Just like the hackers from the mainframe and early personal computing era, Zachtronics fans love to not only solve technical puzzles but also to optimize these solutions, over and over again, each time shaving a few more cycles from a program or state machine. Ruckingenur II got covered on Hackaday, drawing in thousands of technically-minded fans who would then form his core audience for his (and later his studio's) commercial efforts - none of which, prior to Exapunks, are about hacking, but all of which inadvertently capture some of the old hacker ethic. The game that kicked off his career as an indie developer was, fittingly, a game about hacking electronics. "So I worked in an office but then I kept making games and so there was sort of a transition that then led me into making games. "I got out of college and started getting jobs not in the games industry because for some reason I thought that would be, you know, like, 'Oh, you don't need to work at a company that makes games,'" recalls Barth. Zachtronics' Infiniminer, released in 2009 (One of these, Infiniminer, notably became a key inspiration for Minecraft.) In college his hacker aspirations morphed into game developer aspirations, and these he initially funneled into making a mix of "weird artsy game shit" and freeware engineering games that repurposed the computer theory he learned in class. He already knew how to code before that, but it was only in BASIC, so his hacker aspirations drove him to learn C++ and the basics of networking and web technologies. "I would say my hacker phase - when I wanted to be a hacker, not when I was one - would be like about when I was in high school," says Barth. I spoke to Barth recently about hacking and how it manifests - or doesn't - in Exapunks and Zachtronics' other games. His studio Zachtronics makes games about optimizing systems, programming, and now, with its newest title Exapunks, being a hacker in an alternate-reality version of 1997. Nearly two decades later, he doesn't need hacker handles to pretend. With a cool hacker handle like "thekrispykremlin" - a name he plucked out of nowhere - he could at least pretend. He had no idea how to actually be a hacker, but he'd seen the movie Hackers and he aspired to be like the people he saw there.
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