The History of Games Cheats

Game cheats have long been an indelible part of gaming history, initially used to help developers debug titles during development and then discovered by gamers who would enter codes to give themselves superpowers such as infinite ammo or extra lives. While the original code entry method was a pain to use (going back to the title screen, loading up a new game and then typing in the cheat) the process was eventually simplified with the advent of dedicated game cheat cartridges such as the Galoob Multiface and Datel Action Replay which allowed players to easily input third-party cheats without having to tinker with the actual game code.

This was the era when gamers really started to get into making their own cheats, using knowledge of how 8-bit computing systems worked to change memory values in games. Players learned how to use a POKE command in a game’s code to alter a character’s statistics like lives, ammo and weapons. As more and more gamers began using these self-made cheats they then shared them with others via word of mouth. This also spawned the gaming guide craze of the 1990s, with publications such as Nintendo Power and Tips & Tricks occupying space on school lunchroom tables.

When the industry moved to online multiplayer and skill-based tournament play in the 2000s, this shifted the attitude toward cheating. With huge sums of prize money on the line, competitive gaming companies were incentivized to program their games so that they couldn’t be exploited by cheaters, and players were pushed towards learning to master the game without cheating.

But this doesn’t mean that all players are happy with the status quo. Some people still have the time, money and technical knowhow to make their own games cheats for more power in their multiplayer games – whether it’s to win a tournament or simply get an edge over their opponents. These kinds of cheaters force the gaming industry to work on anti-cheat solutions and can damage a game’s brand reputation as well as user loyalty.

There are two types of game cheaters: The average player who uses them for fun or because they lack the skills to win; and the malicious cheater who does it to gain something like publicity, or even money by winning tournaments. Both of these can cause a lot of problems for a game and lead to other players giving up the game altogether, choosing to find a different title that doesn’t suffer from cheating.

Internal game cheats are usually created by hackers or very skilled programmers who have access to a game’s source code file. These cheats then have to be written in a way that they can dumb down the external offsets and/or internal information and this is where learning some basic file forensics comes into play. External game cheats on the other hand are often created by pastebins that are purely motivated to make money by over pricing their cheats and inflating their features, such as raised sights or aimbot.