Firstly, everyone reading this article put your hand up!
Keep it there!
Now, if you’ve ever cheated in a video game, raise your hand…
Oh what do you know… we all have at some stage in our video game lives abused cheat codes, hacks and level loopholes, after all they can sometimes make a game more fun! There is a flipside to cheating in video games, if you do it once in a game you are guaranteed to do it again and again, you won’t be able to help yourself, which one of us could say no to unlimited lives, infinite ammo and big head mode! Not us anyway!
Where did it all begin? Who cracked under temptation first? Well the truth is, video game cheats have been around as long as video games themselves and were actually used by developers and play testers to determine bugs and cracks in the game in an effort to finely tune the mechanics of the game. So we had no hope at all of avoiding the lure of the ‘cheat’ when it was the people who made the games also gave us the means to break the rules!
One of the earliest cheat codes can be found (thank you Wikipedia!) in Manic Miner, a game from 1983 for the ZX Spectrum, by inputting a certain code you could enable the cheat mode, it just so happened the cheat code was the same number as developer Matt Smith’s driving licence!
From here the urge and need to cheat grew and we’ve been doing it ever since but in 1995 the way we cheated was revolutionized and made even easier for those of us who could afford to splash out on our wickedness!
GameShark cartridges hit the gaming marketplace in 1995, originally released for the Sega Saturn and the first PlayStation console. While they weren’t the first cheating tool to hit the market (Game Genie was out before Shark hit the waters) it quickly became regarded as the best and most user-friendly. The cartridges came preloaded with over 4,000 cheat codes and unlike similar products on the market, the GameShark saved entered data so you no longer had to constantly re-enter the same data over and over again! PlayStation cheaters and owners of the GameShark disc could also use the device to listen to audio from the games, look at the last image stored in the PS Video Ram, scan the disc for images and fmvs (full motion videos). A mere novice could suddenly turn the tides of a battle in their video games but for the masters of the video game hack, GameShark allowed them to delve deeper into hacking.
However the glory days of the cheat code seems to have been and gone, no longer are we celebrated for remembering the code to bring down our Wanted Level in GTA III, ‘R2 R2 L1 R2 UP DOWN UP DOWN’ (in case any of you are wondering, we didn’t even need to Google it). In fact not only are cheat codes seen as a thing of the past, they’ve become almost taboo, a secret shame we are all guilty of using but no one dares talk about anymore and for those out there who do still attempt to break the fourth wall, they can quickly find themselves branded with a scarlet letter! Trophies and Achievements are no longer achievable if you decide to tinker with the settings and give yourself an unfair advantage, hell if you cheat in Portal to clear a level you will find yourself branded with a big ‘CHEATED’ on your completion screen and no one wants that!
Cheating isn’t confined to the console and there has been a surge of it in online gaming particularly in MMORPGs where players use macros to do everything from raise large sums of cash to defeating bosses and other players! Now it seems gaming companies are taking back the tools they entrusted us with oh so long ago but they aren’t being very nice about it.
Two legal battles are currently on going, Sony is suing well known hacker, Alexander Egorenkov better known as Graf_chokolo and that battle seems to have turned nasty after having his equipment seized Alex posted the means to hack Sony’s PS3 all over the web so anyone can do it – in fairness we’d be a little pissed if Sony was suing us for a €1 million! Here is what he had to say about his latest move:
“… SONY you failed again, you took my equipment but my mind is still free and you canot (sic) control it. You failed again. They are just tools, I can get new ones and will continue my HV reversing and bringing back PS3 Linux which you took from us. If you want me to stop then you should just kill me because I cannot live without programming, HV and Linux kernel hacking You know who am I and where I live, so come and get me!!!”
However Alex isn’t the only one at the mercy of the big companies, Blizzard are also taking action against three hackers who brought out hacks and mods to their game StarCraft II. The lawsuit was brought against Permaphrost, Cranix and Linuxawesome after Blizzard were forced to ban 5,000 players for using the cheats!
So it seems that the days for the cheater are up but that doesn’t stop people from being absolute b*st*rds when playing online! The overpowered maxed level character pwning on noobs, the button bashing, hadouken throwing, upper cut landing Ryu/Ken in SSFIV or the campers in Black Ops, the gamer who is all too happy to ruin your fun!
Were we better off with the player wielding a missile shooting Rail Gun with infinite ammo or do we have to cut our losses and settle for the campers? Either way the whole thing still feels really unfair!
