A curated list of tools, tutorials, and much more for reverse engineering video games!

Introduction

Welcome to the most comprehensive, unique list of game hacking resources on the web! As you traverse this evergrowing behemoth, you may be surprised to learn that many of the tools, libraries, frameworks, etc. featured herein are not made with hacking games in mind whatsoever. Since game hacking is a branch of reverse engineering in its own right, that means we have a wealth of other types of reverse engineering tools at our disposal which we can repurpose for game hacking.

Beyond the tools, there is a wealth of knowledge to be gleaned from a cornucopia of tutorials, presentations, books, and much more. I’ll constantly be updating this list, so be sure to Watch/Star it! If you’d like to share a resource that isn’t yet on the list, feel free to submit it for consideration via creating an issue or pull request for this repository, or email it to me.

Finally, if hacking online games is a topic of interest for you, I’m also maintaining an extensive curated repository for that subject alone: The Ultimate Online Game Hacking Resource. You may note a negligible amount of overlap between these two repositories, but by and large, they are complementary to one another. And now, on with the game-hacking goodness!

Game Hacking Tools (Disassemblers, Debuggers, Hex Editors, Unpackers, and More)

Interesting Repositories, Trainer and Custom Tool Source Code, Etc.

Title/Link
Description

makin
A tool to help reveal which debugger detection techniques a game is using.

JRemapper
An easy-to-use GUI for remapping classes, methods, and fields of compiled java programs. Useful with games like Minecraft!

Portal 2 Trainer
A hack/trainer for Portal 2 that demonstrates C++ and Win32 programming, including GUI, multithreading, and external/remote process memory manipulation.

Game Hacking (Book) Code Repo
This is the code repo for all the targets and samples used for the book, Game Hacking.

pdbWriter
A small tool to produce a dummy pdb for an executable with symbols at addresses from a file (think: porting work from, say, IDA to be used for dynamic analysis via Cheat Engine, which would apply the symbols from your custom PDB).

xortool
A tool to analyze multi-byte xor cipher and guess key length (based on count of equal chars) and key (based on knowledge of most frequent char).

GameTutorials
An expansive list of game development tutorials in multiple langauges. Heavy on source code and even inclusive of Win32 examples (which is an amazing resource if developing Win32 game trainers is of interest to you). Archive of accompanying site here.

General Information

Title/Link
Description

EFF FAQ on Reverse Engineering Legalities
This FAQ details information that may help reverse engineers reduce their legal risk. Use this information as a guide, not actual legal advice.

Blog Posts, Articles, and Presentations

Interesting/Educational Forum Discussions

Videos

Books

Title/Link
Description

Game Hacking
Game Hacking shows programmers how to dissect computer games and create bots.

Attacking Network Protocols
Attacking Network Protocols is a deep-dive into network vulnerability discovery.

Practical Packet Analysis, 3rd Edition
Practical Packet Analysis, 3rd Ed. teaches you how to use Wireshark for packet capture and analysis.

Exploiting Online Games: Cheating Massively Distributed Systems
This book takes a close look at security problems associated with advanced, massively distributed software in relation to video games.

Game Programming Patterns
A collection of game patterns that make code cleaner, easier to understand, and faster. A great reference for seeing forward engineering representations of what you discover while reverse engineering games!

Game Hacking Sites/Forums/Etc.

Open Source and Safe-to-Hack Games