Video Games Cheats
Video game cheats are a major part of the gaming experience, giving players an advantage they otherwise wouldn’t have. Whether it’s the infamous aimbot, wallhacks or scripting, there’s always an edge to be had for gamers willing to go against the grain and break the rules of fair competition. But what is a cheat and how does it work? This article investigates five of the most popular video game cheats, their mechanics, impacts and ongoing fight against them.
Cheating in games has been around for as long as there have been video games. It originally started out as a way for developers to debug titles during development and then became an essential tool for testers. Gamers quickly discovered that they liked using third-party cheats, too, which helped them reach high scores and share their favorite codes through word of mouth.
The earliest self-made game cheats took advantage of the 8-bit computing systems of their time by changing memory values. The game’s statistics — how many lives, ammo or health a player had — were all just variables stored in the computer’s memory, and so clever gamers could manipulate them by using POKE commands. They then shared their cheats with other gamers by word of mouth, helping the gaming guide craze of the 1990s take off.
More sophisticated third-party game cheats came about in the 2000s, as esports began to grow and a professional gaming industry emerged. Cheating was now out of the question in skill-based tournaments, where large prize money was on the line. Developers began to program controllable environments that couldn’t be easily altered by cheating, and they also implemented anti-cheat solutions, which monitor a game’s memory access to ensure no changes are made.
Despite the shift in the gaming world, there are still plenty of gamers who like to use cheats in online multiplayer games. These internal game cheats are usually more complex to create, requiring knowledge of how to bypass an anti-cheat system and often using raw math or geometry to overload rendering functions.
External game cheats, which are based on macro scripting and modifying the game software, can be used to activate raised sights, aimbots, twinking, artificial lag and stat-padding. This kind of cheating requires the user to know how the game’s anti-cheat is designed and how to exploit its vulnerabilities, which is why it is so popular with gamers looking to get ahead in a competitive multiplayer environment.
It is important to note that while these game cheats are still wildly popular, they violate the terms of service set forth by many gaming platforms and can ruin the experience for legitimate players. Fortunately, the esports world has created an incentive for developers to provide a more regulated gaming experience and prevent cheating in their games. As a result, most modern games employ anti-cheat technologies, which continue to evolve to keep out new cheats and make old ones obsolete. This is an ongoing challenge to ensure that a fair playing field remains intact for all gamers, and it will likely continue well into the future.