God Mode and NoClip: A Brief History of Cheating

There’s that old saying, “it’s not whether you win or lose, it’s how you play the game.” Of course, losing isn’t a whole lot of fun for anybody, save for masochists and deadbeat dads who never really wanted custody in the first place. However, savvy gamers ’round this big ol’ world of ours all know they don’t have to lose, provided they play the game right: with a whole slew of codes, hacks, and exploits, as well as a defunct moral compass.

From the comfortably familiar to the understandably obscure, here’s a quick look at cheating throughout the ages.

1. Cheat Codes

Anybody who’s been playing games for a decade-plus is familiar with the Konami Code. For those not in the know, I’m referring to Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A, Select, Start. The code, which has seeped into all facets of pop culture, was first included in a 1985 NES port of Gradius because developer Kazuhisa Hashimoto thought play-testing the game was just too damn hard.

The code (or some variant thereof) has been featured in dozens of Konami games, including staple series such as Castlevania and Contra. The Konami code owes its renown to the original Contra, where it granted players 30 lives and the willpower to persevere through the mindbogglingly difficult side-scroller. While the Konami Code remains one of the most prominent examples of early cheat codes, it’s not the first.

In the 1983 game Manic Miner, entering developer Matthew Smith’s phone number would turn on the cheat mode. This was either a brilliant way to make sure he received recognition for his work, or a poorly thought out method to pick up chicks.

Shakespeare actually said this. Whether or not he meant for it to apply to video games has been the subject of numerous scholarly debates.

2. Physical Add-ons
Cheat codes worked wonders for frustrated gamers, but players looking to bend the rules even further needed more. Enter the Game Genie. Released by Galoob in 1991, the Game Genie revolutionized cheating. By inputting a series of characters, players patched a game’s code, enabling everything from God Mode to skipping levels to accessing content developers had scrapped from the final cut of a game.

Lists of codes and their effects were available to players at a price, but ambitious (and slightly crazy) gamers could input random jibberish and hope for the best. More often then not, nothing happened. But once in a while, players would get lucky and discover a cheat — or send saved data hurdling into oblivion. It was about 50/50.

And the problems didn’t stop there. Players inserted NES cartridges into the Game Genie and then put the whole shebang into their systems. This made it difficult to use the Game Genie in top-loading systems, and the Game Genie bent the pins of other Nintendos to the point where games wouldn’t play unless the add-on was used.

Nintendo also raised a stink — claiming the way the Game Genie messed with a game’s code was copyright infringement — but that failed to keep the Genie in its lamp, so to speak.

3. Cheating in the Modern Age

As technology evolved, so did ways to exploit it. As gaming reached a larger and larger audience, cheating transformed from a lazy man’s way to best a nasty boss into a serious ethical concern. It was one thing to give yourself 99 lives because you sucked at a game, but cheating during competitive play was something entirely different.

For starters, there was Counter Strike. From aimbots to wallhacks, the game’s fierce league competitions have attracted their fair share of creative cheats. Wallhacks, as the name would imply, allow players to see through walls to peg foes from across the map. And Aimbots guarantee headshots by either checking the game’s code for the coordinates of a foe’s skull, or by scanning the map for pixels the same color as an enemy and moving the cursor to that point. However, should you be caught using either, you can expect to have your account banned from play for upwards of a year.

Some modern cheaters prefer the role of mafioso over code monkey, choosing to exploit people rather than game mechanics. In Lineage, a fantasy MMO with a substantial following in Korea, virtual mobsters roam the servers, forcing noobies to pay “protection” money, according to a Slate article. And gold farmers (people who kill the same enemies over and over again for the loot they drop, and then sell the fruits of their labor to people too lazy to actually play the game right) have thrown the economy of World of Warcraft out of whack. While it’s not actually cheating, it still skews the game in a way that ruins the experience for people trying to play the way the developers actually intended.

And that’s just not cool.