What is the culture around their games' community like? Do lots of folks release game hacks publicly? Do others reverse engineer their products and release tools? Is that activity celebrated by the company or discouraged? If you are one of many that are encouraged in this arena then go ahead and tell them about it. If not, keep it to yourself. If you aren't sure, then err on the side of caution and don't bring it up.

Seems like that would be a concise but useful answer @JoeStrazzere. It's that judgement call that anyone in this situation should make.

OP, note that if you're just saying you used the typical kiddie-script tools to look at stuff, that's not impressive, nobody cares, and it will just be seen as a keen but amateurish first step. OP, you mention "while reading binaries assembly is still impossible for me..." you seem motivated; why not double your effort and push on with lower-level skills? It will get you much better jobs at much more money! Keep at it dude!

This reminds me of the time Valve contacted a cracker that was releasing hacks pretending to want to interview him for a job or something and he was about to board the plane but was arrested in his home country instead of the US. (Much better option)

@Fattie not sure what falls under typical kiddie-script tools category, but everything was done from scratch

A few more pertinent questions... First, when you were doing the MitM thing, were you at any point ever (messing with anyone else's game)/(gaining unintended advantage for yourself) or was it just something that you did to acquire more information about how the system worked? Second, you said that the game lost most of its popularity. Were your reverse-engineering efforts before or after that popularity loss?

@lolbas - if so, that's GREAT. I wish you good luck. I encourage you strongly to probe to even lower levels. The bottom line answer to your question is, everyone will LOVE that you have done this - but, literally, if you're asking about in a resume, then "No" (Because resumes are just glanced over by gatekeepers - you want to be as bland as possible in a resume, sad but true.) Enjoy !

@BenBarden first 2 activities (mining and parsing) are taking a whole mentioned time span, while MITMare just few last month. And while I could test things on some fake account, I did that on my main because, well, I don't really care, I've lost most of the interest to the games, but yes, this did lead to getting some advantage over the other players.

@lolbas at the game engine level, why not grab the ubiquitous Anti-Cheat Toolkit and totally familiarize yourself with every kiddie-hack it protects against; pick some titles and try to attack 'em in all the ways you have learned, and then write some anti-hack packages yourself and put them out there. You will be massively building your skills and income. Enjoy!

@Fattie that'd something interesting to learn!

@lolbas get off your ass then, young man! good luck and always remember, it's only about making lots and lots of money! :) in software skills -> money and lower-level -> money

I'm not going to provide an answer. But if I was interviewing you (technical interview) and you would bring this up and be 100% transparent about it. The chances are great I would hire you if you are competent for the job. My boss, on the other hand, would sue you if he could, but that's another story.

One thing to bear in mind is that if you do get a job at this company, you'll probably have to sign a contract which effectively forbids you from doing that kind of thing while working for them. (Even if it doesn't have anything explicit, the standard clauses about Intellectual Property or acting against the company's interests will probably have that effect.) So if they do find out later, the penalty could rise from having your account suspended to disciplinary action and even firing.

Were you reverse engineering or hacking? It sounds like you hacked something illegally.

@Steve reverse-engineering netcode revealed some flaws in the system, which obviously required me to first test if it works, and this was a hack I believe

@lolbas sounds to me like you broke the law and should not speak of this, however building a mirror of a game from scratch without looking at source code is a great exercise and proves your ability to program.

FYI, if you or the game developer or their servers are in the USA, you might have violated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. I would keep most if not all of these activities to yourself.

Should I mention I've reversed engineered games and then released to the public what I'd found of the company I interview at? - I'm going to pretend that I want the job, so... yes, you go do that.

Ignoring the ethics argument as well as how the specific person interviewing you might react to such an action. What you did is very likely illegal in your country, so regardless of if it will land you the job, it would probably be wise to not talk about it anyway.