The History of Games Cheats
Cheating in video games enables players to gain an advantage beyond normal gameplay. In single-player games this makes the game easier to play; in multiplayer games it gives the cheater a competitive edge over other players. In either case, cheating undermines the gaming experience for millions of legitimate players, and creates a significant challenge to game cyber security.
Cheats can be implemented from within the game itself (a built-in code), from third-party software tools designed to break a game’s security features, or using external hardware cheating devices. Some cheats modify the game’s underlying system drivers, making them harder to detect than changes in game data files. For example, a simple wallhack may modify the game’s graphics driver to ignore depth checking, allowing the player to see through walls. Other cheats require the user to enter a series of code commands to trigger an action in the game. These can include everything from superhuman aim and invisibility to a complete lack of penalty for death or instant health regeneration.
Many of these hacks are illegal, violating both copyright and the Terms of Service (ToS) of the game. Moreover, the use of these hacks violates the DMCA, and is punishable by civil and criminal penalties in some jurisdictions. Even when legal, these cheats are often unethical. They break the trust of millions of legitimate gamers, and ruin the gaming experience for them.
The history of gaming cheats began long before the first video game consoles were introduced to the public. For testers, and the lucky few who had access to a game before it was released, games cheats were a vital part of the debugging process. The ability to modify game variables like health, currency and energy was essential for testing the gap between platforms, determining how far a player could get on level 12, or whether an in-game event was happening as expected.
During the heady days of 8-bit computing, it was common practice to load a game into memory and then POKE at a portion of its code, changing the numerical values that defined the game variables – such as how many lives a character had, or how much energy they had available. Magazines at the time were full of pages dedicated to POKEing, cheat codes and map hacks.
The advent of the Nintendo Game Genie allowed users to bypass these kinds of cheats, introducing a graphical user interface that gave them a selection of pre-defined cheats to activate in the game. This didn’t go down too well with the mighty legal force that is Nintendo, who sued the manufacturers of the Game Genie for violating their copyrights. Despite these legal challenges, the hardware cheating industry flourished with devices such as the Datel Action Replay, which provided similar functionality but added an instant game save function and a number of other features to enhance the gaming experience. The proliferation of online, downloadable game cheats has brought new challenges for video game security professionals. However, with the right community reporting mechanisms, vigilance and regular updates to anti-cheat systems, it is possible to safeguard fair competition and an immersive gaming experience for all.
