The year was 1999.
I had borrowed my sister’s Game Boy and was in the late stages of Pokemon Red.
I never wanted this summer to end.
I remember... surfing up the coast until I found the glitch that would turn the singular master ball in my sixth
item slot into 99 master balls.
I could catch anything, from Pidgey to Mewtwo.
I was powerful.
I was unstoppable.
Cheating used to be FUN.
[honestly sick hard rock guitar song churning]
[EXPLOSION]
So what happened!?
What it even means “to cheat,” and why it’s considered bad, is almost impossible
to define for video games.
In the days of yore, using an Action Replay to – gasp!– save your progress!! was considered
cheating.
Even today, some people argue that save-scumming is uncouth, while some devs are embracing
it as a feature.
This divide can be traced back to early arcade culture.
Debate has raged for decades about whether tilting a pinball machine is fair or foul
play.
It got you more points, but you weren’t duping anybody, so why was it considered cheating
at all?
Weeeeeeeell, hypothetically, the arcade owner WAS being cheated.
If you nudged the board to keep your ball from dropping, you weren’t feeding another
quarter into that metal maw.
Once players realized they could hump a machine into victory, it became widespread practice
– which lead to damaged machines.
Pinball wizards would toss and shake and drop the boards, so not only were arcade owners
missing out on revenue, they were on the hook for busted property!
Pinball manufacturers responded by adding preventatives (ominous).
When this plumb bob touches the ring, it completes a circuit, which could lock the flippers or
reset the score.
Anti-tilt tech was meant to stop cheaters.
But it also basically added a new mechanic, one with high risk, high reward.
Using tilt became a skill.
But some purists still consider using it at all to be cheating, because it’s not “in
the spirit of the challenge.”
And! It could bust your whip.
Anthropologist Shinichi Nakazawa argues that the pleasure of pinball is inherently competitive
– not against other players, against the machine itself.
And the competition between players and manufacturers, that escalation in tactics, never really leaves
gaming culture.
In fact, it’ll only become more intense as we telescope into the future.
The earliest recognized “cheat” in a video game came in Adventure.
Most games of this era were made by lone programmers, the Toby Foxes of their time.
But companies like Atari didn’t want to give credit to developers.
According to Warren Robinett, the dev who made Adventure, this was to keep the talent
anonymous, so they wouldn’t get poached or get famous.
So Robinett added his name as a secret.
When Atari management discovered this, they were angry that Robinett pulled one over on them.
But players loved it; it was fun to uncover secrets.
Fun!!!
Atari manager Steve Wright dubbed it an “easter egg.”
This “cheat” didn’t power up the player.
But in her book Cheating: Gaining Advantage in Videogames, Mia Consalvo argues that somebody
was being cheated here – Warren Robinett, the person who was denied credit for his creative work.
So Robinett “cheated” back, by making an advantage that the people in power didn't
think he should have.
By that definition, it’s a lot closer to what we think of as a cheat: accessing forbidden power.
99 fuckin' master balls!
But of course, anything that exists outside of capitalism will inevitably be co-opted
by it.
It became official policy that all Atari games must have secrets.
Other game companies followed suit.
What a fun way to ensure your developers still weren’t really getting credit!
Thankfully easter eggs quickly evolved from submerged credits into real power-ups, like
the hidden flags in Xevious.
Hitting one granted a bonus life – but they were really hard to find accidentally.
You wouldn’t just stumble across them; your best bet was to peek over another player’s
shoulder in the arcade.
Xevious was hugely popular and influential.
Players were obsessed – not with getting high scores, but with finding all the secrets,
from easter eggs to bugs and errors.
Hunting was a community practice in arcades; knowing where all the secrets were gave you
social capital.
It made you a cool kid.
And players did this because they loved Xevious, or whatever game they were hunting through.
They wanted to extend their time with it, without just replaying.
Nakazawa argues that bug-hunting was an escape from the “capitalistic pleasure of playing
for the sake of attaining high scores…” but he also knew that capitalism would eventually
subsume this practice too.
He refers to these bug-hunting players as “game freaks.”
Inspired by Xevious’ secrets, developer Kazuhisa Hashimoto hid UFOs in his works.
But that’s not why he added a little secret code to his port of the arcade game GRADius.
No, that was all about efficiency.
The code gave him all available power-ups, so he could easily playtest the game.
It was meant to be removed in the final version, but it was discovered too late in production.
Although unlikely to be input on accident, it was really easy to remember.
Up, up, down, down, left right left right, b… a…
That exploit became known as the Konami Code, arguably the most well-known cheat.
This isn’t the only instance of a dev code being leveraged for power, but what’s really
funny is that some of these devs have openly admitted to never legitimately beating their
own games.
The codes were dev-exclusive difficulty modes.
They weren’t meant for the public, so in this sense it is “cheating” because you’re
going against the dev’s intentions for the game.
It wasn’t long before the communal bug-hunt became big business.
Secrets were a major selling point for gaming magazines during the 80s and 90s.
Some had tips from players, but often the clues came from game publishers themselves,
in exchange for cover stories.
They were exclusives – back when you could have exclusives because “copy-and-pasting”
involved literal paste.
Games got advertising, magazines got content.
And players got secrets, to show off to their friends, like a very lo-fi pay-to-win.
It was building on, and reinforcing, the idea of bug-hunting as a part of gaming culture.
It was this big cycle of community and capitalism.
So by the time the Konami Code appeared in the port of Contra, it was put there on purpose.
It wasn’t a “cheat” because it defied a dev’s intentions.
It was only a cheat because it gave you power than you wouldn’t otherwise have.
Players were hungry for that power.
And devs knew it!!
They’d program a cheat into one game – and then counter-program it in the next.
In Gradius 3, entering the Konami Code gave you all the power ups… then blew up your
ship when you unpaused!
In Doom, there was a cheat code that unlocked unlimited ammo and armor.
But if you remembered that code and tried it in id Software’s next game, it would
replace your weapons with a shitty little staff.
Tomb Raider 1 had a cheat sequence that powered you up, but if you use the same sequence in
Tomb Raider 2…
[BOOM!]
This truly was the golden era of cheats.
The hunter-dev relationship was essentially playful.
Codes were in the spirit of video games, which are really just a series of challenges some
beautiful strangers craft to keep us occupied.
Consalvo says that bug-hunting was a way to “not only play a game but play with a game.”
Players weren’t cheating to get it over with.
That was like their whole allowance for the month!
They were cheating to get the most out of the experience that they could.
Cheats extended the lifespan of a cartridge.
I cheated because I loved Pokemon and I would do anything to keep playing.
And nobody lost money or got hurt, except for the legion of Snorlaxes, Abras, Rhyhorns,
and Chanseys I caught with my unlimited master balls.
Cheats were so valuable, a side industry broke off to provide them outside the purview
of the game companies.
One of the earliest coyly billed itself as a way of “fixing” Castle Wolfenstein…
with the benefit of packing your inventory and starting in any room.
And it came with a map and a guide!
What a deal!
Hardware exploits, like cheat cartridges and mod chips, followed soon after.
Commercial boy, yelling: This is GAME GENIE!
Second Boy, also yelling: FROM GALOOB!
Commercial Boy: The awesome video game enhancer for your —
Second Boy: Nintendo Entertainment System!
Jenna: As with other cheats, they were exclusively used on home consoles, but they were really
heavily advertised as “cheating,” giving the aura of a naughty, illegal behavior.
FBI Agent: Your hacking days are over!
Jenna: It was all very in keeping with the radical, edgy, corporate-sponsored-rebellion energy
that game marketing had in this era.
Here’s a fake condom ad for your child.
It doesn’t even make sense.
[explosion fading out]
Boyz: EXXXXCCCCCELLLLLENNNNNNT!!
Jenna: These hacks gave you access to scandalous power-ups like infinite health and ammo, as
well as the dastardly ability to… record your high scores or start at different levels
of the game.
AKA basic shit that is really standard in games now.
The cheat-to-feature evolution!
Despite the naughty-lad advertising, cheats were still pretty low-stakes and goofy.
But that self-directed cheeky fun would soon take a dark turn.
To paraphrase Sartre, hell is gaming with other people online.
But in the early 2000s, players discovered that some Action Replay cheats would function
in online multiplayer games of SOCOM U.S. Navy SEALs.
Cheating meant getting an unfair advantage over other players, and those players might
have no idea why they suddenly sucked!
Early multiplayer games had basically no defenses against cheating because companies didn’t
know they needed to be concerned about that.
And I let my grain, chickens, and foxes freely intermingle, I hope nothing goes horribly wrong!
That formerly playful and pretty inconsequential arms race between devs and cheaters
was suddenly really, really important.
Different people have different standards for how to play a game.
And now they were all playing in the same sandbox!
This all gets real complicated, real quick.
Consider Diablo 2.
PK - player-killing — was totally allowed within the hardcore mode of the game.
But it wasn’t the point of Diablo 2, like it wasn’t mainly a PvP game.
Imagine if you played Mario Kart and there was an unavoidable minigame where you fist fight another player
in the ditch beside DK Jungle Parkway.
And if you failed, Toad's deleted from the game.
Some players thought PKing ruined the entire experience – so they came up with cheats
to counteract it.
For instance, the “chicken hack” auto-booted players when somebody hostiled them, or when
they had a certain percentage of health left.
No chance of dying and losing all your shit!
This is inarguably cheating; the rules of the game clearly allow for PKing, and this
is denying PVPers their fun.
But whether this is BAD cheating? That’s a little bit trickier.
There’s a really interesting email exchange between an anti-PK fan called Sirian and one
of the producers of Diablo 2, Max Schaefer.
In it, Sirian argues that PKers are allowed to wrestle control of the game from other
players and that it’s essentially unethical.
Schaefer insisted that PKing was just a part of the Diablo universe, and that adding the
ability to turn it off “wouldn’t be true to ourselves.”
And I doubt most PKers saw themselves as griefing – after all, the game lets you do this!
If you don’t want PvP, don’t play hardcore mode!
It comes down to a fundamental disagreement about what the “spirit” of the game is.
And disagreements are fine, they're good even – they help you understand other people’s points
of view, even if you will never agree with them.
But a difference in opinion matters when a person has the power to enforce their opinion
or standards or values on other people.
So while PKers were totally legitimate, I can appreciate cheating defensively to avoid
having to deal with them.
Really, the important thing to note about this email exchange is that it’s a pretty
heady philosophical debate.
While I do think that's fun… in a way… it’s certainly not as fun as showering
a Blastoise in an infinite rain of Rare Candies.
In Diablo 2, PK-ers also got their hands on the chicken hack, of course.
So they could hostile other players without any risk – they’d peace out before their
super PVP-built character died.
The cycle just kept going.
Because it doesn’t matter why someone cheats.
In multiplayer games, if they cheat and get away with it, honest players will either be
driven away, or corrupted in their quest to keep up.
And the game will get a Reptuation.
As the executive producer of The Sims Online, Gordon Walton, says, “If you leave a cheat
long enough, it becomes part of the culture of the game.”
Notably, in Diablo 3, there is no free-for-all PvPing; if someone challenges you, you can
not engage.
So in the end, this really seems the same as saving your game or recording a high score
– a “cheat” that became a feature.
Which is a really smart approach to anti-cheat management!
If you undercut the purpose of a cheat, you render it unnecessary.
Instead of punishing “bad” behavior, you should try to find the reason for that behavior
and correct that, rather than just jumping to punishment.
An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of banned players.
But that’s not what most anti-cheating strategies look like.
In the late 90s, a fan of the “three-dimensional combat game” Team Fortress got fed up and
developed the amusingly named “PunkBuster” anti-cheat software.
PunkBuster launched a whole new anti-cheating industry, one that is still thriving.
And this combat has gotten pretty ugly in the years since. Especially since games
have carefully managed economies rivaling those of small nations.
Eugen Harton, a lead producer at Bohemia Interactive, has explicitly described hunting cheaters
as a “game of cat and mouse” – more of that competition angle.
Eugen Harton: So they are usually tax frauding.
And it’s a big part of what you can use within legal, to get on their backs, and get
them in jail.
Jenna: He talks about taunting cheaters on social media, and then being harassed by them in turn.
Certainly makes the days of Schaefer openly emailing forum members seem pretty quaint
On the other hand, publishers are almost always the cat in those cat-and-mouse games.
And those cats have tons of money and power and legal teams.
Cat legal teams.
It’s adorable, but it shouldn’t be.
Okay, so multiplayer cheating is a nightmare!
But even single-player cheats are hotly debated amongst gamers these days.
These miserable, miserable days.
This copypasta was made in response to an article about using a slow-mo cheat in Sekiro.
The idea that you’re “losing” something by cheating in a single-player game is a far cry from
"DUDE, CHEATING MAKES YOU POWERFUL!!!!!!"
What’s changed is that so much of our media consumption is now public.
People really identify with not only what they consume, but how they consume it.
For some people in the gaming community, it’s really important to say that they’ve beaten
a game according to a certain set of standards, especially a difficult one like Sekiro.
So they see cheating as devaluing their own achievement, as stolen valor, as a personal failing.
And that’s fine, as long as they don’t have the power to enforce those values on
other people.
And the idea that you must “gain” something from the experience of playing video games
is pretty — pretty deeply capitalistic!
And BORING.
Thankfully the fun kind of secret-hunting is still a part of the game community.
The first few weeks after Elden Ring came out, I was trading hot goss constantly.
I learned from coworkers that Fia’s embrace crunched my HP, so I went and told my friends,
and so on.
And who could forget the especially beefy illusory wall?
The information, it's not like it's “hidden” in the game, it’s just — the game just doesn't tell you.
And is that the same as hiding?
[indecisive groans]
Unimportant! The important thing is that: finding that out, and telling other people,
and then learning from other people, these secrets,
really gave me that old school gaming feeling!
I liked it! I miss that!
I miss us!
Some games – the kind that are allowed to not be super serious – still have that quasi-finger-wagging
but also kind-of-incentivizing punishment that games from the 90s and oughts did.
I had never even considered cheating in The Stanley Parable until I heard it punished
you by putting you in a special “serious room.”
I want to see what happens!
I am willing to cheat to find out!
I remember those breezy summer days, cheating in the park under the cherry trees.
Those were good times!
So I looked up to see what kind of options I had for Pokemon Arceus.
But... they're bad! They're paltry!
Even third-party developers won't make hacks or cheats for Pokemon Arceus.
Cheating online is just too big a business to make obscure little titles like...
...this pretty mainstream Pokemon game... worth hacking.
And nobody is cheating just for the love of the game.
[breezy '80s vaporwave snaking in]
[a happy little summery synth beat]
[SNARE!]