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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.
So cheat codes are alive and well - they just now start with $ sign.
If you leave off the last letter, does that make it a wor?
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.
Isn't it B -> A? The article's title has it as A -> B. I find this quite distracting.
Well, then you don't know the gaming industry. Basically people work on a game and then get laid off.
This was fine back in the days where once you release, you can't patch (which was really helped because consoles of yore were a lot simpler to test for - nowadays you have to check out your 3D models and for glitching that could let players walk through walls because a/b/c/d/e was just right). Then there's the gameplay breaking bugs where if you save at the wrong moment, you can't restore.
Problem is, you can't patch the game if the developers aren't there anymore, and there's about a 2 month leadtime between submission of a game and when it appears on the shelf - pressing discs can easily be a month (your disc is just another one in the big press queue), and distribution another month (from disc factory to factory to distributiors and then to retail warehouses, etc).
So you have a team of devs sitting idle for two months. Well, you could put them on fixing some of the more egregious bugs found (leading to day 1 patches) because they have an extra 2 months to fix it, and the other devs (and artists, etc) can work on making extras (day 1 DLC). Because the moment the game is released, gamers might find a bug and you need to get people fixing it.
Developers can't sit around idle, and if a game's done, either you reallocate them to a new project, or lay them off. Either option doesn't work if you need to fix bugs. That's why you have day 1 patches (extra 2 months to fix bugs), day 1 DLC (2 months to generate content), and day 1 gamebreaking bugs.
And once someone is reassigned to another project, it's damn near impossible to get them to go back and fix issues with the existing code (just getting them back up to speed and building the code can be challenge all in itself).
Very few games get patched after the first month as that gets treated as the official close of the project. Unless there's a business case to keep DLC going in which case you'll have a small team for that. But that's it, and most games on the shelves are dead after the first month.
Well, then you don't know the gaming industry. Basically people work on a game and then get laid off.
And all this has just about zero to do with the comment you replied to. Which I agree with, by the way.
THIS is the reason I don't buy many competitive games anymore. When you can buy your way through them, then who gives a shit at getting good at the game?
I don't give the slightest damn about the gaming industry's internal problems. I didn't create them. I'm a customer, and I don't like their product.
Period. It's that simple. Make a product I want to buy, or I won't buy it.
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.