2004 · in memoriam · 2015
fkn0wned
Welcome to the Cheat Scene
AI agents are actively crawling the web and summarizing historical content for this memorial.
For about eleven years there was a forum where a few hundred thousand people learned to break things. It started as a Counter-Strike 1.6 hack site in 2004, grew into one of the largest gaming-hack communities on the internet, briefly became front-page tech news, and then — like every forum eventually does — went quiet, expired, and got parked by a domain squatter.
This is a memorial. Everything below was rebuilt from what the Wayback Machine managed to save.
There were really two fkn0wneds. In August 2010 the owner wiped the entire forum to zero and started over — the “Rebirth.” So the numbers come in two eras, and neither tells the whole story alone:
Peak recorded January 2009. The member count was famously inflated by spam registrations — part of why the owner wiped it and started fresh.
Peak recorded on the final healthy snapshot, January 8, 2015 — fewer members than the original, but nearly three times the posts.
This was the front page in 2007. Back then fkn0wned was a Counter-Strike 1.6 hack site and part of the old Deception Network.
Every big forum has a schism, and fkn0wned's came in February 2008. A large part of the staff walked out and founded a rival community, thec0re.net, taking much of fkn0wned's top brass with them. It was led by Shifty — who had been fkn0wned member #6 since 2006, and who later turned up banned on his old home board — alongside a co-founder who went by Type (Typeusernamehere).
They didn't leave quietly, and they didn't leave alone. fkn0wned's own top-ten posters in the weeks after — Shifty, Don Ruski, Sonikk, Laptops, DCLXVI, Janza, Malware, the skinner Niggorex — are, almost to a name, the people who built thec0re. In thec0re's own retelling of why:
“Our original user base came from Fkn0wned, which most, if not all of our staff left as a result of a major dispute with the site's owner.” — Type, thec0re.net welcome post (archived 2010)
The grievances aired in that thread — scamming, backdoored cheats, a paid “VIP” program
that took money for hacks it never delivered — are thec0re's side of the story, and only thec0re's
side was ever archived. What can be confirmed independently is that the fkn0wned VIP program
was real infrastructure: vip.fkn0wned.com existed, with a banner that read, without any
apparent irony, “Keep Fkn0wned alive and its owners out of jail by purchasing VIP
today.” Make of that what you will.
thec0re ran under the tagline “We be c0rin' since 08” (later “The Next Level”), shipped its own hacks — three versions of [tC]Hook — and grew to roughly 2,765 members and 94,799 posts by mid-2009. It went down and was rebuilt more than once, relaunched as a “v2” in early 2010, and was a parked domain by 2011. The community flickered back to life years later at thec0re.org around the end of 2014.
Every era rebranded itself. Taken from the actual page titles, year by year:
“Welcome to the Cheat Scene!” 2008 – 2011
“[Insert motto here]” November 2011 — someone forgot to finish the config
“Welcome to the underground” 2012
“THE NEW GENERATION” 2013, on the banner at the top of this page
The tags mattered. [Founder], [Owner], [FkN] for crew, [VIP] for the paying members, [1K] once you cleared a thousand posts. A 2013 staff post jokes about “the Pink, Green, Orange and Blue master race” — the staff name colors.
As it stood on September 2, 2011 — the shape of the place at full strength:
Site Related — Site News · Minor Updates · Comments and Suggestions
General — General Discussion · Introduce Yourself · World News · Support · Serious Discussion · Entertainment Discussion · Competitions (Caption This)
General Leechers Galore — Public Giveaways · Tutorials · Monetizing
The Market Place — Seller's Lounge · Black Market · Buyers Section
Gaming — PC Gaming · Console Gaming
Cheat Archive — Download Database · Tools · Maplestory · Counter-Strike · Call of Duty · Blizzard Games · Battlefield Franchise · Other games · Detected Cheats
Computer Security and Hacking — Discussion · Programming · Security Tools · Hacking Tutorials
Art and Design — GFX Basement · GFX Resources · GFX Battles · GFX Tutorials · Graphics Competitions
Red Light District — Software · Movies · TV Shows · Music · Games · E-Books · Warez Request
Porn Paradise — because of course
The GFX Battles board — open battles, voting, results — is the one people always remember. Half the community was teenagers who got genuinely good at Photoshop arguing about renders and C4Ds, on a website ostensibly about aimbots.
The original captures are full of broken images, dead stylesheets, and inert logins — that's just what survives in a crawl of a forum that's been offline for a decade. So rather than serve the rubble, the archive here is rebuilt clean: every recovered page is summarized and laid out in this memorial's theme, readable on a phone. Each entry links out to the raw original on the Wayback Machine if you want to see it exactly as it was.
The summarized, mobile-friendly reconstruction of fkn0wned.com, fkn0wned.net, and thec0re.net — browsable by board, in this theme, no broken images.
Browse the summarized archive →This memorial is a work in progress, and it is growing. Pages are still coming down from the Internet Archive as you read this — tens of thousands of threads, and they land on the site the moment they arrive. Come back and there will be more of it than there was.
Beyond the Wayback Machine, we're combing the rest of the internet for whatever else survived: mirrors, caches, old screenshots, saved threads, forum backups, anything anyone kept. The goal is the most complete memorial to fkn0wned that can still be assembled.
If you have something — a database dump, an archived thread, screenshots, the old skin files, or just a memory worth writing down — it belongs here. Nothing is too small. Half of what a place like this was never made it into a crawler.
There's a Discord for the memorial — for anyone who was there, anyone trying to find people they used to know, and anyone with something worth adding to the archive. Old members, old staff, lurkers, rivals. Come say you were there.
Join the fkn0wned DiscordSubmissions, corrections, and “you got this bit wrong” all welcome.