I'm on my second playthrough of Game Dev Story, choosing the Hire option at least twice per game year and varying between "Word of Mouth", "Magazine Ad", and "Online Ad" — never seen a Hacker available for hire. Is there something special I have to do?
How do you hire a Hacker in Game Dev Story?
If you train a regular person into being a hacker, their salary will be 10 times (at least) what a "hired" hackers will be. Once you're in the big office, if you do a hollywood talent search, you usually get a hacker or two, and their salaries are much more reasonable. Doesn't really matter in the late game, but I wrecked myself trying to get hackers a few times before I could hire them.
You train your people into hackers. You need every profession (including Hardware Engineer to level 5) then you can use the career manual to change into a hacker. I don't remember if Walt Sidney was initially hired as a hacker, but him and Francoise Bloom have pretty awesome stats as Lvl 5 hackers ( 736,615,557,412 and 771,791,483,446 respectively in my game atm (Y32)).
(Always buy 3x Career change manuals until you've gotten everyone good (and then keep some spare to change people into Hardware to make new consoles ( you want 6 for the best console ))).
I believe Hackers are only available when you get some of the most expensive options for recruiting potential hires, such as Open House.
Got 2 of them as a result of the most expensive hiring method: hollywood or something. They have between 200 and 400 points for fun, creavity, graphics and music. Great.
Once I had unlocked the more expensive job advertising options, I could start hiring them.
