How I Fixed a 10 Year Old Guitar Hero Bug Without the Source Code
Why Hacker News recommends it
Held up as a favorite tech talk and a great hard-debugging story about patching a game binary.
What it is
A reverse engineer walks through fixing a ten-year-old bug in Guitar Hero III without access to its source code, using a disassembler and decompiler. It is technical but explained step by step.
Recommended by 2 HN commenters across 2 different months, 2017 to 2025.
What Hacker News said
Strong rec zapperdapper · 2017-12 · on “Ask HN: What's your favorite tech talk from 2017?”
I put a bunch of the ones I enjoyed here: [LINK] One of the best though, for me, has to be this one on fixing a Guitar Hero bug: [this video]
Recommends 0xC0ncord · 2025-01 · on “Reverse engineering Call of Duty anti-cheat”
This video[1] on reverse-engineering parts of Guitar Hero 3 covers a few similar techniques that were used to heavily obfuscate the game code that you might find interesting. [1] [this video]
Cites Tempest1981 · 2018-11 · on “Ask HN: What's the hardest problem you've ever solved?”
You reminded me of this: "How I Fixed a 10 Year Old Guitar Hero Bug Without the Source Code" [this video]