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How I Fixed a 10 Year Old Guitar Hero Bug Without the Source Code

Name: How I Fixed a 10 Year Old Guitar Hero Bug Without the Source Code
Description: 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.

ExileLord

Talks

YouTube

2 HN users recommended this talk2 months2017–2025 score 2.5

Years with an HN recommendation, 2007–2026

Held up as a favorite tech talk and a great hard-debugging story about patching a game binary.

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.

“One of the best though, for me, has to be this one on fixing a Guitar Hero bug” (HN, 2017)

1 strong recommendations · 1 recommendations · 1 citations · Talks · intermediate

Speedrunning, glitches & game hacking Security & hacking Testing, debugging & developer tools Talks Games & Game Development

3 Hacker News comments

From the HN archive; up to 20 kept per video, favoring different commenters. Recommendations first.

@zapperdapper Dec 2017 Strongly recommends

on HN thread 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]

Fixing a Guitar Hero bug without source code

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@0xC0ncord Jan 2025 Recommends

on HN thread 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]

Reverse-engineering techniques on heavily obfuscated game code

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Citations, criticism and jokes

@Tempest1981 Nov 2018 Cites it

on HN thread 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]

Hard debugging story fixing a game bug without source

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