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The Rise and Fall of the Cheat Code
An anonymous reader writes A new feature published this week takes a deep-dive look at
the history of the cheat code and its various manifestations over the years, from manual 'pokes' on cassettes to pass phrases with their own dedicated menus — as well as their rise from simple debug tool in the early days of bedroom development to a marketing tactic when game magazines dominated in the 1990s, followed by dedicated strategy guides. Today's era of online play has all but done away with them, but the need for a level playing field isn't the only reason for their decline: as one veteran coder points out, why give away cheats for free when you can charge for them as in-app purchases? "Bigger publishers have now realized you can actually sell these things to players as DLC. Want that special gun? Think you can unlock it with a cheat code? Nope! You've got to give us some money first!"
First up, up, up, left, left, down, right, down, right, up, up.
Don't leave children
Dangling like crickets,
Dark legs chained.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
So cheat codes are alive and well - they just now start with $ sign.
We get to have cheat codes whenever we want and you can go shove your DLC up your ass. Just fire up a memory editor/debugger, CheatEngine being a free purpose designed one, and you are good to go.
The whole "selling cheat codes" thing is just so scummy. Particularly since I think it can lead to the "pay2win" mentality of "Maybe we should make this harder, so people need to give us money for cheats!"
And this is why my XBox isn't connected to the interwebs.
I'm not interested in your damned in-game economy, and I have no interest in getting my ass kicked by a 12 year old playing on-line.
I'll stick with my off-line gaming, thank you very much.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
this may just be my opinion as a greybeard, but back in my day of commander keen and blake stone: aliens of gold, Cheat codes existed but players rarely used them. part of the games replayability was its challenge; its where nintendo users patented the phrase 'nintendo hard.' Sure, you always knew the kid down the block with the Game Genie, but there was a certain pride and honor to beating Duck Tales without using it.
my question is when will DLC stop? I already bought the game, and back in my day that meant half or a quarter of the content. some can argue shareware was analagous to DLC but thats a stretch. Shareware originally came on BBS systems and was a form of advertising. it convinced you to mail in a check for $25 and get that sweet copy of Duke Nukem 1. DLC just serves to segregate players by monetary class, effectively voiding any reason to care about prowess in gameplay. Some trustfund kid in hawaii will always be able to kill you with his microtransaction-approved skill enhancement that doesnt get flagged on multiplayer servers as cheating. Turning my playing field into an ayn rand capitalist paradise will certainly make me reconosider your games.
tethering me to a multiplayer universe serves only two purposes I can think, perhaps 3. Its a way to ensure you rent me a product instead of me buying it, and it prevents me from using your game without you knowing exactly how and when i decide to play it. Sometimes im not here to collaborate and that should be OK. i should be allowed to selfishly play a game by myself, i shouldnt have to 'authenticate' with your servers and i should be allowed to avoid entirely your rich tapestry of trash-talking 13 year olds and perhaps multitask with a bit of quake in one window, and code in the other.
Good people go to bed earlier.
I think the reason they don't have cheats anymore is not because they can sell them as DLC, but because they CAN'T sell them anymore. If you look at it, cheats were first invented as a method of copy-protection, rather than a testing device.
It's most evident in a lot of older NES games (usually ones that were made before battery-backed saves) where the most commonly used "cheats" were so-called continue codes - button inputs that could be used to continue after a game over. These things were all over the place, and were usually listed in the way back of the game's manual. This was mostly a tactic to stop rentals and re-sale, since there was no easy way to look up the codes and unless you had the manual or knew someone who did, you'd be out of luck. Even the Konami Code is an example of this: unless you are very highly skilled at Contra, which was one of the first games to feature the code, you are probably not going to finish Contra without the extra lives granted by the code.
It makes me sad that I still remember IDSPISPOPD ...
"If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear." - Every fascist, ever
Isn't it B -> A? The article's title has it as A -> B. I find this quite distracting.
I never did figure out how that's so easy to remember... you wouldn't think it would be, but there it is 10+ years later.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
Some pinball machines easter eggs and some even gives you extra points.
http://hem.bredband.net/b25718...
I've heard this accusation before, but I'm not seeing much evidence of a trend.
Goggling "pay DLC cheat codes" brings up a few examples that I then looked into with gamefaqs. Dead rising 2 has some cheats you can pay for, but there were no cheats in dead rising one. Saints row 3 appears to have other cheats for free that are roughly the same thing. Sleeping dogs cheat DLCs appear to simply be shortcuts, like buying in-game money.
It seems to me like more games are simply cutting out cheats altogether, for free or paid. I suspect it's more about wanting to make sure cheats don't ruin the mandatory online multiplayer portion that all games seem to have to have, or ruin the achievement/trophy systems. GTA had always been good for cheats, but GTA V, the cheats are severely limited. Invincibility only for 5 minutes, and cheats can't be used in missions. It's annoying: replaying games with cheat codes gives more replay value: several months after beating a game fairly, I might want to play it again, but don't want to spend as much time getting the hang of it again.
That's why I used them. I'd play the original SimCity, Civilization, and Warcraft (before "World of") and I quite honestly stunk at them. Complex resource management in a game just felt like work to me. So I'd cheat. I'd build a city in SimCity, give myself a ton of cash, toss a few disasters through my city, and then rebuild. For Civilization, I'd give myself unlimited money and buy everything up. (At the time, I called it the "Bill Gates Strategy.") I'd use diplomats to buy other civilizations' cities and troops until only their home city was left. Then, I'd either crush them or keep them around so the game wouldn't end. In Warcraft, I'd make it a "good day to die" and send one peon wood-cutting orc against an army of humans. The humans would be blasting him like crazy, but he's just slowly work his way through them until they were all dead. Did I ruin the point of the games? Sure. Still, it turned them from past times that would have frustrated me until I tossed them aside to games I kept playing over and over.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.