[filiph]

The first time I opened a hex editor, it was to give me better stats in X-COM: Enemy Unknown.

I was about 16 and had no idea what I was doing. But, at the very least, binary files stopped being some incomprehensible magic. They were just data that you can change, if you know what you're doing.

[Terr_]

> The first time I opened a hex editor, it was to give me better stats in X-COM: Enemy Unknown.

Ditto, although to be honest it didn't stop being "incomprehensible magic" for a rather long time.

What really mattered was the surprised realization that this was magic within my reach, something I could freely cast even if I couldn't (yet) create entirely new spells.

[filiph]

Agreed. I _still_ don't know what I'm doing most of the time, but there was a barrier that I overcame back then as a young dude trying to cheat at a videogame, that most people don't.

And to add to your point about crosshairs as bitmap files. When you install a game nowadays, half the time you don't even know where the files are, and even if you do, they're in the part of the file system we've been conditioned never to touch (for good reasons). When everything was "somewhere at C:", and you ran games by literally cd'ing into the game's directory and running that one executable there, modifying the game was a lot more "in your path".