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Finding Cheat Codes For A Living
selan writes: "The Baltimore Sun has an article about the guys from GameShark who spend their time digging up cheat codes. 'For hours on end, hackers here squint over thousands of lines of numeric coding that translate to great feats of accomplishment on a video game.'" Good work, if you can get it.
Maybe the great working is playing the games for a living... looking at bare hex/assembly all day sounds a bit too much like debugging other people's code to me. (Which is only fun if they are around to make fun of...) And god help these guys if the DMCA nazis get a hold of them... "We liscenced you the game, we didn't say you could look at it."
Game Genie/Game Shark codes...
Trainers either, for that matter.
When I was about 15, I mowed lawns all summer in order to afford to buy NES cartridges. One of the 'cartridges' I bought was a Game Genie adapter.
Once I had done all the 'special effects' on the games I owned, I realized that any of the difficulty-altering codes took all the challenge out of the game.
Sure, it was fun to always have the elusive Hammer suit in SMB3, but at the same time, if you don't have to work hard and stay alive all the way through World 6 or 7, then you don't really appreciate it as much and don't play so carefully in order to keep it.
Now days, even the graphics altering abilities of such devices or programs aren't that impressive. There's very little you can do graphics-wise to a 3D, immersive game that doesn't break the game play. One of the few legitimate uses I've seen for this is to allow the player to play as characters that he wouldn't usually get to... such as Bowser in Super Mario 64. Even then, the animation and clipping is broken, hurting the play experience.
Some trainers do have positive uses. Here, I'm thinking about the trainers that exist for games like Roller Coaster Tycoon that allow the player to more or less play in the 'Free Form Building' mode that everyone agrees is missing from the game.
The conclusion that I've drawn from these observation is that trainers usually detract from gaming... at least for people who are interested in playing. If a game needs a trainer in order to be enjoyable, such as RCT... then there's something wrong with the game.
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I am not exactly sure how they make "big" money on this...maybe there is a side of marketing that I am not thinking about but when is the last time you saw anybody pay for cheat codes?
Well, the codes themselves aren't big money, as (as far as I know) nobody sells just the codes. However, the codes do enable them to sell the hardware (or you could say hardware sales subsidize the code finding efforts). And every code they develop and make available adds one more reason for someone to buy a Game Shark
Looking at this another way, suppose you are play video games and are not opposed to the idea of a game shark. If the Game Shark didnt support any of the games you play, would you buy it? Probably no, but what about if it had codes for a handful of the games you play. Then you might buy it. If it supports every game you play, you are more likely to buy it. But what if it does support new games as they come out. That would make you less likely to buy it. In otherwords, to ensure sales of Game Shark, they need to support as many games as possible, and continue to support new games as they come out. This way they build a loyal following. Then, as new games systems come out every couple of year, they quickly come out with a new product for that system and have millions of instant repeat customers.
...
What about this cycle:
Is that so despicable?
After I beat Baldur's Gate for the nth time, I amused myself for a while by experimenting with the various cheat codes, toying with the save file format with a hex editor, and otherwise trying to push the boundaries of what the game would let me do, which in itself was made for interesting challenges. Isn't that perfectly natural for someone with a hacker mentality?
In the process, I learned a little bit about how the game worked. It was fun for a while. Of course, silly me, that's why I buy games -- for the fun, not so I can prove how cool I am or look down on others for the way they choose to have fun with the games.
The kids who said "no, this is how you're supposed to do it!" were always the most annoying ones.