868-HACK

It was released in August 2013 for iOS and in January 2015 for Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X. The "PLAN.B" expansion pack was released in July 2017. 868-HACK received mostly positive reviews from critics. The game was nominated for an Excellence in Design award at the Independent Games Festival, receiving an honorable mention for the Seumas McNally Grand Prize there. Ranked 42nd on Polygon list of "The 100 best games of the decade (2010–2019)" and 29th on Paste list of "The 50 Best Mobile Games of the 2010s".

• Title — 868-HACK • Developer — Michael Brough • Publisher — Michael Brough • Platforms — Windows • Released — * iOS • 30 August 2013 • Windows, Mac OS X • 27 January 2015 • Genre — Roguelike • Modes — Single-player

• Illustration — In a top-down view, the player must grab as much computer data as possible. The player controls a hacking program in a computer system and must grab as much computer data as possible before a defence program destroys it. The game plays in the manner of a dungeon crawler, with rooms being randomly generated. The player must collect keys to unlock nodes to hack. The game's graphics resemble those of early 80s home computers. The game takes place in a cyberpunk setting, where, as alluded to by the game's title, hacking is done by dial-up. The player is a "smiley face" which can be moved around an 6×6 grid. The grid is shaped by "circuit-board-looking walls". The enemies in 868-HACK look vaguely like those in Pac-Man. Players can fire lasers at these enemies. Most of the enemies have two health bars, and they each have one of four different special abilities; being able to move on top of wall tiles, being able to move over two tiles at a time, having three health bars instead of two, or being invisible when not in the same row or column as the player. Each wall tile in the game stores a reward which can be extracted, but also has a number signifying how many enemies it will spawn when opened.

• Illustration — Developer Michael Brough In March 2013, developer Michael Brough started to work on 868-HACK as part of a seven-day Roguelike competition. The game was originally called "86856527" at the event. Brough worked on the game for six months, then spent four months fixing bugs, tuning balance, and porting. Michael Brough recorded the sounds of the game; Leigh Alexander of Gamasutra said the sound "gives its forbidding machinery a fascinating human sound". 868-HACK was released for iOS on 30 August 2013, and for Windows and Mac OS X on 27 January 2015. An estimated 14,000 copies of 868-HACK were sold for iOS. On 23 July 2017, an expansion pack of the game was released, called "868-HACK – PLAN.B". The expansion added a "new mode, new progs, and new power-ups". Fours months after its initial release, on 17 December 2013, the game was chosen as "Mobile Game of the Week" by American magazine Paste. Aevee Bee, writing for Paste for this review, described the game as "a turn based trainwreck—a meticulously ordered, predictably random and nearly always solvable trainwreck of exploding and overwhelming complexity". In November 2019, 868-HACK was ranked 42 on American video game website Polygons list of "The 100 best games of the decade (2010–2019)". It was also ranked at 29 on Pastes list of "The 50 Best Mobile Games of the 2010s".

868-HACK received nominations for Excellence in Design and the Seumas McNally Grand Prize at the 2014 Independent Games Festival, getting an honorable mention for the latter. • Year — Award — Category — Result — Ref(s). Reference(s) • 2014 — Independent Games Festival — Excellence in Design • Seumas McNally Grand Prize — Honorable mention