Today on a special round table episode of Game|Life,

we talk to game designer, Mike Mika,

And Supergiant Game's Greg Kasavin.

About what video game we would most like to hack into.

Ooh, is this the part where I get to say hackattack?

Asked you really nicely not to say hackattack.

Hackattack!

(upbeat music)

Today we are very pleased to be joined

by two game designers, yes,

from Other Ocean, there is Mike Mika.

Thank you, happy to be here.

Hello, and from Supergiant Games,

Mr. Greg Kasavin.

Hey, hello.

Mike, now recently you may have made some waves,

you made some news. You made headlines.

Because you hacked the game Donkey Kong

so that your daughter could live out her dream

of playing as the girl, Pauline,

in Donkey Kong and rescuing Mario.

Was this something new for you,

to go into a previously existing game

and change it around?

I hadn't done it for a long time,

and in fact, the way I learned how to program

was from hacking.

Okay.

I would actually change other games

and figure out how they worked,

and then I would learn from that.

Well here's a question.

What classic game would you most like to hack,

and what would you do to it?

I have a daughter as well, she's seven,

and I found this story very inspiring

and was just trying to think of like actually

a similar interesting case,

and the best I got is I wondered what it would be like

if you could take the original Metroid

and take the ending, which reveals that Samus is a woman,

put that sequence at the beginning rather than at the end

so it's not like the gotcha ending

because I feel that it's a very important game,

one of the first prominent games with a female protagonist,

but they had to sort of Trojan horse it in

for that to be a thing,

like they couldn't have just put it front and center.

At least that's how I think about it sometimes.

I should probably go a little bit more classic than this,

but my first choice is actually something that is

imminently hackable and moddable.

Obviously any game that was made with the source code,

there was Gary's mod that let you do just about anything

with some of those Valve games,

but people do that a lot with Team Fortress,

and they change levels in Team Fortress.

I would like to see Team Fortress changed

so you have a bit more character elasticity.

That you could maybe bring in characters from other games,

I'd maybe like to see a team of Gordon Freemans

take on some scouts and heavies.

Bring in some of the gang from Left for Dead.

I think just the extended family

of the games under the Valve umbrella

has enough potential for fun,

kind of Super Smash Brothers style crossover

that I'd kind of like to make that happen.

Or I'd like to contract one of you

to help me make that happen.

Well you know, there's guys out there that they do,

they hack Super Smash Brothers,

and they insert more characters

and they build 3D models of new characters

that they want in that game,

and they will put them in there.

That's something that the fighting game community

has actually done with M.U.G.E.N?

M.U.G.E.N., yeah.

Yeah, which is just like everybody versus everybody,

the fighting game where you can have

Homer Simpson versus your dog if you want to,

and you can just change it as much as you want.

It's the least balanced game on earth, right?

Just 'cause Homer Simpson the donut attack.

Oh indeed, yes, he just destroys everything.

64 slices of American cheese.

(laughing)

That's a super combo.

You've got to store up energy before you can use that one.

But that impetus that you have,

you like this game and you just want

to throw more stuff into it,

is one I think you share with

a lot of hackers. It's the crossover urge.

What's better than seeing characters that you love

pop up in another game,

and that's always the first thing I think of

when I think of a game hack,

but I'm curious as Mike,

as someone who has hacked stuff before,

what's your dream?

What's my dream?

I'm sitting here as you're talking, I'm like,

what is my dream game to hack?

I started hacking, there was a game

that was called Impossible Mission on the Commodore 64,

which was a pain in the ass.

It was one of the hardest games ever.

That was the very first hack I had ever done,

because I wanted to beat that game so badly,

I had to yank all the sprites out

so I would have no collision

as I run through that game. Oh, nice!

With that train of thought, right now there's the most

immediate and the most self-satisfying hack that I could do

would be the Bioseshock Infinite ending,

where that whole airship attack

and the songbird attacking and everything.

Gone?

It killed me, it killed me, and I hated that part.

It was the worst part ever, and I'm playing on easy.

I'm awful at this game.

But I would hack that out completely

and just go straight to that awesome ending,

that'd be my current hack.

I would take Street Fighter II,

and I'd make it so I could just jump,

and throw many me--

no, that one's not good.

Well that was

a commercial hack. That was a commercial hack.

Yeah, they actually really put me off to the idea.

I became sort of very puritanical about it,

like no, this is not the intended thing,

and this is just like,

you know, turns out if you could have a version

of Street Fighter II where you could have

like 90 fireballs on the screen,

it doesn't actually make the game better.

It doesn't.

What was so interesting is these machine,

these hacked Street Fighter machines

became so popular that Capcom had to respond to this,

and immediately after Capcom had released

Street Fighter Champion Edition,

they released Street Fighter II Turbo,

which incorporated a lot of the changes

that people had made in the hacked version.

So like, you couldn't do fireballs in the air,

but you could do the hurricane kicks in the air.

And Chun Li had a fireball and all that kind of stuff.

Capcom took the hacked version

and made a real game out of it.

Ms. Pacman was a hack.

Ms. Pacman was a hack, it's true.

Yeah, they were building that company around

the idea of, we're going to make a board

that if you're an arcade game operator,

you can take your game, pop this board on,

and it's going to use what's already in there

and make a totally new game out of it,

which at the time, they didn't really know

if that was illegal or not, to even do that,

but yeah, it was a hack.

But what is your choice, Chris?

I always felt that the biggest weakness

of Super Mario Brothers 3,

besides the fact that it was regressive

in the sense that they went from Super Mario Brothers 2

with four characters into Mario 3 with one.

In Mario 2, that introduced the Mario and Luigi

were separate dudes with different powers,

and then Mario 3, he went back to being

a palate swap of Mario.

But I felt it's biggest weakness

was that it did not have a save battery.

If I did go back in time and change history,

like the epic hack,

I'd be like spend the money and put a save battery

in every copy of Super Mario Brothers 3,

because then what that would do was

it transforms it from this really quick

kind of level based experience,

into an almost Mario World style open world kind of thing,

because that game was huge.

That game was eight worlds full of levels,

but if you wanted to beat it,

you had to do it in one sitting,

which meant you had to warp through everything,

unless you were super good

and were going to play through everything

and leave your NES on.

And of course, you know, if the cat came by

and knocked the NES over, you'd lose all your stuff.

Oh, and, you'd be able to travel

back and forth between worlds

instead of being locked on one path.

That's my idea Miyamoto, all right?

Take it and run with it.

(upbeat music)

So those are our ideal hacks, what we would do

in a perfect world, but we want to know yours.

So what would you do to change a classic game that you love?

Let us know in the comments.

Don't say Mario 3, that was my idea.

Say Mario 3.