Someone allegedly tried to steal the Zelda: Breath of the Wild E3 demo

Real or not this is a wild story

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Zelda: Breath of the Wild was one of the biggest games at E3 this year, and this caper involving that very project is easily one of the most interesting stories out of the event.

According to Kotaku, a “17-year old game developer” tried to steal the Zelda demo at E3 by way of transferring the code to a PC from a demo pod. This story has been backed up by famous hacker NWPlayer123, as well as A.W. Chadwick, creator of TCP Gecko — the tool used to instigate the theft. The way it works, according to Chadwick, is that it basically forces the Wii U to access a URL that “tricks” the system into running an unauthorized routine and then opens it up to do “almost anything” to it.

A number of hurdles made this job nigh impossible (the Wii U units weren’t retail, and were not connected to the internet), but they weren’t going to give up. Supposedly the culprit got a little bit of help from NWPlayer123 to circumvent those issues, but alas, all the demo units were booked on the last day after a modified bit of code was acquired. The individual almost succeeded too on the second day, but “copied the wrong files.”

Again, take this with a grain of salt, but with TCP Gecko’s developer corroborating that this event was possible given the right parameters, it could have very well happened. For now, we have to wait until 2017, and Nintendo will probably be taking greater precautions in the future.

I still remember going to the E3 when the 3DS was announced — the hardware was literally handcuffed to the demonstrators. For those of you who think this has no merit at all, other Nintendo-based E3 demos have circulated/leaked in the past.

The Rumor That Someone Tried To Steal The Zelda: Breath of the Wild E3 Demo [Kotaku]


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