Hacker

Adventure 1985 Dos Activision Science Fiction Strategic scope

More espionage than hacking

The game is an old take on the idea of hacking from beginning of 80s. Maybe inspired by those classic movies of the time such as War Games. However, there is not that much of hacking indeed as the concept of the game is to go around the world and talk to different "spies" in order to buy and exchange items and get back a piece of some important document you'll have to bring back to CIA. The only hacky part is the beginning of the game where you must guess a series of parts of a robot in order to get in the game system. Not sure if that was on purpose or a sort of copy protection where you needed some manual, but you may spend quite some time by guessing (or just watch the video instead...). The gameplay is quite straightforward. You must navigate through a sort of tunnel from one city to another in order to meet those spies. The controls are the capital letters of the actions in the menu and the arrow keys for moving around. The sounds may be annoying as it's coming from old pc speaker and it's just noise. You'll end up turning it off. Resuming, a classic old game that does not go too much beyond its title.

Hacker is an espionage/computer hacking adventure

He he, Activision Blizzard can now sit and count their money for their rest of their lives, but in 1985 they had been hard at work on a very compelling and weirdly enough innovative (sic!) series called Hacker. The game, while basically a text based adventure is a really intricate piece of a game for its period. While today hacking games are more common and they offer you pseudo hacking like interfaces and tooling, in 1985 the technology was less evolved. However, what a game could deliver was a good deal of story, puzzles and also brain teasingly hard scenarios. Expect to be hidden behind a prompt at all times and to be treated with a black screen with the occasional pictures offered to you. Also, expect the bombast of cool sounding words, such as they were perceived in the mid 1980s. At any rate, if you're into text based adventures, the premise of this one game is really interesting so you might want to give it a try but make sure you have a walkthrough with you to avoid frustration.

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