This came a few years after ZeldaFiles. I was sixteen. Valve got hacked. The source for Half-Life 2 walked off onto the internet. People were saying the game might not come out. I was mad about that, in the way a sixteen-year-old is mad.
My buddy TheAmazingXemo and I put a site together to catch the hacker. We were dumb kids. The thing went viral. Thousands of AIM messages an hour. Anonymous tips — mostly bullshit. I also made internet friends during that stretch that I still have.
At some point the FBI talked to my parents when I wasn’t home. My mom cried for hours. All you have to do is sign this apology letter and you will not get in any more trouble. I asked her why she wanted me to sign something that proved guilt for something I didn’t do.
I did an interview about it years later. That’s the video. About twenty-two minutes.
October 13, 2003 I posted a smoking gun from “a huge log.” I am not sure who provided it. It may have even been Valve or the FBI under an anonymous account, trying to smoke Ago out. The site got DoSed into oblivion once I posted that — presumably by him.
The old site. gtwy.net/hl2. This is what it looked like.
The smoking gun from the log, posted 13 Oct 2003.
Imho the charges they levied against Ago were unjust and overzealous. Knowing what I know now about the law, I would never get involved with anything like this. I was a dumb kid.
If you were there — the AIM crowd, whoever sent that log — the guestbook is open.