Nobody likes a cheater – but talk to any veteran gamer, and they’ll likely have nostalgic memories surrounding cheat codes.
These secret passwords and button combinations have quite a long and interesting history. What started as developer secrets eventually turned into easter eggs for players to find, before slowly being phased out and transformed into controversial user-generated mods and hacks.
In this post, we’ll dive deeper into the history of cheating in video games and explore some of the most famous cheat codes throughout the decades.
The first cheat codes
The first cheat codes were never supposed to be discovered by players. Developers added them as testing tools for easily fixing bugs and glitches – this included codes to skip levels and infinite health codes that allowed developers to test various game functions.
It’s hard to say what the first ever cheat code was, however one of the earliest documented examples can be found in a game called Magic Miner in 1983. In this game, players could enter the code 6031769 to select from any level in the game. It’s likely that this was part of developer Matt Smith’s driving license number or phone number, and that it had been added during testing.
In the 80s, cheats were typically discovered by trial and error, or by developers sharing them with friends who then leaked them. One famous cheat code that developers forgot to remove was the Konami code in 1986’s Gradius. This was a sequence of buttons that went like this: up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A. Players discovered this full power-up cheat code by accident and news spread quickly, until it became common knowledge among gamers. Konami embraced this, adding this same cheat code to later game titles like Contra, and turning the cheat code into a deliberate feature for players to find.
The rise of cheating
More game developers intentionally started adding cheat codes for players to find during the 80s. This led to more players discovering them and sharing them. In 1988, the magazine Nintendo Power began publishing codes, turning them into communal secrets.
Players were already hacking machines and games in the 80s, but typically this required a lot of coding prowess or understanding of gaming electronic hardware. Then, in 1990 a series of cartridges called Game Genie were released for the NES which changed this – these allowed everyday people to tamper with the code of their favorite games. Nintendo would launch a massive lawsuit in 1992 over these cartridges – they lost the lawsuit, however it would not be the last lawsuit related to hacking and modding.
The golden age of cheat codes
The 1990s and early 2000s was the golden age of cheat codes in games. During this era, famous cheat codes like Doom’s God mode password ‘iddqd’, and The Sims money-generating cheat code ‘Rosebud’ became general knowledge among gamers.
This era also saw the rise of comical Easter Egg cheat codes – not designed to give players an advantage, but simply to add some more fun to the game. This includes Goldeneye’s ‘big head mode’ cheat code, GTA: San Andreas’s flying cars cheat code and NBA Jam’s unlockable characters (including Bill Clinton!).
Some games incorporated huge lists of cheat codes for players to discover. These would be updated in monthly gaming magazines or shared on dedicated websites. Unfortunately, cheat codes would soon be on their way out…
The fall of cheat codes
Throughout the 00s, multi-player gaming started to shift from local splitscreen matches and LAN parties, to online multiplayer games with players around the world. As games started to bring in tournaments, ranking systems and achievement trophies, cheat codes started to become a problem, and many games stopped introducing them.
A software known as PunkBuster was introduced in the early 00s and adopted by many developers to detect and prevent cheating in online games, banning players from servers who were found to be cheating. This had a significant impact on the use of cheat codes, hacks and mods, putting off many gamers from using them.
Around this time, developers also started to realize that they could start charging players to ‘cheat’. Instead of letting players get extra ammo using free cheat codes, many games started introducing online marketplaces where players could buy extra ammo. This kickstarted the controversial ‘pay to win’ model that some games today are still accused of using, giving players willing to spend more money an unfair advantage. Funny features like unique character skins similarly turned into paid additional content.
The rise of hacks and mods
While developer-added cheat codes have mostly disappeared from modern releases, mods and hacks created by players have continued to thrive. In fact, the rise of the internet made hacking and modding more accessible to more players, allowing certain mods to be more easily shared.
Nowadays, there are sites dedicated to hacks and mods – like these BF6 cheats and hacks – that players can now pay to download. This includes everything from aimbots to no recoil hacks. Some developers have been fighting back against this, but players continue to build more elaborate mods that are harder to detect.
It’s worth noting that some developers like Bethesda and Valve have embraced hacking and modding. The game Skyrim for example has spawned an endless number of mods that players can tinker around with, helping to keep the game popular over the years. Such games are typically not played online and so the impact to other players isn’t as much of a concern to developers.
Will traditional cheat codes make a comeback?
Some relatively modern games like GTA V, The Sims 4 and Red Dead Redemption 2 have continued to add cheat codes. But it seems unlikely that we will see a widespread comeback now that online games rule the market and in-game purchases are the preferred way to give players an advantage.
Things might change if there is a rise in offline gaming in the future. There has certainly been a rise in retro gaming, but it seems unlikely that most players will give up online games.
