Genius programmer hacks Mark Hamill's online game to make him face Darth Vader
If you follow actor Mark Hamill's entertainingly quirky Twitter feed -- and really, if you clicked on this story, you probably are -- you may have seen him tweeting Tuesday about an unusual game of online Yahtzee involving Darth Vader.
The game Hamill was playing (at cardgames.io) appeared to have randomly matched the Luke Skywalker actor with someone using the Vader icon as their avatar, with the username reading simply as "Dad."
In other words, for the first time since they clashed for their second and last lightsaber duel in a London studio in 1982, Skywalker Jr. was facing off with Skywalker Sr. "#StillDuellingDadVader," Hamill wrote.
He was further surprised to see the game start saying "The Force is strong with you" whenever he rolled a Yahtzee.
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But just as on those two occasions, the meeting was directed, the game's maker, Einar Egilsson, has revealed.
The Icelandic programmer had been overjoyed to discover (via a previous tweet) that Hamill was playing his game, and decided to hack a little easter egg just for him.
"I created a trigger that only activated Darth Vader when someone with [Hamill's] avatar was playing," Egilsson wrote Wednesday. "I wanted to target Mark specifically, not just show everyone Darth Vader, since the name "Dad" doesn't really apply to anyone but him!"
The game is supposed to be entirely anonymous. Hamill didn't enter any of his personal information, he just customized a cartoon avatar. Yet the hack took Egilsson a mere hour, since Hamill's prior picture of that avatar had been so clear.
Luckily, Hamill saw the light side of the Force when the trick was revealed via another user on Twitter. "#BestFansIntheGalaxy", he wrote.
Evidently something of a Star Wars fan, Egilsson described the one-hour character hack as "probably my favorite piece of code I've ever written."
Topics Star Wars
Chris is a veteran tech, entertainment and culture journalist, author of 'How Star Wars Conquered the Universe,' and co-host of the Doctor Who podcast 'Pull to Open.' Hailing from the U.K., Chris got his start as a sub editor on national newspapers. He moved to the U.S. in 1996, and became senior news writer for Time.com a year later. In 2000, he was named San Francisco bureau chief for Time magazine. He has served as senior editor for Business 2.0, and West Coast editor for Fortune Small Business and Fast Company. Chris is a graduate of Merton College, Oxford and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. He is also a long-time volunteer at 826 Valencia, the nationwide after-school program co-founded by author Dave Eggers. His book on the history of Star Wars is an international bestseller and has been translated into 11 languages.
