Good to see an article around this era of "hacking" (writing punters in VB). I haven't seen too much about it and I'd love to know if there are others.
My fondest recollection was that there was a Pokemon battling type game (Pokemon Platinum, I think?) where you could battle Pokemon over chat. The creator had hard-coded his AOL username into the binary to unlock a bunch of moves and skills. We figured out you could load the binary into a hex editing app and change the screen name - only problem was, it had to be the same length as the creator's: 9 characters. So made a new screen name, the one that stuck with me for the next 10-15 years, so I could unlock some pointless features in an AOL program. But it introduced me to Visual Basic, hex editing, and generally being interested in tinkering with computers and software.
Those literally got me started programming back in the day. The developers name was GerbilFan, I believe. There was a few different versions of the Pokemon battler app - some of them were Gym-editions (meant to be used by friends of theirs I guess?) that, if I'm remembering correctly, let their team have powerful Pokemon guaranteed. I actually learned how gradients work because of the gym-themed background gradients in the program (blueish for water, redish for fire, etc).
My fondest recollection was that there was a Pokemon battling type game (Pokemon Platinum, I think?) where you could battle Pokemon over chat. The creator had hard-coded his AOL username into the binary to unlock a bunch of moves and skills. We figured out you could load the binary into a hex editing app and change the screen name - only problem was, it had to be the same length as the creator's: 9 characters. So made a new screen name, the one that stuck with me for the next 10-15 years, so I could unlock some pointless features in an AOL program. But it introduced me to Visual Basic, hex editing, and generally being interested in tinkering with computers and software.