In The Beginning...

...the heavens opened up and offered forth an idea: a hacker conference in DC! But what to do at this conference? Talks, of course, but perhaps there should also be some recreation that didn't punish the liver for attendees to enjoy. And yea, Hack-or-Halo was created!

On the First ShmooCon, HoH was created in the image of the King-of-the-Hill. Rounds were short, with only 7 min for each Hack round. Each hacker was given the same string of easy machines, and the one who pwned the most in their round got to keep their chair for the next round. At the end of the night, the person who'd crushed the most boxes was crowned the champion of Hack.

Halo at ShmooCon 1 was similar, with short slayer rounds of the original Halo, and the winner staying on for the next round. However, the final round was set up as something different: a one-on-one match between the player that'd won the most rounds during the night against the player who'd won the last round before the final. Confused? So were a lot of people that night.

And thus, unto the format changes were made, and they were good.

On the Second ShmooCon, the format for Halo was switched to a classic bracket-style tournament. This was easier to explain to players, and easier for HoH staff to administer. We also stepped up to Halo 2. Hack was kept mostly the same this year, but rounds were lengthened to 15 min to give people more time to break things.

On the Third ShmooCon, additional changes were made unto the Hack format. Players were divided up into two 1-hour rounds and set loose to flex their big brains in a Puzzle Box format: a large number of puzzles, attackable in any order, testing skills ranging from reverse engineering to the ability to sing "I'm A Little Teapot" in order to authenticate into a box.

Halo continued on the Halo 2 platform, but was played on shiny new Xbox 360 hardware. The graphics were improved, but so was hardware security. We discovered that moving player profiles on original Xbox games across 360's wasn't possible, leading to some tense moments and pleas for help (which thankfully prevented us from bricking the boxes - fyi, you can't just crack the hard drives and use a forensic file-copy to manually move the individual files across to the other box. Evidently files are individually signed by the box on which they're created), a lot of mid-game profile creation, and ultimately, a new staff member for HoH4.

On the Fourth ShmooCon, Halo 3 had been released. And verily I say unto you, there was much rejoicing. And high-definition head shots. The final round was utterly amazing. The last spartan standing out of an original field of 64 players, 'Zeff' was an absolute animal and set a new HoH record for number of kills in 10 minutes. With just four players, he got 34 kills in a 10 minute final round. That means he killed each of the other three players an average of 11+ times each - more than 3 kills a minute. And if that weren't enough carnage, the second place contender had 29 kills. Bodies everywhere.

Hack continued along the same format as HoH 3, with 23 puzzles and a hotly contested win. Three players all completed 8 puzzles (not the same 8 puzzles, either) so judging the winner came down to determining who solved the puzzles fastest.

For the Fifth ShmooCon, there is no resting! The Hack-or-Halo team is creating a whole host of new excitement for our latest outing. But we won't be giving away those details just yet....

-compton