Hacking Minigame - Television Tropes & Idioms

A minigame in which the character hacks a machine or software system, either to open a password-protected locked door or to access some benefit that the machine is withholding. Occasionally this will extend to Mecha-Mooks, allowing the player to disable or reprogram them to fight on their side with a change in color. Hacking minigames come in a wide range of forms.

Any kind of realistic hacking would be too slow, too hard, too dull, and would require knowledge that most players just don't have. Hacking minigames bridge the gap between realism and fun. We can assume the minigame is just a player-friendly representation of the character's difficulty with the hack, and that characters are indeed hacking properly, even if we don't see it.

Subtrope of Hollywood Hacking. Sometimes these minigames allow for some Menu Time Lockout.

Examples:

Uplink is what you get when you turn the Hacking Minigame into the whole game.
Fallout 3 's Mastermind-reminiscent hacking minigame has you guess a password by searching through raw data and selecting key words. Four incorrect entries get you locked out, resulting in the terminal info being Lost Forever unless someone else has the code.
- Unless you quit after three failed attempts and come back, which resets the puzzle and the counter and allows you effectively infinite attempts to hack a computer terminal.
- One sidequest in Fallout New Vegas has a glorified Whack-a-Mole minigame where you have to quarantine a virus in the Brotherhood of Steel's computer network before it jumps to another set of terminals.
BioShock lets you hack vending machines to lower their prices or hack bots, turrets, or security cameras to make them fight enemies for you. In it, you complete a very Pipe Dream-esque minigame.
- In the sequel, hacking is timing-based, requiring you to make a moving needle land on either a green or blue spot.
- Or if you want, you can just pay a small fee to auto hack it. Yes, in this universe you can bribe the machine. That's Objectivism for you!
Mass Effect let you hack doors and containers by playing Simon in the console version and a Frogger-like game in the PC version.
- In Mass Effect 2, you instead watch through scrolling boxes of coloured text, then select the matching box to the example, with what you're searching for changing every time. Bypassing is also changed to matching "Pins" on a circuit board to bypass electronic locks.
  - The change from the first game to the second is lampshaded in the Lair of the Shadow Broker DLC:
  Shepard: Remember when you could just slap omni-gel on everything?
  Liara: That security upgrade made a lot of people unhappy!
- Mass Effect 3 does away with it entirely: all computers are accessible instantly because you have a completely unrestricted AI working with you, and bypassing doors involves an animation of Shepard putting his/her omni-tool on the door and doing the bypass without any player input, to hide the loading screen for the next area.
In Alpha Protocol, you have two hacking minigames - one where you have to match two sequences of hexadecimal numbers to their copies on a constantly shifting board and another one in which you have to activate maze-like circuits in proper order. That and yet another puzzle based on lockpicking.
Iji has one, involving moving a pointer through a maze.
Jak 3 Wastelander: Daxter gets jacked in to a security program where he has to eat all the information Pacman style to lower the defences and release a cypher key.
The ancient browser game Urbanoids.
The Freeware Game Saira has a number of hacking minigames.
In My Sims Agents, hacking involves moving the pointer through a scrolling maze under a time limit. And you have to stay on the lit path, which often changes when you pass through certain icons.
Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines allows your character to hack computer passwords so he/she can find information that can be helpful in some missions. However, this depends on how many points you have on your Hacking skill: if the system demands more than you currently have, all you'll get is a jumbled mess of letters that won't get you anywhere. But, since The Password Is Always Swordfish here, hacking skills are only relevant in your first playthrough, since you can simply write down the passwords you've already cracked and use them again in your next playthrough to the same effect, even if you have zero points in Hacking.
Ratchet & Clank has different versions for different parts of the series.
The Sly Cooper series had several different hacking minigames, more often than not for The Smart Guy Bentley.
Both the SNES and Genesis adaptations of Cyber Punk RPG Shadowrun included these.
Enter The Matrix has one, although it's not part of the main gameplay and is instead used as a somewhat immersive way of activating various cheats and viewing concept art. Some versions of it also have normally inaccessible debug commands that require a more conventional cheat code to use, such as the only known to turn open the disc tray with a command instead of pressing the "eject" button on the console.
- It's also far more realistic than most minigames... while no actual hacking knowledge is required or used, you're going to be very lost if you don't have a basic understanding of command-line interfaces.
Project Eden involves spinning disks and quick reactions to hack a device.
Inspector Gadget: Operation MadKactus has a Pipe Dream style one. Since you can rotate pieces and there's no penalty to changing pieces, there's no way you can fail it.
Both System Shock games have hacking minigames. In the first game, the hacking consists of little puzzles; easy to do if the player them self is good at it or gets lucky. In the second game hacking (and modifying, and repairing) involves trying to light up a series of three connected nodes.
In Barkley, Shut Up and Jam: Gaiden, one of the options of the vending machines you get your items from is to hack it, but you need "Science points" to do so. You can't get any.
An important part of the game Freedroid RPG (as it allows you to take over enemy bots)
This is used for unlocking doors and accessing encrypted files in Alien Swarm.
The bomb-disarming sequence in The Journeyman Project consists of a series of increasingly difficult Mastermind puzzles.
In the Batman Begins game, you hack into systems by clicking on 1s and avoiding 0s. There's also an electronic-lockpick minigame, where you just need to click on the wards when they reach the grooves.
Speaking of Batman, the Arkham games have a device that you primarily use to hack open locked doors, using the control sticks to find the correct frequency/password. Whilst not necessarily a minigame, it does require a bit of skill to use correctly. However, the Wii U rerelease of Batman Arkham City has the hacking as a full-fledged minigame, requiring the player to mend circuits with their fingers whilst avoiding obstacles.
Star Wars Battlefront 2 lets you hack into enemy vehicles when they already have a driver. To hack you have to use the repair-smelter for several seconds on the vehicle you wish to get. There is no real minigame part but trying to keep up with a tank as a foot soldier could be considered as such.
Star Trek Elite Force II has several moments where your character needs to reroute power within a computer system; this is accomplished by a modified version of the old computer game Pipe Dream, where the goal is to rotate "pipes" in order to connect identically-colored starting and ending points without hitting a block or crossing circuits.
Paradroid has a mini-game when you take over a new robot where you must wire up more connections than the robot you are attempting to influence.
The GBA game Tron 2.0: Killer App featured a hacking minigame that had to be played numerous times to progress. Plus a few more minigames that generally fit this trope. Come to think of it, maybe the entire game was an example.
Deus Ex Human Revolution has a hacking game where you capture assorted nodes in a path leading to the registry, before the diagnostic subroutine reaches your I/O port. You can also use single-use virus programs to get in more easily. Although it's possible to find the right codes and username/password combinations in e-mails and pocket secretaries (upon which they will helpfully pop up when you access the corresponding machine), successful hacking brings with it bonuses of EXP, money, and hacking tools, providing an incentive to hack even if you know the codes.
EYE Divine Cybermancy has a skill for hacking. When you want to hack an enemy, you have several options; Hack (convert them to friendlies), Possess (take control of them directly), Steal (steal some of their energy), or Destroy. Once you pick an option, the player must overcome the enemy's defenses and counter-attacks, by buffing their own attack and defense or debuffing the enemy's defense or attacks, or simply attacking the enemy's cyber-health directly. Failing the mini-game can result in nothing happening, the player's screen being screwed up with a giant smiley face on it until they re-hack themselves, or player death
While it isn't strictly "hacking" per se, the wiretapping minigame in Covert Action works on much the same principle, making the user solve a puzzle to represent a much more complicated information-gathering exploit.
X3: Terran Conflict has one as part of the New Home plot. Breaking into the Terraformer CPU ship #efaa requires breaking a four-digit code, then solving a sudoku. The third part is inputting a code you put together from clues throughout the plot.
LAN Master, a homebrew NES game, is entirely this: rotate the pipes to connect all the computers. Because the author released the game's source code to the public domain, any NES homebrew programmer can use its code to add a hacking minigame.