A Brief History of Cheating in Video Games

Since the dawn of video games, cheats have existed in one form or another. Most of the first cheat codes were put in games for testing purposes. Cheats were introduced to help lower the time it would take for play tester to test the game. An example of an early cheat code can be found in the game Manic Miner. The phone number of the developer will activate the cheat mode.

Cheating on early home computers was common practice. Numerical values are stored 'as is' in memory of a computer game. It is possible for a gamer to reprogram a small portion of the game before starting it up. With early 8-bit computers, it was common for a gamer to load a game in to memory, and modify memory addresses before launching the game. This could result in getting extra lives, invisibility, etc. POKE sentences were used in order to perform such operations. With the proper cartridge or add-on, a player of the Commodore 64 or ZX Spectrum would be able to freeze a running program and enter a new POKE.

Magazines of the time would often contain lists of POKE's and instructions for using them in games. To find POKE's, a hacker had to be able to interpret machine code and then locate the specific point where a value changes.

Technology oriented players were able to exploit such methods of cheating because of the difficulty of doing so. However, an industry was very quickly formed on the back of cheating as new gaming systems evolved. Cheating has now become a part of a strong gaming culture and books, guides and cheat cartridges are available for almost every platform. Cheating was not always accepted though, and many have spoken out against it over the years. It was often considered that cheating is not part of the philosophy of fairness.

With modern gaming, cheating has become very popular. There are now dozens of magazines and hundreds if not thousands of cheat based websites. In fact, even a television show dedicated to listing cheats has been created. POKE cheats are now a thing of the past and trainers and cheat codes are now main stream. Most cheats these days are not implemented by gamers, but are in fact inserted into the game by the developers.

There are a few reasons why developers insert cheats into games. One reason is that with such a large cheating culture in modern day gaming, cheats have become expected by gamers. Also, game developers realise that not everyone has the time to finish their games and cheats are therefore inserted to help speed up the process. People such as game reviewers fit into this category and cheats will allow them to experience more of the game. Not to mention that cheating can really increase the replay-ability of a game by adding a new twist.

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