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[This is part of a series on video games, their tropes, stories of playing games, and other related topics. If you have suggestions about where to take the series, please do say so in the comments. We have a lot of spaces to fill for this month.]
I miss cheat codes. And the Game Genie, too.
For a time, anyway, in video gaming, cheat codes (and other forms of cheating) had a certain ubiquity. Easter eggs are as old as Adventure, and many times, they were used in the same way, to put in credits for a game where they were otherwise forbidden or frowned upon. ("burger", for example, in the Bard's Tale series will often produce something interesting, because it was the nickname of one of the programmers at the time.) Easter eggs are often amusing or silly or a reward for doing counterintuitive things, like how shooting an otherwise unremarkable button in a corridor that had to be itself found by realizing a part of the environment was not there for show unlocked a spot that was somewhat out of the way and underwater in a specific level in the second episode where one would see a graffiti on the wall making reference to an entirely different game series. (If you followed that, kudos for knowing and finding the Well of Wishes in the Crypt of Decay.)
Cheat codes, on the other hand, generally affect the game in significant ways, by granting invulnerability ("God Mode"), a full suite of weapons or items, having the nominal boundaries of the stage, like walls, become passable ("no clipping"), or other things that make the game experience very different than what was initially intended or balanced for. A lot of the time, cheats are useful debugging tools, as they made it possible for someone to test, say, whether scripted events happened as they were intended to without having to worry about whether or not the person testing was skilled enough to trigger the scripted event themselves. Other times, they're what can make an otherwise frustrating and terrible game enjoyable, or take away issues where a game might be too stingy with checkpoints, supplies, or too numerous with enemies. Or someone might want to experience the game at a higher difficulty than their skill allows them to play, so they can experience the entirety of the story, instead of being mocked or denied important parts of the story because they don't arbitrarily meet the standards of the developers for skill. Or just enjoy the game and inflict a significant amount of carnage on the opposition without having to worry about retribution.
At least one cheat code attained memetic status, because it was so widespread among games published or distributed by Konami - up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A, B, A, Start. Which was still something being used in a game as late as Defender's Quest, a tower-defense game with a sub-plot of finding various secrets and solving puzzles in the game itself to obtain rare artifacts. The Konami Code appeared twice, once in its regular form, and once in a "swearing in longhand, asterisk-mouth" form for a much rarer and more powerful artifact.
All of Doom's cheat codes, on the other hand, started with the name of the company publishing, id software. Several of them probably were acronyms for things, but one noticeable code, IDCHOPPERS, granted the player character the chainsaw meelee weapon upgrade. Upon successful execution of the code, the message displayed was "Doesn't suck --GW", a plea (or swipe) at players who might dismiss the code as not very helpful in the face of the codes that granted items, weapons, and artifacts that had a more immediate and beneficial effect to the player. The Doom codes also achieved a certain amount of memetic status, such that attempting to use the two most common cheat codes from Doom in a different game, Heretic, would have the opposite effect of their intention, removing all the weapons and items from the player or killing them. (Heretic's cheat codes, instead, are things like "rambo", "engage", and "quicken", using cultural references and a popular accounting software as the things to engage some of the cheats.)
In many of these games, the highest of difficulty levels also locked out most, if not all, of the cheats from being used, and added additional difficulty on top of that, such as all enemies and their projectiles moving faster, the player taking significantly more damage from everything, and occasionally having defeated enemies respawn after a set amount of time when they were defeated, requiring even more ammunition to be expended, and putting additional pressures on the player character to be extremely efficient in their work. Many times, the game would explicitly indicate that this mode was not meant to be fair, would not be fair, and might even say up front that cheats would be disabled. (If you can't be fair, be honest.) So a lot of gaming might have happened on the almost-most-difficult difficulty level, because that was the last one that was balanced to be playable.
With time, many PC games would end up with "consoles" that could be pulled down with a specific keypress (usually the tilde) and cheats entered into the console to turn on specific modes, like "god" or "notarget" (everything still spawns, but the monsters don't see the player as a target), which sometimes had the effect of allowing someone to play the highest difficulty and still activate their cheats, which was nice. (The highest difficulty was also often balanced to be playable at this point, rather than just being unfair.)
For game consoles, sometimes button sequences (like the Konami code) would produce good effects, but for the most part, cheats weren't achieved through things hard-coded into the game, but memory manipulation through the use of a pass-through device (the most popular device of the beginning console eras was called Game Genie), which allowed for limited modification of various values, such as for lives, powers, or other items stored or read from the cartridge or disc's ROM, so that one could, say, jump infinitely or have an infinite number of lives or health, like what might be implemented through developer cheat codes. Game Genies were usually limited in the amount of effects they could create, forcing a player to pick and choose between which ones they needed the most. Some codes required two slots to implement fully, which often made them very powerful. Game Genie's interface for codes consisted of seemingly random collections of consonants, which made it more difficult to understand what it was actually doing, since the effect would be noticable, but the process would not be obvious. Memory hacking still lives on, through the use of trainers, and hex editing or other save game or executable modification tools exist to give advantage.
These days, though, if cheats are present at all, they tend to be things that are unlocked after someone has already performed some sort of skilled play, often times after they demonstrate they don't actually need the cheats to be able to play the game. Furthermore, many games deny achievement progress to those who use the cheats to play the game, once again forcing someone into the situation where they have to play the game and do the thing the developer believes is worthy in their own mind to collect it. A brick-breaker game that I was playing only unlocked the cheats after I had successfully completed the most difficult task in the game by running the table from stage one to the end without running out of lives. Having essentially beaten the game, it then said "okay, now you can have fun with it however you like, because you've proven you are up to any challenge." There was still one more achievement, which was "run the table three times in total", and rather than saying "you did it once, have fun with it", they said that having the cheats on would not count toward achievements. So I had to slog through doing it twice more for the last lousy point. It would have been a lot more fun had I been able to do it with the cheats on, to see if I could put together some other self-imposed challenge to get it to work.
All of this applies solely to the single-player experience. It's not fair to cheat in competitive multiplayer, although I would say that it's perfectly fine to do so in cooperative multiplayer as well, so that everyone can enjoy the game and play at their skill. And there's also a rather large swath of countermeasures in place for most Internet-multiplayer games at this point to discourage unfair play against competitors, and as new methods are discovered, they're patched out and the associated accounts struck or banned from play on official servers.
Even though games are flourishing now, I still miss the era where cheat codes were part of the game, and they would get traded around or posted on the Internet for people to discover and use, kind of like finding what the inputs were for the fatalities in the early Mortal Kombat games, since they were never published in any of the game manuals. It allowed the player to choose how they wanted to approach the game, what difficulty they wanted to play at, and what rules they wanted to observe in playing the game, so they could tailor their experience and make it enjoyable (without having to take any guff from a developer about how they chose to enjoy the game.) Enjoyable is one of the things that games should be regularly. When we get into the talk about achievements, we'll talk more fully about enjoyment and how achievements are sometimes counter-productive to a game being enjoyable.
I miss cheat codes. And the Game Genie, too.
For a time, anyway, in video gaming, cheat codes (and other forms of cheating) had a certain ubiquity. Easter eggs are as old as Adventure, and many times, they were used in the same way, to put in credits for a game where they were otherwise forbidden or frowned upon. ("burger", for example, in the Bard's Tale series will often produce something interesting, because it was the nickname of one of the programmers at the time.) Easter eggs are often amusing or silly or a reward for doing counterintuitive things, like how shooting an otherwise unremarkable button in a corridor that had to be itself found by realizing a part of the environment was not there for show unlocked a spot that was somewhat out of the way and underwater in a specific level in the second episode where one would see a graffiti on the wall making reference to an entirely different game series. (If you followed that, kudos for knowing and finding the Well of Wishes in the Crypt of Decay.)
Cheat codes, on the other hand, generally affect the game in significant ways, by granting invulnerability ("God Mode"), a full suite of weapons or items, having the nominal boundaries of the stage, like walls, become passable ("no clipping"), or other things that make the game experience very different than what was initially intended or balanced for. A lot of the time, cheats are useful debugging tools, as they made it possible for someone to test, say, whether scripted events happened as they were intended to without having to worry about whether or not the person testing was skilled enough to trigger the scripted event themselves. Other times, they're what can make an otherwise frustrating and terrible game enjoyable, or take away issues where a game might be too stingy with checkpoints, supplies, or too numerous with enemies. Or someone might want to experience the game at a higher difficulty than their skill allows them to play, so they can experience the entirety of the story, instead of being mocked or denied important parts of the story because they don't arbitrarily meet the standards of the developers for skill. Or just enjoy the game and inflict a significant amount of carnage on the opposition without having to worry about retribution.
At least one cheat code attained memetic status, because it was so widespread among games published or distributed by Konami - up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A, B, A, Start. Which was still something being used in a game as late as Defender's Quest, a tower-defense game with a sub-plot of finding various secrets and solving puzzles in the game itself to obtain rare artifacts. The Konami Code appeared twice, once in its regular form, and once in a "swearing in longhand, asterisk-mouth" form for a much rarer and more powerful artifact.
All of Doom's cheat codes, on the other hand, started with the name of the company publishing, id software. Several of them probably were acronyms for things, but one noticeable code, IDCHOPPERS, granted the player character the chainsaw meelee weapon upgrade. Upon successful execution of the code, the message displayed was "Doesn't suck --GW", a plea (or swipe) at players who might dismiss the code as not very helpful in the face of the codes that granted items, weapons, and artifacts that had a more immediate and beneficial effect to the player. The Doom codes also achieved a certain amount of memetic status, such that attempting to use the two most common cheat codes from Doom in a different game, Heretic, would have the opposite effect of their intention, removing all the weapons and items from the player or killing them. (Heretic's cheat codes, instead, are things like "rambo", "engage", and "quicken", using cultural references and a popular accounting software as the things to engage some of the cheats.)
In many of these games, the highest of difficulty levels also locked out most, if not all, of the cheats from being used, and added additional difficulty on top of that, such as all enemies and their projectiles moving faster, the player taking significantly more damage from everything, and occasionally having defeated enemies respawn after a set amount of time when they were defeated, requiring even more ammunition to be expended, and putting additional pressures on the player character to be extremely efficient in their work. Many times, the game would explicitly indicate that this mode was not meant to be fair, would not be fair, and might even say up front that cheats would be disabled. (If you can't be fair, be honest.) So a lot of gaming might have happened on the almost-most-difficult difficulty level, because that was the last one that was balanced to be playable.
With time, many PC games would end up with "consoles" that could be pulled down with a specific keypress (usually the tilde) and cheats entered into the console to turn on specific modes, like "god" or "notarget" (everything still spawns, but the monsters don't see the player as a target), which sometimes had the effect of allowing someone to play the highest difficulty and still activate their cheats, which was nice. (The highest difficulty was also often balanced to be playable at this point, rather than just being unfair.)
For game consoles, sometimes button sequences (like the Konami code) would produce good effects, but for the most part, cheats weren't achieved through things hard-coded into the game, but memory manipulation through the use of a pass-through device (the most popular device of the beginning console eras was called Game Genie), which allowed for limited modification of various values, such as for lives, powers, or other items stored or read from the cartridge or disc's ROM, so that one could, say, jump infinitely or have an infinite number of lives or health, like what might be implemented through developer cheat codes. Game Genies were usually limited in the amount of effects they could create, forcing a player to pick and choose between which ones they needed the most. Some codes required two slots to implement fully, which often made them very powerful. Game Genie's interface for codes consisted of seemingly random collections of consonants, which made it more difficult to understand what it was actually doing, since the effect would be noticable, but the process would not be obvious. Memory hacking still lives on, through the use of trainers, and hex editing or other save game or executable modification tools exist to give advantage.
These days, though, if cheats are present at all, they tend to be things that are unlocked after someone has already performed some sort of skilled play, often times after they demonstrate they don't actually need the cheats to be able to play the game. Furthermore, many games deny achievement progress to those who use the cheats to play the game, once again forcing someone into the situation where they have to play the game and do the thing the developer believes is worthy in their own mind to collect it. A brick-breaker game that I was playing only unlocked the cheats after I had successfully completed the most difficult task in the game by running the table from stage one to the end without running out of lives. Having essentially beaten the game, it then said "okay, now you can have fun with it however you like, because you've proven you are up to any challenge." There was still one more achievement, which was "run the table three times in total", and rather than saying "you did it once, have fun with it", they said that having the cheats on would not count toward achievements. So I had to slog through doing it twice more for the last lousy point. It would have been a lot more fun had I been able to do it with the cheats on, to see if I could put together some other self-imposed challenge to get it to work.
All of this applies solely to the single-player experience. It's not fair to cheat in competitive multiplayer, although I would say that it's perfectly fine to do so in cooperative multiplayer as well, so that everyone can enjoy the game and play at their skill. And there's also a rather large swath of countermeasures in place for most Internet-multiplayer games at this point to discourage unfair play against competitors, and as new methods are discovered, they're patched out and the associated accounts struck or banned from play on official servers.
Even though games are flourishing now, I still miss the era where cheat codes were part of the game, and they would get traded around or posted on the Internet for people to discover and use, kind of like finding what the inputs were for the fatalities in the early Mortal Kombat games, since they were never published in any of the game manuals. It allowed the player to choose how they wanted to approach the game, what difficulty they wanted to play at, and what rules they wanted to observe in playing the game, so they could tailor their experience and make it enjoyable (without having to take any guff from a developer about how they chose to enjoy the game.) Enjoyable is one of the things that games should be regularly. When we get into the talk about achievements, we'll talk more fully about enjoyment and how achievements are sometimes counter-productive to a game being enjoyable.
