There was no way to access and hack the content... However, as for the game and possible exploits... my god, I've rarely seen something so careless... with the intention of making the game realistic, they had fallen into major errors, scenarios that were too complete that made knowing how to take advantage of them more important than the characters' skills, numerical bugs... Ugh, bad stuff... and at the character architecture level, thousands of interactions that created OP characters out of nothing...

The video game industry was going through a bad time. With all the graphic revolution, the power of the graphic engines, there was a lot of neglect of what was real content. Many games were downright bad or rehashes of formulas that had worked well at some point.

It was disappointing shit, but unfortunately it was their job, to deal with those shitty games.