Interview With A Cheater
You've all heard about aim bots, wall hacks, and various other cheats for Counter-Strike. CitizenC has managed to track down XQZ2, the creator of the latest wallhack/aimbot.
- Cary "CitizenC" Schwartzman | June 18, 2001
We have all experienced it: You'll be playing a game online with some friends on a public server, and somebody you've never seen before will join up and completely kick the crap out of you and your teammates. Headshots from across the map. Knowing EXACTLY where you are all the time. While it is possible that they are just good, a very real possibility is that said person is using xqz2's wallhack/cheat combo. xqz2 was kind enough to sit down with CitizenC in this exclusive interview.
3DActionPlanet: First, who are you? Tell us a little about yourself. (You don't have to give your name if you don't want to.)
xqz2: I'm a student in high school and live in a small little country named Sweden. I live in a small villige with my mother and father and started programming about 2 years ago, and I spend quite a lot of my spare time doing this when I don't play Counter-Strike.
3DActionPlanet: How long have you been gaming?
xqz2: I've been gaming all my life. The first computer was a VIC-20 with a tape device with some great games, like Shadowfax, I really recommend this game. I also bought a Nintendo (8bit), and a Super Nintendo (16bit) when those came out on the market. I really enjoyed this time. After some years I got my first PC, a 468/66. And when Wolfenstein 3D/Doom was released I spent almost all my time playing. Duke Nukem 3D was also a great game I played a lot. And nowadays the only game I play is the mod Counter-Strike for Half-Life.
3DActionPlanet: What is your favourite type of game?
xqz2: As you can see above the most games I played was FPS First Person Shooter games. But I also played games like Settlers and Command & Conquer etc but not as much as those above.
3DActionPlanet: The question on everyone's mind: Why did you do it?
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xqz2: I had been playing Counter-Strike for so long time so I was really tired of it. I was very good, and when you are very good you gain experience quite slow. I was really bored, the only reason why I kept playing was because I was a member in a great clan, and I didn't want to quit the clan and loose all the work I spent on building it up so I was stuck. I needed something that made it fun to play Counter-Strike again. And one day I took the decision to make a wallhack. I spent some days studying how to make OpenGL passthrough drivers and how half-life renders the scene. And after three days I had a working wallhack. I played with it and it was damn fun. It felt like it was a totally new game. And I played with it for about 3 month til I heard that my clan was going to play a contest on a big LAN-party. I knew I couldn't play with wallhack on a LAN. I needed a cheat that was invisible. So I got the idea to create an aimbot that you can enable/disable in the game and doesn't use colored models.
Once again I studied how half-life renders the scene and it didn't took long before I knew how to get the player coordinates. After some days I got a fully working aimbot. As it was invisible I used it on the LAN-party and I was playing as good as I did with the wallhack.
Now 6 month later I saw some sites on the net that showed that aimbot exist. Now I thought that they would check the player computers more detailed on LANs, so I decided to quit my clan before getting discovered.
I changed my nick and started to play on public servers just for fun. But this was not as fun as I tought it would be. As I had a new nick and wasn't a member in a good clan everyone blamed me for wallhack/aimhack/spiked models etc. Even when I disabled the cheats they blamed me for the same things. So I decided to stop playing Counter-Strike and spend all my spare time on programming which was a good choice. As it didn't exist any aimbot that didn't use colored models for public download I was really curios how the react would be if I released it.
So I made it more user friendly and released it for public download.
3DActionPlanet: Did you create the hack yourself, or was it a team effort?
xqz2: I created the cheat by myself.
3DActionPlanet: How long did it take?
xqz2: I took about three days to make the wallhack working. And about the same to make the aimbot working. And some hours to make it user friendly.
Now after the Beta1 release I've been sitting some hours everyday for three weeks to make improvements. Like better aim algorithms, VGUI menus and a Tetris game that you can play when you are dead and waiting for respawn etc.
3DActionPlanet: What language is it written in?
xqz2: It's written in C++ using Microsoft Visual C++
3DActionPlanet: Did you intend for the hack to become as widely distributed as it has become?
xqz2: No not as it is now. When I released Beta 1 I thought that PB was going to detect it after some days and people would stop using it, and that I was going to receive a lot of flame e-mails. But of all the mails I've got only about 5% is flames. The rest is positive feedback. All the feedback makes it fun to continue and release new versions. And a result of this is that PB doesn't detect all versions.
3DActionPlanet: Did it turn out as you had hoped?
xqz2: Yeah, even better.
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3DActionPlanet: Did you encounter any difficulties?
xqz2: Yeah, when the guy UnknownCheater disassembled my aimhack dll and took a screen-shot of the code and said "This code steals your half-life CD-key and upload it to an ftp" to the community. That screen-shot was on many Counter-Strike news sites as a proof that my aimhack steals your key. From the gamers viewpoint it looks like my cheat steals your key when you see that screen-shot. But from the programmers viewpoint nothing in the screen-shot says that it steals your key. They didn't believe me when I said it doesn't steal your key, they trusted UnknownCheater. Even when I showed four ways to see that is doesn't steal your key they still didn't believe me. So after three days fighting against the flamers UnknownCheater answered a statement I've made on a cheat site and said that it doesn't steal the key. But the Counter-Strike news sites never told the community that the whole thing was wrong and that it doesn't steal the key, so I don't doubt that there are a lot of people out there still thinking that is steals the key.
3DActionPlanet: How did you test it out?
xqz2: I tested it by running half-life.
3DActionPlanet: What is your opinion about programs such as Punk Buster, which are created for the sole purpose of ensuring that people are NOT using cheats?
xqz2: I think it's a great idea, it stops a lot of cheats. But there's also
a lot that it doesn't stop. But I think that it gives the wrong impression
to the users that use it. Many games actually think that it stops ALL
cheats, but it just stop the cheats that it's looking for. If you don't look
for a special cheat you'll never find it.
It's like a race between the cheat-developers and the PB team. It's the one
that release new versions all the time that wins. The last week I released
new versions almost each day so PB didn't detect all of them. But the
last few days I haven't released any versions. The result of this is that PB
detects the official versions of my hack at this moment. But not the new
version that will be out in [a few] days. It's just for me to change a little
in the code and PB won't detect it.
So as long as the cheat-maker is releasing new versions all the time he will
always win because he is one step before PB. It's just a matter who tires of
releasing new versions.
I just wonder if PB will take money for their client in the future when the
most of the servers has it installed and all players are depending on it.
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3DActionPlanet: Many online gaming leagues recently suspended play or even closed up permanently due to cheating. Do you feel any guilt by knowing that you are the cause of it?
xqz2: I haven't thought very much about it. But I don't think it's all my fault.
Either they could allow cheats and everyone would have the same condition to win, or they could ask the PB team to make a special version of PB for the league that only allow the player to use the Software or Direct3D display driver. Then my cheat wouldn't work.
There you have it, folks. I'd like to take this opportunity to thank xqz2 for taking the time to answer these questions. Comments about the interview? Visit the forums.
So, jetzt wissen wir endlich woher der wall Hack kommt, also ich weiss schon wohin mein nächster wurm geht....
