The Rise and Fall of SuperDaE, A Most Unusual Video Game Hacker

The first thing that ever puzzled me about the man I used to know as SuperDaE was that he didn't sound Australian.

I couldn't detect an accent.

SuperDaE told me back then, during our first long-distance call from New York to wherever he was Down Under, that he got that a lot. He swore to me that he really was Australian. Over the next month he would tell me many, many things that were hard to believe. I'd eventually be able to confirm half of it. I was left to wonder about the rest.

He'd claimed to know about the next Xbox and PlayStation, claimed to really have two prototype versions of the next Xbox. He said he'd had access to next-gen games, that he had Homefront 2 and Sleeping Dogs 2, that he'd played Gears of War 3 a year before it came out and that—after he drunkenly told Epic about it—they'd sent him a poster. He could send me a photo, if I wanted to see it.

A month after we'd first talked, he'd convinced me he'd done many of the extraordinary things he'd said. I'd changed my impression of him from possibly being a disgruntled, anonymous game developer to being a hacker—a really good hacker. "I'm more than that," he told me with a laugh during one of our many calls. "I'm just an image."

Our most recent phone call happened on Saturday, February 16th. We talked for two hours, me trying to confirm things he'd said before. He told me his wildest stories yet. I asked him if he expected to wind up in jail. "Possibly," he told me.

At that moment, he sounded naive. Possibly?

"I try to be optimistic," he said. "But yes."

On Tuesday, February 19, members of the Western Australian computer crimes police force raided the home of SuperDaE, aka Dan Henry, aka Dylan. They had a warrant. Dylan—that's his real first name (he asked that his last name not be used)—said they had an FBI agent with them. They took his computers. They took piles of papers. They took a souvenir cup that was shaped like a penis. He says they took his phone, froze his assets.

"I've lost everything," he told me when I found him again on Twitter a couple of days later. He said his life was in ruins. "Was what I did wrong?" he asked me. "Did I really deserve it? As the saying goes, curiosity killed the cat."

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Rather interesting article, worth the full read. The Microsoft Developer Store for ordering dev kits seem to be legit, but no, your own hotmail or Microsoft account won't get you past login, I tried. And no, I don't care if you know Microsoft, my initials spell MS.

This is what the whole raid was about. The console stuff is just a diversion.

Now this is interesting:

Earlier this week, Sony officially announced the PlayStation 4 (the former Orbis), and it turned out that everything in the documentation Dylan had sent me—the names of the controller's buttons, the specs of its new touchpad, the specs for the console itself—were entirely correct. Sony never commented to me about Dylan's supposed hack, but their PS4 press conference made a strong argument that what he said he'd done, he'd done. His info all checked out.

Does this guy think he's V?
"because I'm an idea"

And I was kind of hoping that part would go unnoticed in this thread :D

Yeah, we already knew this. Looks like the nextBox specs are actually true which is pretty disappinting.

I'm pretty sure he once said "if you only knew" - "those durango specs are OLD lolol"

Quite likely there were better specs than he was willing to tell us about.

Well that's just speculation. Even if the specs did change, the changes would be minor. Look at the Sony specs he had...they were mostly correct except that Sony upgraded to 8GB of GDDR5.

I never would have guessed you could buy dev kits for next gen consoles by simply filling out an order form. Time to go buy 4 PS4s!

I see.

So the one thing he said is true because it is good for you and Sony, but him saying the specs are old and "if you only knew" is all speculation because it isn't good for you and Sony.

You really should just say what you mean.