A man of many interests, Dale Earnhardt Jr. is known for more than just his impressive NASCAR career stats.
A lesser-known fact about Dale Jr. is that, along with being a NASCAR Hall of Famer, team owner, podcaster, and business personality, he’s also a huge video gamer. That passion helps explain his advocacy for sim racing, too. Junior has shared plenty of stories over the years about winning—and losing—money while gaming. Some involve casinos and gambling, but others are a little cleaner.
For instance, on his podcast, “Dale Jr. Download,” the JRM owner detailed how he once turned about $100,000 into $4 million in a single night.
Dale Earnhardt Jr. on His Love for Video Games
Junior started by talking about his first iPhone and the games he downloaded. He also mentioned getting an old Nintendo with his wife, Amy Earnhardt, and playing retro games like “Excitebike” and “Double Dribble” on a 40-inch TV.
He described the experience: “We start playing and we’re like, ‘It’s so slow.’ We can’t tell what that is. Like, it’s so bad.”
A little later, his co-host, TJ Majors, asked, “Remember the mafia game we used to play?”
Junior lit up. “Listen to this s***! This is awesome.”
Before telling the story, Dale Jr. admitted to having what he called “loose morals” when it came to video games. He gave a heads-up: “I’ll just go ahead and put this out there. If there’s a way for me to cheat in a video game, I’m doing it.”
But he made one thing clear—he never hacked anything illegally or risked getting banned from Steam. “I didn’t do anything that could get me in trouble,” he said.
While Majors tried to hold in his laughter, Junior kept going.
“There was this little Mafia game on the old original iPhones. It was just text, and you mashed buttons to collect money.”
He explained how the game was super simple. “It was just pushing buttons. No movement, no animation, no real video game moment,” Junior said.
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So he got creative. Junior asked an engineer from Dirty Mo Media’s IT department to write a program that would cheat the game. The code let his in-game profile keep attacking other players and collecting money—even while he was asleep.
“We figured out how to be able to, at night while we were sleeping, continue to wage war and continue to fight,” Dale Jr. said. “I’d go to bed, have like $100,000, and I’d wake up and I’d be like, $4 million? H*** yes. Kicked some a** last night.”
Majors pointed out how the game allowed players to attack anyone who wasn’t actively online, which meant Junior and his crew had a major advantage.
The group also shared memories of playing “Clash of Clans,” and Junior told more stories from his video game adventures—even some from his time in military school.