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.

Comments

Doing this for money?

[Violet Null]

Why don't they simply press up-down-up-down-left-right-A-B and get themselves infinite cash?

Re:Doing this for money?

[Mike Schiraldi]

You're all idiots. It's UUDDLRLRBA. Also note that select and start are not part of the code. Once you press UUDDLRLRBA, you can do whatever you want -- press left again, press select six times, hold the B button, whatever.

Why?

[Bilestoad]

when you play Tiger Woods Golf, you get a hole in one every time

Tiger Woods game: $40

Gameshark: $60

Realizing that you spent $100 to watch a golf game play itself: Priceless.

People do this?

[LewK2]

I remember, as a young lad, wondering how anyone ever came up with the cheats that were published monthly in my favorite ZX Spectrum (and later Commodore Amiga) magazine. I just assumed that somewhere, someone would get the infomation out of the programmers by sleeping with the despectacled geeks. Oh, how innocent I was when I was younger...

Re:People do this?

[radja]

indeed... very innocent..

No way a geek gets laid that easy ;)

//rdj

Re:People do this?

[AndrewHowe]

Dunno about the Spectrum. I had a Commodore Plus-4, and the standard infinite lives procedure was something like this:-
(1) Find the lives display on the screen
(2) Moisten a bit of paper and stick it over the place found in step (1) [because step (2) requires two fingers]
(3) Run/Stop-Reset into the built-in TEDMON (oh I loved it)
(4) Clear the screen, place cursor under bit of paper placed in (2), whack down an '@' character (PETSCII $00)
(5) S C00 FE7 0 (finds the '@')
(6) S 0 FFFF for the address found in (5)
(7) You should now be able to find the routine that updates the lives display... The rest depends on how it works... You are usually pretty close though.

Re:People do this?

[Tet]

how anyone ever came up with the cheats that were published monthly in my favorite ZX Spectrum (and later Commodore Amiga) magazine. I just assumed that somewhere, someone would get the infomation out of the programmers by sleeping with the despectacled geeks.

We used to do it on the Beeb by poring over hex dumps, looking for the magic sequences of 6502 assembler (the novelty quickly wore off, and we wrote a program to do the search for us shortly afterwards :-) Ahhhh, wonderful memories. The BBC Micro was an amazing hackers machine. Much more so than the Spectrum or C64, by virtue of the fact that it had in inbuilt assembler/disassembler and hex dump. As for sleeping with despectacled geeks, I sadly conformed to the stereotypes, and wasn't much interested in that sort of thing at the time. Of course, things have changed somewhat since then :-)

Re:People do this?

[Transient0]

interesting. i had a NES and the standard infinite lives procedure was very similar:

(1) Find the lives display on the screen
(2) Draw the infinity symbol on a piece of paper
(3) Moisten the bit of paper and stick it over the place found in step (1)

Re:People do this?

[Sobrique]

Never did the infinite lives thing, but savegame hacking I have done. Basically note down your 'cash' (gold, energy, credits, whatever). Save the game, and quit. Load the save file up in your favourite hex editor. Look for the 'cash' as a hex value. Usually the bytes will be reversed (something to do with the processor architecture IIRC - x86 are 'little endian' meaning the byte order is reversed). Replace these numbers with FF FF - 65535 of 'cash'. (If it shows up as -1 then you need to change the first F to a 7 because they're using a 'signed' number) Even better if you have a leading 00 00 you can replace these too - the game designers anticipated you earning more than 65535 of cash. replace with FFs or for a nice round number 00 40 42 0F will be a million (sad I remember that). It worked nicely on Sim City 2000, and Command and Conquer as I recall. May not work _quite_ so well on others.

wonder if that's allowed in the EULA

[K7001]

you can prob find all sorts of stuff. remember that backdoor in Quake that lets you root other machines in online play......

Cheat Codes Origin

[toupsie]

Who came up with the idea of cheat codes (Easter eggs) in Video Games? I have always wondered why a company/programmer would leave the inserted cheat codes in their game when its released. I can understand for testing purposes that they are helpful but why for the consumer? And if they leave them in, why don't they just tell you what they are? Obviously they are not making any money selling the cheat codes to Game Shark.

Re:Cheat Codes Origin

[medscaper]

The majority are for QA purposes, and lots of them are so embedded it's hard (or useless) to rip them out before the code is released.

Also, don't forget - how much fun would it be to get a game like RTCW and push a button for God mode right out of the box? Booooorinnnng.

Re:Cheat Codes Origin

[Tazzy531]

There's two different answers to this one:
1) Companies insert cheat codes because like you said, they use it to test the games. The Second reason is that it is always a thrill by the player to find out about these cheat codes, either through a purposely well placed 'leak' by the company or by themselves. Thirdly, companies do make money on cheats. Some companies sell "player guides" that are filled with help and cheats on games. If there weren't any cheats, there would be no market for these player guides.

2) Game Shark (according to the article) does not use the cheats made by the companies, although, I suspect that if they are reverse engineering it, they could view the cheats. But what they do is write/edit the RAM (memory) at given moments to enhance a feature. Let's say that in memory location 255, the game Mortal Kombat stores the maximum health of player 1. What the GameShark does is, instead of letting the game store 100% there, it writes in 500% (let's say) which gives you more health. Or another way would be to store -1 or something that the program doesn't expect.

Here's why that would work: Let's say that the program says:

while(player1life != 0) player1life--;

With this, the player would never die.

Re: Cheat Codes Origin

[hyyx]

I would probably say that the Atari 2600 "Adventure Dot" was one of the first documented eggs. It was created by Warren Robinett. I think that eggs and cheat codes are for the hacker types who like to understand and take apart what they are working with. What fun would it be finding codes if they "just tell you what they are?" That is why you buy a game in the first place. Eggs and codes can show up in the most interesting places, the fun is finding them.

Re:Cheat Codes Origin

[Marcus Brody]

Because Easter Eggs Rulez!

Seriously though, there is a beautiful ineffable quality in hiding something just below the surface . There is something fun about hiding thing's in your own creation, that perhaps the occasional observant individual ot jammy git will discover. There is also something fun in discovering them - that feeling of conspiracy between you and the author, that you share a secret that few others know about.

Anyway.... about cool game hacks. I have seen (or not seen, as the case may be) in Quake II, an "invisible" player:

"WTF? Why is the wall shooting me?"

Also, I see this guy who was running around at about 200mph.... like his game character was caffiened up to the eyeballs.

It's actually quite amusing at first, and a rather cool hack. Yes, it can be annoying. However, the really decent players have a tendency to hunt down and specifically annihilate/embarrass any cheats.

I could have my facts wrong here (help me out...), but I believe this used to be called "smurfing". There is also some unrelated cracking technique called smurfing I think. I remember hearing a story about one of the very first networked academic computers. They had this old vector-based dog-fighting game. One day, a few people were playing. Suddenly, the Enterprise appears from nowhere, and instantly destroys all the players with a photon torpedo. To this day, nobody knows who it was, or how it was achieved.

Good work?

[coug_]

"'...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.

I'm not sure I agree with that one. Personally, squinting over thousands of lines of hex code for hours at a time does *not* sound like good work.

Ummm

[Halo-]

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."

Silly Me

[ackthpt]

I used to buy games to play and have fun.

Now you:

Buy the game

Buy the strategy guide

Get all the cheat codes

Get bored because it's no fun anymore

Repeat cycle

To each their own...

Re:Silly Me

[Corgha]

I used to buy games to play and have fun.
...

What about this cycle:

• Buy the game
  
• Play the game
  
• Beat the game repeatedly
  
• Get bored because it's no fun anymore
  
• Get cheat codes
  
• Find new ways to have fun in the game and sometimes come to a better understanding of how the game's engine works
  
• See strategy guide in computer store while looking for a new game and chuckle at the silly hints, but then remember that some people might need them
  
• Repeat 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.

I've never understood the point of...

[Bonker]

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.

Re:I've never understood the point of...

[zeus_tfc]

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.

I always (well almost) used the game genie to make the game harder. Did you ever play smb1 with moon gravity? I had already beaten the game several times over, but moon gravity made the game a whole new experience. Sure you could jump higher once you figured it out, but your control was wigged out. Many times I would take a flying leap right into a pit. (WHEEeeeeeeoooooossshhii).

How about Tetris? I find a perverse pleasure in playing the "B" game with a high number of blocks already on the screen then trying to work them down to the bottom. The only problem is you only get 10 lines to do it in. With the game genie you could change it to 40!
I wasn't trying to cheat as such, just change the mechanics of the game, for better or worse, and make a different playing experience. It should be noted that I didn't have a game genie, I just borrowed one on occasion.

Thoroughly enjoying

[interiot]

Last christmas I got my little brother a GameShark for his N64. I ended up monopolizing it the entire christmas break to hack on Mario Kart 64. While I only came up with 3 codes, and have many programming challenges at my job, it was the most enjoyable hacking experience I've had in a long time. There's just something about trying to get inside the heads of the game programmers, finding clues to indicate how they coded a particular feature, persevering by spending a couple hours looking over numbers, and finally finding a result that impresses even your non-geek friends.

Re:whaaaa...??

[LordKronos]

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.

Been going on for years in back bedrooms!

[popeydotcom]

In the days of the Sinclair Spectrum or in the US, the Timex TS2048 the programs came on tape. Initially (especially for games by Ultimate-Play The Game [now RareWare]) the tape would contain a small BASIC loader, which then loaded the binary game code and executed it.

One of the skills was to load the BASIC program, break it (stop it running) and find out where the binary game code loaded. Then you'd possibly manually load the binary and start looking around at the code. Using your trusty Z80 opcode-list you'd look for places where counters were decreased (lives reduced?). You'd also look for places where initial values were set (number of lives/amount of energy). These were pretty easy to do at the start.
Once you knew the location, you could create a modified BASIC loader containing POKE statements. These would modify the contents of memory after the binary had loaded, but before it was executed. That way you could change the number of lives, or amount of energey or whatever..

Then things got a bit tricker. The developers would embed some machine code into the first line of the BASIC program. This special code would load the binary code, but using a different (non-standard) speed. This was the advent of the 'turbo-loader', the bane of most spectrum owners. With higher speed loading came the delicate balancing of the volume and tone controls on the tape desk. Get the controls wrong and the game would refuse to load.. or worse, the game would load all the way to the end, but crash either dumping you to the '(c) 1982 Sinclair Research' initial screen, or show flashing coloured blobs (sorta the equivalent of BSOD).

The other problem with turbo loaders was that you couldn't just load the binary on its own, you needed a special loader. Each game developer had their own set of routines for storing the binary data on tape. Some had cool things like counters, music or animated loading screens whilst you wait for the game to load.

People would 'decrypt' the developers loader and create their own programs to load the turbo-loader games and then hack them....

Anyway, I'm rambling..

..suffice to say, this isn't new. More complex, harder, maybe? More fun... hmmm. There's a big difference between doing this for a job, and doing it to get a namecheck in a crappy Sinclair Magazine!

Apologies to Dogbert

[Mike Schiraldi]

So let me get this straight.. You're reading a book ... about using a device ... to automatically play ... a computer simulation ... of an activity that can't exactly be called a sport?

That's about as close as you can get to being an inorganic life form.

not -1

[da5idnetlimit.com]

"another way would be to store -1 or something"

Congrats. You just described the "Sudden Death" Issue.

Look, this is life points you speak about. -1 means you are dead for a few seconds.
I know. I tested for quite a long time and -1 in life is almost always fatal.
Just as the old trick of having "EF FF" in life is better than having "FF FF".
"FF FF" usually ends up with your player @ -65 465 in life , instead of +65...8|
Shocking to see the effect on vampire weapons 8) (Diablo 1 Players welcome 8)

Re:man strings

[Syberghost]

What's the big deal with this? You can sometimes find stuff with strings or a hex program.

And when exactly did the Sony Playstation start shipping every unit with a copy of strings and a hex editor?

Well, that's one way to do it...

[Snowfox]

I'm a game developer, and I'm glad these guys are doing their thing, however I wish they would contact game developers as well.

A bit of social engineering could really up the value of the Gameshark and similar. I know I've often put some queer things into my own games and removed them at compile time, or in the last minute rush, left them resident without adding a way to activate them because I never got them past management/legal. If someone had been nagging me just after shipping, while I still had my map file handy, I'd have been more than happy to share the location of one nifty thing or another. I'd wager many other developers are just like me.

Get a hold of the publishers and they may see implementing leakable codes as a way to get a second bump in the sales chart.

Do a little digging and get a hold of the programmers themselves, and they may share things they put in for their own joy and benefit. A little push or some free gear, and they may even put bonus flashy extras in there as a side project.

Re:DCMA, Cheat Codes and MaMe

[Zocalo]

Who needs GameShark? There are plenty of tools out there that let you find codes on your own like ArtMoney and GameWiz32. Like most games these are for Windows, but both work very well. There are lots of others if you are prepared to look, but I found ArtMoney to do all I needed, which was actually circumventing a forgotten password lock rather than a lives cheat, but what the hell.

Interesting point...

[ackthpt]

I (may be in error here, but) recall the guides which came out for Infocom text adventures, years and years ago. After a few games where a hit book (which wasn't free) was pretty much essential to solve the puzzles, leading me to suspect they were becoming intentionally bizzare to sell hint books. IIRC someone other than Infocom/Activision tried to sell hint books, too and was awarded C & D letters for their business acumen.

Cheat codes are usually put in by coders for debugging purposes and sloppy Q&A practices or, perhaps more sneaky, left in intentionally to drum up additional interest in the game. Winning the game becomes less the point, knowing how to cheat and where to find specials is the paradigm.

"Dude, I just came up with the greatest keyboard sequence to reveal a cheat code!"
"Yeah? Alright! Let's design a game around it!"

I'm still creating codes for the Game Genie.....

[Rahga]

There's still plenty of gamers like me who still like playing classic NES games even today... I'm one of those fascinated at the Americanization of many of the games first released on the Famicom. For instance, in Japan, Contra had (in comparison to the US version) double the size of both of its ROMs and a non-Nintendo memory mapper that allowed the game to include extra cut scenese and special effect like trees rustling in the wind on the background of level one.....

A while back, I discovered the joy of making Game Genie codes when decided to make my four-score famicom compatible (e-mail me for info)... I lost (and still need to replace (if you are from Japan and can help me out, email me!)) my copy of Nekketsu Kakutou Densetsu, and needed something to test my converted adapter on. Knowing that the Famicom version of Super Dodge Ball had 4 player mode, but that it was removed from the NES version because of incompatibility, I simply spent some time to make a game genie code that would allow a four player beanball game on the NES.... "GEUOLZZA"
Click here for a screenshot of it.

I kept going too....

How about coed Super Spike V'Ball? (it uses unfinished/prototype characters that were not completely removed before production.)

That's "AEXGXYGE", or "AAKGNTGE" if on the same cart as NES World Cup....

I've even made a code that unlocks 3 player games in Stinger.

Any, I find this stuff loads of fun. All of it will be up on my site some day, when I get a little more time and a digital camera to show off the construction of my modified four score.....

So, to all those trolls whining about cheating and gamesharks being no fun, nyaaaaah to you. There's no way I'd ever play as Wolverine on THPS3 if I didn't make my PSX memory card reader ;)

-rah
(ahgaray atyay ahgaray otday omcay)

Remember C64 POKEs?

[adadun]

2) Game Shark (according to the article) does not use the cheats made by the companies, although, I suspect that if they are reverse engineering it, they could view the cheats. But what they do is write/edit the RAM (memory) at given moments to enhance a feature. Let's say that in memory location 255, the game Mortal Kombat stores the maximum health of player 1. What the GameShark does is, instead of letting the game store 100% there, it writes in 500% (let's say) which gives you more health. Or another way would be to store -1 or something that the program doesn't expect.

Does anyone remember the good old C64 games, where you cheated by resetting the machine, issuing a few POKE commands and restart the game using a SYS command? That utilized the exact same tecnique - POKE stored a value in RAM and SYS started executing the game.

Usually, however, these POKEs didn't rewrite RAM locations where the number of lives were stored. Instead, it replaced the actual machine code that decremented the life counter. So instead of doing:

dec $5463

The game now did:

nop
nop
nop

Which uses the same number of bytes of RAM.

There even existed hardware devices (called cartridges) that enabled you to automatically scan the memory for the locations of life counters and such. Once the life counter was found, the game code was patched in the way outlined above.

Ahhh, those were the days!

On the PC...

[Tom7]

Back in the DOS days, there was a program called "Gametools" that worked like a Game Shark for PC games. It was a whole lot more useful, though, because you could easily come up with codes yourself by searching through memory for interesting values as you played the game.

(You could also use it to write cracks for your software. Some day, this kind of software will probably end up being illegal.)

These days there are SoftICE and GDB, but programs are getting a whole lot bigger and more complicated. It's just not as fun...

Cheats and mods

[i387]

I cannot believe that the mod community hasn't been brought up. There are some games (namely id-based games) that have extremely long lives because of the mod community.

People make new maps, player models, enemies, etc. to create new experiences within the game. Without cheat codes, level creation would be near impossible.

Game developers use cheat codes to debug and test the gameplay. If they took the cheats out before release, there would be no mods for the game and the lifespan would be much shorter.

It is NOT illegal under dmca

[rebelcool]

Christ im tired of reading the ignorant messages about 'this is illegal under dmca', more proof that the DMCA is simply a word flung about by the fools here without a shred of understanding...

The DMCA covers copy protection. It has NOTHING to do with this. In fact, here's a subsection of DMCA *maintaining* the right to reverse engineer in this way:

`(f) REVERSE ENGINEERING- (1) Notwithstanding the provisions of subsection (a)(1)(A), a person who has lawfully obtained the right to use a copy of a computer program may circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a particular portion of that program for the sole purpose of identifying and analyzing those elements of the program that are necessary to achieve interoperability of an independently created computer program with other programs, and that have not previously been readily available to the person engaging in the circumvention, to the extent any such acts of identification and analysis do not constitute infringement under this title.

Please, for the love of god, read the text of the DMCA before ever mentioning it again. It's fairly short and to the point.

Text of DMCA

The first easter egg

[psxndc]

I read in an EGM article (I think that's where I read it) a couple months ago that the first documented easter egg was in "Adventure" way back when. The creator had the hero pick up a pixel (big back then) that was the same color of the wall it was embedded in. By carrying it around to some far part of the board, you could get into a room that had the game creator's name in it.

http://www.warrenrobinett.com/adventure/

psxndc

Underpaid

[srichman]

the game guys at Interact earn $28,000 to $60,000 a year -- but this is a dream job for young gamers with remarkable programming skills

Doesn't 28k-60k seem a little low for employees with "remarkable programming skills"?

Hacking?

[exceed]

I find it kind of amusing that this articles constantly mentions the programmers "hacking into the game system" as if they are gaining unauthorized access to some machine on the Internet. When will the press use this term correctly?