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zakruti.com » Humor, fun and entertainment » Polygon
Cheating in video games used to be fun

Cheating in video games used to be fun

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Rating: 4.0; Vote: 1
Cheating goes way back in video games. but what does it even mean to cheat? And is it BAD? Polygon's Jenna Stoeber falls down the rabbit hole of cheating history, from the heady days of Action Replay, Game Genie, and Game Shark. to the terrible modern days of bot hacks in online multiplayer games, and publishers cracking down on players with threats of fines and jail time
Date: 2023-12-10

Comments and reviews: 30


I think cheating is really interesting as a way to discover the limits of what a game can do. I would never cheat in multiplayer (unless in a game where everyone agrees to it. But singleplayer? Who cares honestly. I know people who think cheating in singleplayer tarnishes the experience but you should be allowed to play stuff the way you want.
I played through a grueling playthrough once: Dishonored 2, no killing and no powers. Midway through a late game mission i did something that the game didn't tell me would result in a death and therefore count as a kill, so i cheated so it wouldn't. Because I didn't discover this until after the fact my saves couldn't help me. Then I just played the rest of the game as if it hadn't happened. I wasn't going to let a mistake like that affect my outcome, i had spent like 15 hours trying to get that and with like 10 hours remaining I wouldn't want to start over. Cheating still meant i had to replay like 1 hour. Some might say that still means it shouldn't count as an achievement, i mean, the thing is maybe you're right. Maybe it doesn't count. But to me it did. And who's going to know? Like who is going to care? Why do we waste energy on stuff like that? If that's how you want to play, then fine by me. But I really don't care how anyone plays their game. Cheating in competitive games is just bad manners, but in games we play for our own enjoyment with ourselves. Go knock yourself out.
I still remember playing the original age of empires and writing BIGDADDY and getting a car that could kill anything -

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Pokemon is a bad example of cheats going away because it never had them in the first place. At least, not in the typical sense of being intentionally put in or left in by the devs. The only cheats that Pokemon games had were glitches, which were more common in the early days of gaming for various reasons. It's not like Game Freak or Pokemon Company changed their mind, they -never- wanted cheats in their game, and the presence of glitches which gave players an unfair advantage were purely accidental.
Instead, look at games which had honest-to-goodness cheats. GTA was known for cheat codes, and the series still has them in the latest entry. THPS had some famous cheats, and the modern remaster has many of those effects as -game mods- instead of button combos. In Mortal Kombat there were fatalities, which were similar to cheat codes in that they were seemingly random button combinations, and those have been and continue to be a staple mechanic in the series.
While it's true that the culture of cheat codes in single-player games has died down quite a bit, a lot of the big hitters (and some indies) carry on the tradition to this day.

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I like that there's a lot of games now that have accessibility options that are inarguably cheats. I think it's important to give people the option to play games in a way that works for them when it doesn't directly affect the experience of other players who haven't agreed to you having a handicap against them.
I think Tunic is an excellent recent example of having cheats as options. Being difficult is a large part of the game's identity, yet that didn't stop the developer from adding in infinite stamina and invulnerability settings. They're not hidden at all and the game doesn't even disable achievements if you flip them on. I enjoyed the game without touching those settings (tempting though they were, but it does not at all affect my enjoyment of the game if someone else does use them. In fact, I want people to use those because I want them to experience the entirety of the game. Sure they could watch a video, but it's just not the same feeling as actually controlling the character through the world.
That said, if you're cheating in PvP games, then I hope you fall ass first onto a cactus (to put it mildly)

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I don't mind cheating in single player games, the only persons experience you can ruin is your own by using the cheats. Cheating in multiplayer by using a program to give yourself perfect aim or whatever so you play better than others is just sad though. I did the Missing No. trick in pokemon, I gave myself all the guns in gta 1, 2, 3, I'd take advantage of the less impactful cheats games offered, but I'd never skip levels or have the game basically play itself with them.
One thing about Diablo 2 you seem to have wrong. It's not only in hardcore mode that pvp is enabled. PvP in Diablo 2 starts at lvl 9. As soon as you're level 9 in any mode or difficulty you can be targeted for pvp. All anyone needed to do to enable pvp was be in any of the towns and click an icon next to your name on the character list in game and pvp was essentially forced. There was no way to prevent the other person from targeting you if they wanted to, aside from joining a new game. If you stepped outside of any town you could be killed by the person who targeted you for pvp.

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cheating in games is basically an essential tool for me, as an indie gamer who is Hashtag Bad At Games. indie games don-t have a lot of resources to fill their settings with every feature under the sun, like an easy mode which could be helpful to people like me, so instead they prioritize more pertinent accessibility tools, like turning off flashing lights/screen shakes. i don-t mind this at all! the devs can focus on making the game safe for everyone to play, and i can go online to search for hacks to help me through it. hacking kind of takes the responsibility off the dev-s shoulders, as well as giving me a fun treasure-hunt with each rpg i play; and even better, i get a wider range of customizability by fiddling with the game-s code myself, rather than relying on a predetermined -easy mode- which may not suit my play style.
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Cheating in old games fullfills the same role as modding does: giving the players tools to unleash their full (power) phantasies within the game. It still baffles me that so many people, especially modern AAA developers don't understand how important the sandbox element of games is. Yes having a nice story with engaging characters and cutscenes is great and all, but at the end, games should be our escape to let us do as much as technically possible.
This is why Minecraft is one of the most popular games ever. This is why the -do what you want- GTA games got huge. This is why many popular games like Counter Strike, DOTA and Battlefield 2, actually started as mods.
Give the players more freedom instead of taking it away, or worse, hiding it behind a paywall!

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One of my favorite cheat code stories is that Sly Cooper and the Thevius Raccoonus which came out in 2002 on the PS2 has cheat codes that weren't discovered until 2020, 18 years after release. The speedrunning community was messing around with the files and found a bunch of inputs that made the game do certain things that nobody ever knew about. Prior to 2020 there was only 1 cheat code commonly known and it was to reset the level you were on in case you bugged out or got caught in a cutscene you didn't want to watch but now we know how to put on invincibility, auto-grab bottles, get every ability, unlock every level, etc just with cheats.
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Back in the day (and today too Idk) there were two battle nets in D2 and in Open Battle Net you could use your single player characters I think? And there were utilities that effectively just allowed you to modify the hex codes underlying your characters. So in Open Battle Net it was just standard practice to have -Hacked Duels- where you tried to build the most OP PvP character. It was a good time but I only recall doing it on -softcore- mode so like if you died you just started a new game and got your stuff back. It's obviously cheating to modify hex codes to buff yourself up but it never felt like malicious multiplayer cheating to me
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The notion that cheating in single player to make a game easier is honestly pretty ableist. That means hostile to disabled people. Take your standard first/third person RPG. There is story and there is battle. A disabled person is just as entitled to that story as everyone else who bought the game, even if their eye-hand-coordination is not good enough to make the fights fun or even possible. Yes, you could built in a way that relies on your companions or whatever. Or you could use a cheat. It's only for your enjoyment. Did you have fun? That's the only metric by which one could judge if a game is played the -right way-.
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Cheats for Nintendo games nowadays are basically -here's how to avoid the forced save to keep savescumming a billion times until you get the result you want- or -just change the clock until you get the result you want- and I hate it. That's an incredibly draining way to play that, for me, defeats the purpose of those mechanics, and these things get so widespread that I can't find advice on doing things legitimately. I can't find a guide on how to earn lots of watts in SwSh that isn't -here's an exploit to get millions in a few minutes by changing your clock-. Not what I'm looking for!
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Great video. Something I feel you could have touched on more though is cheats in singleplayer games, and how those were basically killed off by the rise of -Achievements- in the 360 era. Now we rarely if ever get this, just because people need to arbitrarily measure their incremental progress with extrinsic rewards that erode the intrinsic fun of games. Cheats used to be a thing that let you harmlessly play around with the rules and give yourself extra powers or resources or just try goofy stuff just for the fun of it, since you were only playing against AI anyway.
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Reminds me how in the early part of the pandemic I would always end up in among us games where someone was cheating and instead of actually playing for the crew member team like I was supposed to I would just lie to see what happened and how far I could take it. I grew up playing card games more than video games but the games I played all had cheating mechanics that were really just shows of skill or how you played the game though, so lying is usually part of what makes a game fun for me. Killer work as always!
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Cheating in Arceus (and Animal Crossing) was and likely still is very much alive. It requires having a second Nintendo Switch that is hacked - doesn-t even matter if it-s been banned, the game just needs a local play option and a way to trade items between the systems. - Totally loved these kinds of things my whole life. Part of the fun for me these days is seeing how I can change things in games that are not exactly intended. Usually PC games but with that extra Switch it-s made Nintendo Switch games a lot more fun.
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Every single aspect of this is so relevant to the entire American sociopolitical landscape. My personal favorite connection is in the way that some people get really horny over this concept of hard work as its own reward--in gaming, it's the people like 15: 30, and in the real world it's people who think that everyone should be required to work excessive numbers of hours as a cog in a capitalist society that benefits them very little simply in order to pay for survival needs that ought to be free for everyone.
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18: 05 this is where I disagree. Modding is the modern version of what you're describing. Randomizers, extra hard challenges, entire new worlds or areas, new mechanics that completely change the game, and so on. That's what modern day hacking for fun is, and it's great. I'd blame the shift away from arcades and the fact that the mainstream has moved on to online games which can't have cheats for the decrease in popular cheats, but that doesn't mean they're gone.
Thanks for listening to my Ted Talk

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There's a whole phenomenon of built-in cheats from pirated games. My cousin used to get us pirated Gameboy and GBA carts from Asia. Some of them proudly said they had -99 in 1- games on the sticker label, but it would really just be 10-15 games, each modded in different ways. The one that stands out the most in my memory is Immortal Turtle, which was the original TMNT Gameboy game but you couldn't die as long as you didn't get the pizza power-ups.
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I still own a Game Genie somewhere in a closet, I remember using cheats on the side-scrolling Star Wars platformer game, neat that the cheats worked, but I didn't really like that game so I didn't really get much out of the Game Genie.
My favorite cheat in old PS2 games was -Unlock All- Made playing SSX much more enjoyable so I didn't have to grind levels and we could play the maxed out Trick stat character to our hearts content!

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Way back when I was young and handsome, I loved the game -Driver Parallel Lines-. They had a cheat menu that expanded as you collected tokens. After beating the game, I loved cruising through the city in some crazy modified car and just wreaking pure chaos. Hours and hours of pure insanity of shootouts and ramps. Road Rash 64 had a similar cheat system. Crazy modified bikes you would kamikaze just for fun
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This is one of the many things I love about Stardew Valley - its low stakes, single developer dedicated to making the game fun and community obsessed with finding all the little easter eggs really make it worth trying to find the cheats- I swear, a lot blur the line between cheats and -secret- features! Some have disappeared as he updated the game, but there's always something new worth trying out.
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I'd say cheating at Pinball by tilting is bad, but only because it can damage the machine. If the machine breaks because cheaters tilted it, then others are robbed of the chance to enjoy it.
Cheating in single player, who cares. It's their game, they can play it how they want. No skin off my nose.
Cheating in multiplayer is bad because it makes the game unenjoyable for others.

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I always defended cheats in singleplayer because they would expand the content of the game. Who doesn't remember fighting off the cops in GTA San Andreas while hovering in a tank over water and giving yourself a speedup by shooting backwards? It was great. And you could do it for HOURS. Was is overpowered? Yes of course. Was it fun and gave yourself a new challenge? Absolutely.
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The reason third-party developers don't develop hacks for Pokemon Legends: Arceus is because Nintendo made the Switch nearly unhackable with physically modifying the console itself, something most people who aren't tech savvy don't want to do. I'm sure they could come up with something, but it would likely lead to a Switch getting bricked as a result.
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I use WeMod and NexusMods a lot nowadays to just get around grinding or challenges I find boring rather than, well, challenging. Grinding for a rare drop for 15 hours is something I would've found mind-numbing and a waste of my earthly hours even when I was a kid and had a lot more earthly hours, now it's ludicrous to even consider it.
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Interesting video! I wonder how speedrunning esp. the whole finding secrets / glitches / other shortcuts, relates to cheating. I feel like speedrunners chase a similar challenge 100%ers that way. Kind of playing another game, around the original one.
Edit: ah nevermind, other comments pointed that out in a better-articulated way: )

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I remember using Game Genie to force me to always have the frog suit in Super Mario Bros 3. It can still be a challenge with the odd movement even if I can't die from getting hit. There's nothing wrong with cheats in a single player offline game as long as you don't brag that you beat a game without cheats. That would be lying.
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I need a fact check at 8: 19. You could have multiple Abra, ok. But only two Snorlax. And I don't think you could get Surf (to perform the glitch) before battling one of them. And I think Chansey and Rhyhorn were Safari Zone exclusives, meaning no Master Balls on them
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Lara didn't blow up from the Power up code, Polygon. And I knew that perfectly well. :p
Lara blew up when players put in the developers' -leaked cheatcode- for -naked Lara- troll - because in Tomb Raider 1 there were rumors of a non-existent cheat to remove Lara's clothes

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I think there's a big hole in the -cheating is fun- section of this video: tool-assisted speedruns! Those are a feat of cheat engineering and love for games. Maybe it would warrant a video all in on itself, the scene is pretty amazing.
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I was questioning this very thing the other day. I'm not sure when I went from wanting to blow away all the civilians in San Andreas with hacked-in ammo to not even wanting to abuse the villagers in Minecraft the way everyone else does.
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There is only two cases of cheating I dislike. The first is in multi-player and the other is where people afterwards review and talk bad about the game fx because it was too easy, even through what made it easy was the cheating.
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