Hi, I’m Falkrian. I spend a fair amount of my free time taking games and their files apart to see how they work.

The blog mostly follows whatever I happen to be working on. There is no schedule and I do not choose subjects because they fit a particular series. I find something, take it apart and write about it if there is enough to say.

A bit about me

My interest in reverse engineering started on the Astalavista forums. I learnt a lot from tutorials shared by other members, then practised on whatever software I had available. I also took on requests from other users and stayed around for several years. Eventually, I joined Team FOFF. The forum disappeared not long afterwards.

GuidedHacking came next. I worked through Fleep’s AssaultCube and Call of Duty material, then started writing my own game cheats. My first was a C# external hack for Borderlands.

I later joined the staff as a Global Moderator and became Administrator while Fleep took a break. When he eventually handed the forum over to Rake, I was already moving on to other things. I had my account deleted and stepped away.

After that, my interest shifted from game hacking to software protection. Tuts4You became one of the forums I spent time on while learning more about packers, licensing systems and the code built around them.

These days, most of my spare time goes into researching game archives, proprietary file formats and the code that reads them. What I work on has changed quite a bit since then. I still enjoy taking unfamiliar code apart and finding out what it does.

You can find me on sites such as ResHax, where I look into files people are having trouble with and help with requests when I can. Some of those requests turn into articles for this site.

About this blog

The format itself is what interests me, not the individual files or data stored inside it. I want to understand how the game opens it, what protection it uses and how everything is arranged.

Once an archive or save can be decrypted and parsed, I leave the rest to others. The research is published here so they can build their own tools without having to solve the format again.