Ace: What would you say your greatest achievement in the hacking scene was? Luigi: I believe I was the first (I could not find other examples at the time) on the original Sony psx to prove that conditional if/then codes could be stacked so that a series of conditions had to be met to activate a single code. Ace: What inspired you to do that? Luigi: I was trying to help someone create a code where he wanted to make a Kombat Kode for Mortal Kombat Trilogy (you press a series of buttons to activate the code). I had told him that I would try finding the addresses for each of the icons and then stacking them as "d" codes so that it would keep reading if true then do the following for each icon untill it reached the address he wanted to affect. Well CzarDragon said that he did not believe this could work. I was actually a little annoyed at the time so I set out not to prove him wrong but to prove that I could be right. I made a code where a player got infinite life if and only if he was Noob Saibot "AND" it was the second round of Kombat. I tested it for days under every possible condition before posting it. Zardoz and Bonsang (Fabrice Faure who now works at Datel creating codes for the Action replay) commented on this mentioning that I figured it out by myself. Czar and I are cool and he is a well deserved legend in our community. Ace: What is your favorite code/hack that you hacked? Luigi: My favorite has to be the one that enabled the unplayable fighters in Soul Blade 1.1 for the Sony psx. I was a noob but had this code at CM's site that said "By Codemaster and Luigi". I know it sounds lame but at the time I thought that was really cool. Ace: What is your favorite code/hack of all time? Luigi: There are so many it would be hard to choose but, I would have to say the codes to make Lara fly in tomb raider games. I have mastered moving her around with it. I used it so much as a shortcut in my hacking. Ace: Who would you say influenced you the most in the video game hacking scene? Luigi: I would have to say Codemaster. His GSCC2000 opened new vistas. Gavin was inspiring and so was Seeing %u201CBonsang%u201D move on to working for Datel. Ace: Who did you 'look up to' when you first entered the scene? Luigi: Actually codeboy of good ole' interact. Ace: What was your first code/hack? Luigi: Tomb raider 1.1 play as Gold Lara. I played it like crazy. I soon got the Nickname luigi (because I actually looked like Luigi and was so into the games and codes). Ace: What do you think is the most difficult type of code/hack to hack, and why? Luigi: Those where all the information within a level is static. If it doesn't change then it is very tedious to find. Ace: What is your favorite type of code/hack? Luigi: Without a doubt my favorite type of code is playing or unlocking non-playable content. Unplayable fighters, cars, levels, items, and options. I believe if it is in the game then you should be able to use it. My favorite type of hack is still visually viewing ram looking for patterns. Ace: What is your least favorite aspect of hacking? Luigi: Sometimes a search will get so monotonous that you forget what it was that you were doing and have to start all over. Ace: What do you like least about the hacking scene? Luigi: A lot of people don't like to share what they know (not talking about people under non-disclosure agreements). Call me an idealist but, I would like to see what alot of hackers could do to a game if they worked collectively on them like projects (maybe dedicated sites for a game with forums?). Ace: Which game did you find the most fun to hack, and why? Luigi: The Spyro the dragon games. My wife likes the series (before they took away the exploring and collecting gems). They are not too frustrating to play and not too difficult to hack. Ehrgeiz was fun too (the RPG mode especially) Ace: Did you ever hack an awesome code, or find an address in memory that would've yielded an awesome code, but then lost it somehow? Luigi: Would you believe it was one of the Holy Grails at the time. Tomb raider three play as Nude Lara (and it was only a few lines of code in the same section as the make all enemies disappear code that I made). People said it was not possible at the time and you were not even allowed to request the code at CM's site because "There is no such code. It was an April fools%u2019 joke". Ace: What was the most difficult, 'hair-pulling' hack you've ever accomplished? Luigi: Tomb raider 1.1 Atlantis level-Move the inaccessible life packs from the lava room into the hallway. This drove me nuts. The switch does not open the door but releases lava. The door is not meant to be opened. It is to trick you. I could change the door to look open but not make it physically capable of being crossed. I had to find the value of a life pack and the area where all the items are kept in ram. Then using the position modifiers for Lara as a guide I offset each life pack address and altered it until the correct ones moved. Then I simply had to adjust x, y, and z axis to put them in the hall. Since then I can now actually alter the playing field itself and go outside the boundaries and through the walls. If I find time (yeah right) I will make an awesome code or pass along my research to some other hackers. Ace: Was there ever a code you just couldn't get to work quite correctly (something you hacked/attempted to hack)? Luigi: Oh so many of those. Mortal Kombat trilogy Do stage fatalities at any time without a "finish him". I can't seem to force the stupid timer to zero with this address altered. My invisible Lara in Tomb raider 1.1 I never could get the ponytail to be disappear. Ace: Aside from hacking and gaming, how do you like to spend your time? Luigi: My family which includes my wife BlackGoddess, making cds including Death Metal compilations , t.v., movies, computer. Ace: What do you think must happen for the video game hacking scene to continue to thrive? Luigi: We as hackers have to find our passion that many of us have lost. Hackers need to remember what we forgot. It never really was about cheating. It was about all the cool stuff you could do. The first Gamegenie was not called a cheat device. It was released as a "game enhancer" that could create "special effects". Your old games were fun again. We are too quick to do the basic infinite life/all items hacks and move on. We don't even touch on the really good stuff much anymore. Ace: One last question: if you had one thing to say to current, aspiring, and future hackers, what would it be? Luigi: Don't be afraid to just try stuff. You can stumble upon some pretty good stuff that way. Even the original Gamegenie said to experiment. Ace: Do you have anything else you would like to say to the readers? Luigi: The best story I have was not relevant to the questions. It was the time that I openly challenged Codemaster to a hacking contest. This was back when the official Interact site and Codemasters%u2019 site had people who would troll the boards to start trouble. Being a Noob to all of this I fell for it and got pulled into a heated flame war in a thread at Codemasters%u2019 site. Someone was saying something like Codeboy and his followers were only able to hack lame stuff. I had my Interact official utilities, some pretty cool codes that were works in progress, and being a member of the high I.Q. society Mensa on my side. So I issued a challenge to Codemaster in the thread. Hack codes, you post I post back and forth until someone is declared the winner. Post your best if you are so great. Well, I was laughed at by everyone at Codemasters%u2019 site. Truth was, I knew I couldn't actually win but, I would make it as much of a battle as I could. CM got wind of my challenge and said he would not get into such a competition online (I can only guess now that he had nothing to gain from it. If he won then he beat an unknown hacker who had no medals. If he did lose (yeah, fat chance) then he would lose a lot of thunder. Anyway, whatever the case was it never came to be. Both sites came to have a truce (more or less). Posts bashing each other were forbidden eventually, and CM introduced me to his codecreator2000 which was everything I could have wanted then (I still use it today sometimes). I have major respect for all the hard work CM has put into the hacking scene. And the crowning feather in my cap was when I submitted a few of my codes to Codemasters%u2019 site and he condensed one (Soul Blade greatest hit version: Enable 13 Secret Characters That Cannot Be Unlocked or otherwise accessed). The credit read, Code by Codemaster and Luigi.