Before the internet was a welcoming place for pre-teens, we relied on two sources for gaming tips – magazine walkthroughs that were often spread across multiple issues, and hearsay from kids at school. Everyone ‘knew’ how to get Lara Croft naked, how to catch Mew…all because a friend of a friend of someone’s older brother read online about some secret cheat. These kinds of cheats spread like wildfire, and there were always very specific, yet very different tactics to completing them. We had memorised button combinations for level select codes, and the exact sequence of events needed to run into Missing No. But nine times out of ten, these very specific cheats turned out to be a complete waste of time. How many of us tried to get to that weird looking truck near the S.S. Anne?

There is of course, some truth to a few of these cheats. Encountering a certain trainer with a particular Pokémon in Pokémon Red/Blue that corresponds to the hexadecimal for Mew can trick the game into loading a random encounter with a wild one. It is stuff like this that I hadn’t really understood until I started to play around with hex values in emulators – since there was no risk of corrupting a cartridge this way. Even now, I only have a limited understanding of how the values correspond to one another, but it’s amazing that someone was curious enough to crack the game back then and work it all out. As a kid with no programming knowledge, it just seemed like a magical coincidence that a certain chain of events could trigger this kind of pay-off. About the only cheats I managed to pull off as a kid were all Pokémon based. I knew the Missing No. cheat in Pokémon Red and the Pokémon cloning trick in Pokémon Gold, and that was pretty much it. Funnily enough, it was a friend’s older brother who told us about the cloning glitch, and we passed it on to our friends in the neighbourhood. My brother got in on it too, and whenever we link battled I’d always be faced with a team of six level 100 Mewtwos. Typical seven year old mentality, I guess. On the other hand, I was a big fan of my level 100+ Haunter that I caught with the Missing No. trick. But battling wasn’t the draw card for me in Pokémon, it was the exploration and that’s what got me into trying to find all sorts of secrets and hidden areas.

When it came to other games, my brother and I found the majority of our cheats in copies of Playstation Magazine. These cheats helped me to play the end levels of Abe’s Oddysee that were too difficult to reach otherwise, to unlock the Spyro demo hidden in the Crash Bandicoot 3 start screen and well, get past the second island in the original Crash Bandicoot because I was awful at it. There was something about reading cheats out of a magazine that wasn’t as satisfying though.

Once I got a little older and more confident with using the internet, I found myself lurking GameFAQs for hints on how to best get through the overwhelmingly huge world of Final Fantasy VIII. Though I tried my best to avoid spoilers, sometimes it couldn’t be avoided. It didn’t really feel like cheating, since I’d still have to go and junction certain stats or refine particular items myself. In fact, the closest I really came to cheating in Final Fantasy VIII was using the trick where you’d pop the lid of the PSone while you ran the slots on Selphie’s limit break until you got The End. It was the only way I could execute the move, since it had such a low chance of appearing in regular gameplay. It got me through some pretty tough battles, but sometimes I got too hasty skipping the boring Thundaga x 3 slots and completely go past The End or even Rapture and send myself into button mashing rage. Maybe playing legitimately is the best way to go after all.

One of the last games I remember having the pleasure of cheating in was The Sims. Good ol’ ‘rosebud’. Or ‘motherlode’ if I was feeling really lazy. Sometimes the cheats were useful for building hacks before the sequels enabled more freedom for budding architects. Sure the money cheats sucked some of the fun out the game and the instant gratification wears off pretty quickly, but who wouldn’t want a robot butler while maintaining glorious unemployment?

I’d say the value of cheats in games can be narrowed down to a few key areas –

• Cheats that were written by developers for testing purposes accessible in debug menus. Usually to speed up testing and to see how far they could push an engine. Usually results in some game breaking fun. I’ve mainly played around with these in emulators.
• Cheats hidden by developers as type of easter egg. You know, big heads + slappers only in Goldeneye? Any Maxis cheats that carry on throughout sequels count too.
• Incidental cheats discovered by players messing around with the game. Most of those Pokémon cheats would fall under this category. It kind of feels like this type of cheat has disappeared in the last decade, but the rise of shonky physics engines last gen led to some pretty hilarious exploits in Skate 3.

With development budgets rising, and games being expected to be grander in scale, it’s no surprise that QA testing has taken prevalence since the 32 bit era. That’s definitely not to say that games are released without bugs, because where would Ubisoft be without the endless support of consumers purchasing half-finished yearly sequels? But it seems much harder to break a game now than it was fifteen or twenty years ago, and it’s mainly because developers finally understand 3D environments better than they used to. Think about how broken Super Mario 64 or The Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time were, early 3D games involved a lot of clipping and collision errors that led to some pretty interesting exploits. But you only really see these tricks used in speedruns nowadays.

It’s a little disappointing for games to get to this point where they have to be taken seriously, and even including easter egg style cheats is considered immature. Instead we’re reduced to pay-to-win tactics, where you can unlock character costumes or skins as DLC. Don’t have time to steal all that money the hard way in GTAV? Nobody does! Buy these million dollar shark cards on PSN or Xbox Live and get your instant gratification for only a fraction of the original game’s cost! What a time to be alive. Truth be told, I miss the days of gaming rumours and I’d rather believe in the existence of a Mew under a truck than pay my way to the end of a game.