Howdy, this story comes from all the way back a couple years before 2020 hit, and i figured it'd make a good blog. So i happened to be browsing itch dot io when i discovered Intercept, it was a lot like Hackmud if you're familiar with that game (text/console based, hacking other players type stuff) although it was a lot more simpler and run by one guy i think. There had already been a micro community sort of gathered around this project by the time i got there, and most of the good players also happened to be top (or atleast very good) Hackmud players.

Anyways, Intercept was kind of an innovator when it came to exploring the whole thing, which was done so by either looking around the web, through dead or npc accounts, bounties and even at some point the dev would puppet an oracle character and send messages directly to the player, while it was cryptic, everyone else tried to document these sort of events because it was important, i guess. This type of stuff was real good, you could even make corps with friends and team up to do cool hacker shenanigans

I loved doing bounties in Intercept, logging on and cracking accounts or installing malware onto corporate servers was really fucking fun, the Hacking in general was really good, i'd say better than how Hackmud does it. You'd have to find/grab an ip, probe it and open up their ports to make a connection, and from there you could access the filesystem and transfer currency, as well as leaving notes or clearing tracks before you leave. In fact, there was even a Bank called The Hive (or the Hex? can't remember) but players had cracked it and stolen everything long ago, Chirp (the dev) completely allowed this, along with a bunch of other things that were basically permanent changes to how the world of Intercept was like.

One of the biggest events that happened in Intercept was sadly before i got into it, there were stories of this echoing throughout the game, what it was was Chirp had set up a system where 4 players had to hack 16 (or more (?)) ports to get in and get something really valuable, the players that did this were given a permanent trophy next to their name that always showed up, it was pretty cool and i never got one because i was too late, oh well.

So, here's what i consider the most important part of this post, a handful of months after i was playing the game, having fun and whatnot. Chirp sort of announced he didnt have anything left for the game and was thinking of shutting it down, he saw me and some other players still on so he kept it around for a little while longer, but other than that. Intercept had been shut down...

If it weren't for the fact that Chirp handed over the entirety of Intercept to me. Including the server files needed to host the game.