Now that E3 is over, rumors have surfaced that hackers tried to steal a copy of the demo of Nintendo's The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.
One particular famous hacker, NWPlayer123, confirmed with Kotaku that the alleged theft almost happened, although in the end, the hacker came up empty.
The almost-thief was a 17-year-old who previously attempted something similar with Mario Kart 8. The hack itself wasn't difficult: the only thing required to make it happen was some hacker knowledge and access to one of Nintendo's demo pods for the game at E3. The hacker had tools that allows game data to easily get stolen from the Wii U and then transferred to a PC by using a debugging tool called TCP Gecko, which can force a Wii U to connect to a PC.
The hacker previously put in a request for helpers to keep Nintendo's attendants distracted while accessing one of Nintendo's game pods. How does such a hack work?
"The user would navigate to a special webpage which tricks the Wii U into running code not developed by Nintendo (we call this arbitrary code execution (ACE))," TCP Gecko creator A.W. Chadwick said. "Once the user has achieved ACE, they can then cause the Wii U to do almost anything they would like it to."
After that, the hacker can step away from the game pod, allowing others to continue using it, but must stay in the area for a few hours until all the game data gets transferred.
Chadwick stressed that TCP Gecko was never intended as a hacking tool, but hackers are resourceful in learning how to use tools in ways their creators never foresee.
On day one, though, the hacker ran into the first snafu: the kiosks running Breath of the Wild weren't the standard retail versions. However, that didn't stop the hacker from implementing plan B. Nintendo also did something else to thwart such actions, though: their units weren't connected to the internet, something required to transfer the game data to a PC. The hacker did claim to discover a workaround that allowed access to a menu that turned on the connection, but in the end, TCP Gecko copied the wrong files.
NWPlayer123 stepped in at that point to help the 17-year-old hacker tweak the process, with a plan on stealing the game on the third day of E3. However, that didn't happen because other gamers had the pods booked full on that final day, resulting in the hacker never getting access to the game.
Obviously, there's no guarantee that this story is true, but even a Wii U third-party developer didn't rule out the possibility that it happened. Chadwick also agreed that the story seems believable.
The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild releases in 2017.
