We really can’t do anything about it. People like to cheat. It’s just natural. Once we find we can achieve success without hard work, droves of people will immediately do it. And both mythology and history are full of people who won by not respecting the rules. It just shows how much people like to cheat to achieve victory.
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Some people think they’re being smart when they cheat. Others think cheating is dumb. And some view cheating as “just“ bending or breaking the accepted rules. And there are somethings you just don’t do as it undermines the rules agreed on and destroys the rest’s experience. Currently, cheating in online multiplayer games is being talked about the most. But this is not where cheating began. The act of cheating has gone through quite the evolution throughout the times and it wasn’t always viewed as purely negative.
The very beginning in online text
But before we move on to offline games, let’s first take a look at the place where many old-school gamers first started. MUDs. - Multi-User Dungeons – used to be games that usually ran on a university server and players connected through the university terminals and tried to complete quests. These predecessors of MMORPGs were purely text games but their popularity was rising. And that brought behaviors others viewed other cheating.
Raph Koster, the author of Star Wars Galaxies and an active MUD admin remembers that whenever anybody even attempted to ask how to solve a hard quest in any of the old MUDs like AberMUD, TinyMUD or DikuMUD (BTW: all of these come from the eighties) was considered an unfair individual. Such a player was ridiculed by the community or the community even completely distanced itself from him. A good player figured out everything on their own.
The three types of cheats
Now the situation in offline games was quite different from the multiplayer communities. Cheats were quite common in offline games and nobody stigmatized you for using them. What you do in the privacy of your home is something nobody cares about. This is the time when cheats started to branch out into three separate and distinct categories. First of all, trainers started to appear. Trainers are programs capable of modifying the player's characters, their attributes, and skills. I personally remember using a trainer with Might and Magic VI: The Mandate of Heaven. Some of these trainers even came out as commercial programs costing usually around 15 dollars each.
The second category of cheating is based on modifying the memory used by the game. Especially with 8-bit games, it was common for players to modify specific memory addresses that were known to have important information. For example, inputting POKE 47196.201 granted the player immortality in the game Knight Lore from 1994. But hackers first needed to find out on which memory address is such important information stored. Because of that specialized sections started to appear in gaming magazines showing players how to cheat in their games.
The third category is the so-called developer codes. One of the most well-known cheats of this type is IDDQD from Doom. This famous code granted players immortality. Similarly, IDCLIP allowed you to walk through walls and IDKFA gave you infinite ammo. Doom was pretty revolutionary for cheating. It sort of told players that it is okay to have cheats in your games. And that led to the golden age of cheats. Even whole books that were just lists of cheats for games were being published. Here in the Czech Republic, we had a well updated digital database called Scorpions Cheater that was always attached on a CD/DVD ROM that was enclosed with gaming magazines.
The Konami Code
In the nineties the synonym for a cheat was IDDQD but in the eighties, it was a sequence of buttons pushes. Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A. This is the famous Konami Code that activated all the bonuses in Gradius. It was originally created by Kazuhisa Hashimoto who converted the game from arcades to the NES console and found the game being too hard for him. But he forgot to delete it from the commercial version of the game and players eventually stumbled upon the code. The sequence eventually got featured in dozens of other titles.
An even older cheat code is the number sequence 6031769 from Manic Miner on the ZX Spectrum. If you inputted the numbers (which in reality was the number of Matthew Smiths, the development lead, driver’s license) you were allowed to switch between levels. But the first cheat code appeared in an arcade game called Starship 1 from 1977. If you used the buttons on the game in the correct order a sign saying “Hi Ron!” appeared and you were granted ten free games. And that’s when it all began.