Up, Square, Square, Triangle, Right, Up, Circle, Triangle. Surely that takes you back? Inputting a cheat code using the controller buttons is a very 90’s thing and sadly seems to have died off in the modern era. You will obviously know this code is for floating in Tony Hawks 2 on the PS1. I have been delving into rather heavy areas of gaming recently so I wanted to go back and look at something a lot more fun. The forgotten world of video game cheats.
There has long been a stigma attached to using cheat codes, those that pride themselves on finishing without them seem to look down on those that do. On one level it is understandable, games are meant to be a challenge. It’s there for you to beat and in theory no game should be impossible to triumph over. Those players must be asking if they can beat the game without them why the hell can’t the rest?
Speaking to friends its a near universal that at some point as a kid or in their teens they used some form of cheat. Now as adults they wouldn't even bother thinking about them so what’s changed? Completing single player games is far less competitive than it was when we were at school, it wasn't just about finishing a game but being the first in your peer group.
I suppose the change in usage depends on a few things, particularly ability and patience. As we have gotten older and played many more games we have obviously gotten a lot better, at least mentally. Tragically you peaked physically at gaming at around 21. Sorry guys! As for patience you have to learn to put up with a lot of things in the real world. So many 'roadblocks' that you can't just skip past. You grow up and accept when things slow you down. As a kid a cheat to get past an ‘impossible’ level makes a lot of sense.
It’s also not just as simple as just cheating to win. There is so much more beyond the invincibility option, it’s about giving the players something interesting to muck around with. New characters or levels. Mental physics. Anything that takes them away from how the base game works. The skill and craft that goes into them from games designers is truly impressive. Who even thinks that a big head mode is a good idea (Note: It is). It’s crazy!
For any serious gamers out there I would be shocked if any had never used some kind of code to change the game. I know I am one of them and have no regrets! So let's have a look back at a time when we were all much younger and cheat codes were relevant.
Unique Media Feature
Having racked my brains for a couple of weeks and a good peruse online I literally cannot find anything similar to cheats in other media. Some artists like to put hidden tracks at the end of albums or the numerous Easter eggs you can expect from huge film franchises. In books you can leave hidden messages but none of these radically alter the product itself. It will still be a board game with set rules or an animated series that plays out the same way. Only cheats radically alter the content and are not found anywhere else.
Sure they can make the game easier but more often they can be used to increase the difficulty. Just think of the Wanted Level increase for the GTA series. Being able to instantly add heightened police is a massive pain. Though I did use it as a challenge back in Vice City. I would get a hold of a decent motor bike, arm myself with a rocket launcher and use the code to make my character at six star wanted level. This would spawn tanks on every street so I would have race for my life to survive. Alas I never last longer than a minute! It was fun though.
The invention behind them is brilliant. Often than not they are created to aid testers while playing huge games. A had a few friends who worked on Alien: Isolation and they had full access to a plethora of cheats to select from. Sure it's not realistic of a casual player but who wants to play eight hours of a game just to check a defect? You need to be able to skip levels or be invulnerable to check whether that sofa makes you fall through the floor. These are meant to be just for employees but some still find their way into the final code and can be discovered by data miners.
That has been more of a modern phenomenon. What I don’t understand is how they got into the wild prior to the internet! This was still a time when gaming magazines reigned supreme so I assume that in the cheat sections gaming companies deliberately let slip what the codes were. But what if they didn't? Do we have daring individuals who try every combination these days to find exploits or glitches to beat the game or make a fast speed run?
I assume that having one code gives you clues as to what the rest are like, usually they keep to a theme with variations. There can be cheat sections in games, look at the Red Brick section in any Lego game that drastically alter the title. Codes can still be used in that game but how the hell you guess ‘J4437V’ in order to unlock Bilbo Baggins I have no idea. It’s good to see TT Games are keeping the cheat flame alive!
Making games requires a huge level of invention and it can be rather astonishing what designers and writers manage to come up with. You only have to play something like the Witcher 3 to see how crazy a story can go, let along what game breaking mechanics they can hide away for players to discover! So here is a salute to those with the ingenuity to create the weird and wonderful cheats and another to those who are clever enough to find them!
The Finest Examples
Now confession time for my rampant cheating in my youth. While not wanting to win automatically I wanted to give my relatively amateur skills a boost. A lot can just be time savers, the classic instant upgrades were very handy in StarCraft. For the record I have been playing without them on the rerelease. Turns out I am pretty good!
Obviously money is always a tempting cheat. Rosebud is the classic Sims one for this (thus making the game playable…) Money cheats are actually the most interesting in terms of what it allows the player to do. I have found that I actually lose interest in games far quicker with a shit load of cash, there is zero challenge anymore with RollerCoaster Tycoon or SimCity. But if the game does not have a free build mode it allows the player to create whatever the hell they want, which is usually incredibly hard while playing levels. You are always limited by costs.
Want to recreate New York block by block? Make the most intricate and beautiful road system in the world? Build the longest and slowest roller coaster ever? Have at it! The money grants you the freedom to create whatever you brain can come up with. My main aim in Theme Hospital was always to have the biggest training room possible full of Junior Doctors learning all three professions. It was impossible without a large injection of dodgy cash.
Hell even a money cheat created my pseudonym! As I have said previously I loved the fuck out of Theme Hospital but its not the easiest game ever. While managing the hospital the player will receive Faxes (look it up kids) from which the player can press the dial pad to input cheats. If you hold down Shift + C $2000 would be added to your finances every second but would cause the Hospital announcer to state that ‘Hospital Administrator Is Cheating’.
Public shaming would never work as who actually cares now? As for titles that although I am not ashamed I do regret cheating in, it would be best to start with Enter the Matrix. I loved this PS2 era game (still love the original film) but could only complete it due to numerous cheats I included. And do you know what? I prefer that i actually finished it than just dropping it mid point.Those agents were fucking hard and nowadays I find it hard to finish most games (due to a lack of time and/or interest) so at least I saw the end credits!
I always loved the instant upgrades from StarCraft, saved so much time rather than waiting several minutes to have slightly better armoured marines. Let’s get OP straight away. The Real Time Strategy (RTS) probably has the best cheats of any. Having a game with multiple resources, money, upgrades and units means far more opportunities to speed things up considerably.
Now I was completely unaware of maybe the finest ever made, the Konami Code. This (Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A, Start) was first included in Gradius back in the 80’s on the NES but not widely known at the time. Kazuhisa Hashimoto added the cheat to give the player a full set of power ups so that he could make testing the game easier.
Then someone at Konami had the genius idea of including the same code in Contra to spawn the player 30 more lives and this is where it blew up. Initially being known as the ‘Contra code’ its popularity coming from just how useful it was. This code has been repeated included across a diverse set of games from Castlevania, Silent Hill, Metal Gear Solid and even Dance Dance Revolution! A recurring cheat code is brilliant and I really hope they keep implementing it.
Does It Matter?
With many years of hindsight of course it doesn't matter if people play a standard single player game using cheats. Maybe they need to get past a hard level? Again this is the only media you have to be (in theory) good at to complete it.
It may depend on game design. Fog of war is an integral part of the RTS genre, basically it covers most of the map apart from where your units are. This means you don’t know where the enemy is and what they are up to. To find out you must risk a unit or two to explore who mostly end up dead after accidentally straying into their main base or an ambush.
For a game like Starcraft it’s integral to making the game fun and a challenge. On the other hand something like Wargroove should not have it. Being turn based its a lot harder to plot the movements of you units, normally you just end up right in front of the enemy who just take you out. It’s not fun nor fair so a cheat here would have been an excellent addition. Thankfully Chucklefish have actually made significant changes and its now a lot more forgiving!
There is a definition that we need to make here, a need to break up cheats and exploits. The latter is usually something just missed by testers that usually get patched out later once it has been spotted blowing up online. Think of the infinite bottle caps (in game currency) glitch in Fallout 4, were trading singular bullets netted the player a fortune, in turn ruining the in game market. All of that is accidental.
Cheats are there by design, trying to make the title more fun in some way. It is designed and basically a free bonus for the player. They won’t ever be taken away and it gives a bit more of an insight into the designers mind. The game is built on strict rules so as to make it playable and a challenge. Cheats show which rules the designer wants you to break, whether to pass the challenge or just go crazy.
The reason I bring up the difference is it actually has a huge part to play in speed-running. As I have brought up a few times now, speed-running is players trying to beat a game in record time and thus go to the top of the leader-board. Pokemon is a prime example with a significant community trying to break records. Speed-running in Pokemon is actually broken up into two key categories, whether they use glitches or not.
In Any% players can use exploits to walk past half the map and finish the game in just 11 minutes! For the Any% Glitchless the player must complete the game beating all of the gyms and elite four without walking through walls. It's more dependant on luck and in game knowledge to win. Its very important to have them separated as there would never be any Glitchless runs on the leader-board!
Ruin The Fun
Alas with something like this there are major downsides. None that I can see in the single player realm but it seems to be a huge issue in the online world. In theory multiplayer games should give players a level playing field. Fortnite is a great example. Everyone starts with nothing aside from prior knowledge of the map. Choosing when to jump and where to scavenge weapons is key to making sure you don’t die in the first few minutes. From there it’s all about the skills of the player.
Most other non Battle Royale games have an upgrading structure, allowing players to customise and upgrade load-outs. In theory this means those that are the best (or most likely have played the most) will have unlocked the best armour and guns. Typical old school modes such as death match or king of the hill can be weigthed by your unlocks. Royales are much more even in theory.
One of the best questions I have heard about sport was ‘To play the game well or win?’. Sadly not enough people have thought about this and just want to win at all costs. Thus the prevalence of websites that allow you to download software to ‘help’ you win at video games, particularly the most popular shooters. These include seeing through walls, extra health, infinite ammo all the way up to invisibility and invincibility.
Where is the fun if you know you have such a staggering advantage that you will win most of the time without much effort? There is little skill involved and you will never improve as a player, so why bother doing it? Online games are brilliant as you match up against real people, it’s much more emotional and meaningful than against the AI. Back to my starting point it’s basically win at all costs. And this is where the line is in cheating. You are only cheating the game in single player, here you are scamming so many others who just want to have fun alongside you. It's bullshit but sadly will always occur.
If you know that many people are cheating why would you even bother to compete, knowing it is not a level playing field? Maybe people don't realise how prevalent it is. Or that by playing a Battle Royale title death comes so often and you are into your next match so quickly there is always hope for that next win.
It’s an ongoing issue for companies trying to combat this. Either through specific software to monitor and ban players that don’t act as expected or through regular updates that make the illicit programs stop working. The former ends up with thousands of bans yet people can still just go and make a new account. As for the latter there is a lot of money to be made from working cheats so they will always be made as long as the game is popular.
Does it really matter? Well if you actually want to win and not get killed from a ‘magical’ shot three miles away then yes. eSports are growing with the Fortnite World Cup this summer that had a prize pool of $30 million, the winner taking 10% of that. Surely we want to make sure that the top players are playing fair with this much at stake. Even just qualifying you want it to be a level playing field.
I am not going to win online matches that often but when I do it’s going to be all the sweeter.
A couple of years ago Dara Ó Briain presented Dara Ó Briain’s Go 8 Bit a show on Dave about celebrities competing at Video Games. It was fun and actually gave a grown up account of gaming on TV though has sadly been cancelled. During the last series they also had a side program commissioned called Go 8 Bit DLC allowing the other presenters to talk more generally about games. Interestingly the producer made them do a section on cheats to which they all exasperated that it was pointless. Their reasoning was that cheats are no longer relevant now so why bother talking about them?
It’s not an unreasonable point they make but actually it’s the nature of the industry that has changed how cheats are seen. It used to be you put in a code and boom you get a bonus secret level. Now you have to pay for it as an extra or as part of a season pass. It's ridiculous if you think about it. What about all the skins that people buy in Fortnite or Overwatch? You used to unlock these! Even Football Manager Touch has its purchasable cheats to heal players or give you tonnes of cash.
In the rush to squeeze every last penny from players a lot of game makers have taken away brilliant and bonkers secret extras and just stuck it on the store. I may be an old man now but I do yearn for simpler more fun times. Everybody loves a freebie and it's even better if you have nicked if off them in a cheat.
I would actually argue with the amazing access to such a variety of games the average players abilities is far higher than in the 1990’s. Especially as most people now grow up from a young age with access to computers and smart phones. If that is the case then fewer people would need cheats to help them beat games. So maybe this is part of the reason we don't see them as much any more in the traditional sense?
Of course all of the old games still include them and no doubt that some future games will continue to have them but we have come a long way from that simple times of the 90’s and just wanting NPC’s to have big heads….
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