STACK NZ Aug #76

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of the best hacks in history leading to the exposure of account information of around 77 million users. The network was disabled for 20 days. VLADAMIR HACKS CITIBANK One of the first financially-motivated hacks was conducted by Russian crime ring leader Vladamir Levin. He managed to gain access to millions of dollars from the Citibank network in 1995 over a period of two weeks. US MILITARY COMES UNDER FIRE Scottish hacker Solo, otherwise known as Gary McKinnon, allegedly hacked several US military computers in the early 2000s in search of their UFO knowledge. The truth is out there. KEVIN POULSEN HACKS COMPETITIONS AKA Dark Dante, not only did the young man hack LA phone networks SONY'S PSN HACK Back in 2011, the PlayStation Network came under attack,

go on a lot about that, because we had so much great coverage from the fans.” Rodney says that his efforts influenced others around the globe, too. “A well- known brand called Old Spice in the UK ran a similar story a week or two after us," he laughs. "We thought ‘wow, we inspired them’.” As much as MD is about choice, Mary ensures that the devs can only let you have so much leeway. “When we started with HR we always had a rule that there were story characters that you can’t kill - we would write it as ‘they wore the ring of invincibility x1000’, until their role in the story is over and then it’s fair game. "So then we had to very carefully designate ‘When is their role in the story over? Will they return to the narrative at any point?’ It's fantastic knowing that you can create a character who might not mean much early on, but can be impactful later in the story if you happen to come across

through the game there’s a choice, and you cannot do both, you can only do one, and then your story will change because of that. This way, by the time you get to the end, decisions you made early in the game really will change what your ending is.” The lore of the Deus Ex games is always carefully manicured, and MD is no exception. DeMarle elaborates: “One of the things when you’re working on a game like MD is that you have to be mindful that people may not have played the first one. We have to be particularly careful and make sure that anything you need to know, you get, and it’s understood. Some of it might be implied, but you get the general gist of what's happened so far. And that’s a real challenge, to actually do that. We can't take it for granted that everyone is across the franchise - we always have to be aware of that.” Additionally, MD had a unique marketing angle. A Twitch.tv stream was created, and Eidos Montreal brand manager Rodney Lelu tells us that it was heavily inspired by Konami. “On August 12, 2015, something in the video game industry rocked my world, in terms of marketing and video games. Project PT , you remember that - from Konami? I thought it was the most brilliant thing ever made, in terms of teasing, because the best in the marketing fields aligned with the best in terms of passion in video games. "We thought about it, and we said 'why don’t we try to do something, not similar but somehow inspired by that?' At the end of the day, the marketing team at Eidos Montreal did a lot of brainstorming, and we came up with that idea. We wanted to use Twitch because no one did it before, and the interaction that you can have with your audience is so interesting. So we decided to do that live action mini-movie, with different possibilities, done over three days. Lelu continues: "To be honest, we had a lot of followers and views; we managed to get around two million views in less than 48 hours. It was a mix of marketing and passion about what we were doing. I could

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to ensure he won a radio show prize, but he also made a habit of hacking celeb's phones and eavesdropping on their calls. SONY PICTURES GOES DOWN Sony Pictures was the target of an allegedly North Korean-based attack, in which the hackers attempted to exact revenge on the company for the production of The Interview by releasing internal details.

them again. Sure, you can kill them, but it’s interesting for us to know that if you don’t, there’s so much more fun that you can have.”

• Deus Ex: Mankind Divided is out August 23

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