The History of Games Cheats
Video game cheats allow players to gain advantages in the games they play, such as infinite health or invincibility. Whether the advantage is used for testing purposes or to make the game more fun, cheating has always been an integral part of gaming history.
Some cheats are created by game developers for their own use or to help test a new feature. These “cheat codes” are often hidden in the game and can range from unlocking levels to granting special items. Other cheats are created by third-party software or hardware devices. Third-party cheats can range from simple POKE commands to graphical user interfaces that display the memory addresses needed to change a game’s statistics.
The concept of games cheats first emerged in the 1980s, when gamers with a little bit of computer knowledge could manipulate the 8-bit computing systems of the day to directly hack into the game’s memory and change its values. Lives, ammo and other statistics were stored in a block of memory that was accessible with a simple string of POKE commands.
Third-party software and hardware devices like the Multiface, Game Genie, and Datel’s Action Replay enabled gamers to cheat in a wide variety of games. However, these third-party cheats didn’t sit well with Nintendo, who sued companies that sold them for violating copyright laws. This lead to the inclusion of first-party cheats within many wildly popular games.
Cheating has become a major part of the video game experience, and it can happen in just about any multiplayer game. According to a recent study by Irdeto, 33% of players claim that other people’s cheating negatively impacts their multiplayer gaming experience, while 18% say that it happens constantly. The most common types of cheating include boosting, coin farms, stat padding, and scripting.
Most games today have built-in anti-cheating measures, but these can be circumvented by using third party hacking tools or creating your own. For example, in some games weapons can be fired more quickly than the average player by binding the firing button to a scroll wheel on a keyboard or mouse or by using a macro setting that simulates rapid key presses automatically. Generally, this is considered a form of cheating, and most games prohibit it.
Most gamers will agree that there are certain activities that shouldn’t be considered cheating, such as asking for outside assistance during a match in which decision making is the primary focus. But even this type of behavior can be considered cheating when done to an unfair extent, such as by a Hearthstone pro who recently got caught asking his friend for advice in the middle of a match. While this is not hacking per se, it still breaks the spirit of the game. And this is why it’s important to use anti-cheat software or avoid playing in servers that aren’t protected against this type of cheating.