The original Xbox was my first hacker project in middle school

I remember playing the original Xbox back in the early 2000s, I played more games back then, unlike today. I still play video games, just not nearly as much as the early 2000s and begining of college. The original Xbox is also where I got my first taste in software hacking.

I was very interested in operating systems, not a lot of interest in hardware. At that time, my family lived nearby a Blockbuster. When my parents would go in for our weekly movie rental, they occasionally allowed my to rent a video game too. The selection wasn’t great, but I was able to play through a lot of games this way.

One day, I was looking through online forums and found that I could modify my Xbox. There were two ways to go about doing this. You could get hardware and hard mod the Xbox. Or, you could take advantage of bugs in the Xbox to soft mod. Since I was interested in software, and not much in hardware, I went the soft mod route.

To take advantage of the softmod, all I needed to do was get a specific version of a game that was exploitable, then load a corrupted game save I downloaded from a form. Something I’d be far less likely to do today-- I trusted the mod community more back then.

After looking at the games and versions I had to choose from, the only game I could find that was available for rent was MechAssult. I went back to Blockbuster and found they had the specific version of the game I needed-- version 2.0. Once I loaded the game save, the code ran and gave me the ability to do things like:

• Emulators
• Import/RIP/Backup Xbox games
• New themed dashboards

I, of course, had to throw custom themes on my Xbox. The below image is the dashboard I decided to go with.

After getting my feet wet in this, and seeing how easy it was, I then started dabbling in modding PC game data files.