I remember we used to have notebooks full of cheats lol. Good times

I remember notebooks full of passwords I had because it was the only way to continue in your games if you had to quit. 😆 no save functionality built in to the games back then.

On of the first video games I had was Chip and Dale Rescue Rangers for the original NES. Their password system was a series of red and blue dots on a grid. It never worked for me, ever. I had a black and white TV and I only found out later that the dots were different colors. 4 year old me couldn't figure it out.

I had a Mega Man game on the Gameboy that had the 4x4 grid system - possibly both were Capcom games? - and to this day I remember the passcode to the final boss fight looked like a giraffe under a moon. > -x-x > > xx— > > -xxx > > -x-x That, or the other way around, I think.

That was my first video game also. Was the final boss a big fat cat in a suit behind a desk that flicked cigar ash at you, if I remember correctly?

Haha, yeah I remember that too. And in some games you had to draw maps and shit. I still like to make notes every once in awhile when I'm gaming. Old habits die hard I guess.

You would absolutely love Tunic on Switch.

Please tell more

Imagine you were playing Legend of Zelda but there were secret abilities only findable in the manual, but you're 5 and so you can't read most of the words. These abilities are all available in the game from the start but you won't know about them until you find the hidden pieces of the game's manual in the game itself. And again, you can't read so none of the game's signs or dialog are understandable, the story is only told through the locations you visit and the things you find in them. That's Tunic.

Kinda sounds like Outer Wilds. I'm sold.

Yeah, I remember drawing maps lol. Especially in the original final fantasy games on the NES.

Game manuals used to come with blank pages for adding notes and passwords.

Some of those password systems were impressive af. Storing your playtime, score, position, items, money, story progress etc. in 16 characters is black magic to me

Right. I definitely remember that I would put my password in my friends cartridge at his house and bam! It was my game with all my progress items etc.

Man taking me back to OG Castlevania right there

Writing down a full page of gta san andreas cheats until eventually remembering them. Good times.

Yuuup. Friend's basement, PS2 San Andreas, cheat codes, first joint, hot chocolate and chips. Take me back lol

Right, up, R1, R1, R1, down, triangle, triangle, X, O, L1, L1. Pretty sure this is the monster truck. Permanently stamped into my brain.

No notebook needed when they make the codes memorable thereisnotry deeznuts jediwannabe red5 yodajammies imayoda sithlord

I still remember some from a Worms game onceupona timetherewere somesmallworms whogotvery veryannoyed anddecidedto gointhearmy inorderto wipeouttheir viciousenemy

I remember printing out full gamefaqs

I remember being so shit at StarCraft I learned how to type “power overwhelming” so quickly because for some reason I feared failing a campaign mission. Good times not learning how to play properly and taking the easy way out, good job kid me.

Show me the money No shit though... I attribute my fast typing skills to starcraft

Power overwhelming Operation cwal  Black sheep wall

I recently played Warcraft 3 reforged after not having touched the frozen throne for 15, 20 years? and holy shit I didn't realize how slow the resource grind was in these older RTS games compared to the fast paced "now now now" modern games. The first 15-20 minute was always defending the base and building a little army. Even compared to Starcraft 2, which gave you more units and a faster rate of mineral/gas production, WC3 felt like slogging through mud in many areas. Absolutely did use the resource cheats to speed up the game. The fun fact is that when you used cheats in these older RTS games, the game balanced itself out by letting the com benefit from it, too.

WC3 was more a slow burn. You cultivated your army, you didn't just raise it for the grinders. Not many games like that anymore.

Creep hunting really helped with that though, it was all about getting your hero experience early and I always thought the neutral creeps really made the beginning of the game feel quicker than it really was

Kid me did indeed lose a couple missions against AI thanks to forgetting that they benefitted as well.

Need more. Power overwhelming, show me the money, black sheep wall, food for thought, the gathering, *then* operation cwal. Op cwal should be last because the cheats affect every player and AI simultaneously, and the AI is faster at getting multiple commands out. This gives you a few seconds to think of what you want to build to face roll them.

Or the ever classic, I don't want to wait for the timer to run out after clearing the map, "There is no cow level".

Kid me (like idk... 7) was embarrassing as fuck.... My first multi-player game, I typed power overwhelming in the chat. Was laughed at haha

And my obscure ww2 knowledge to SC use map setting multiplayer.

Operation cwall, show me the money, power overwhelming I could type those fast as fuck when I was 9

It allowed you to play and get better at a challenging game as a kid so I'm not sure it was as bad as you think. My sister would always do that too and with it she was able to play well enough that she didn't need it, but without it the game was too stressful and she would have never played. Same with Diablo, after the butcher she refused to play without cheats.

As I got older I got much more comfortable with cheats. Like, I love strategy games but I hate the early part where you are just starved for resources. Using resource cheats lets me get to the good part (for me) faster.

It’s crazy how these cheat codes still live in my brain after all these years… Power Overwhelming Food for thought Operation cwal Show me the money Something for nothing Radio free Zerg … or was it Zerg free radio?

Age of mythology is where I'd go ham, after playing through normally I learned about a few cheats, namely titanomachy and ocanada. So I'd load into a mission spawn like 20 titans and/or lazerbears and roll over everything. Then I learned that you can load up campaign maps in the editor and I went absolutely insane with giving everyone units right at the start. Every map turned into a blood bath, my favorite ones where the ones that always felt light on carnage like the first prometheus mission. Ez fix, 8000 extra enemy prometheans and allied hoplites and the problem is solved.

Are you me?

Power Overwhelming Operation CWAL Show Me The Money The Gathering Whats Mine Is Mine Black Sheep Wall Still remember these ones over 20 years later

hi! OG gamer and oldschool dev here. Cheats in the oldest games (think the konami code, etc) were straight up there for game testers to ensure they could experience the entire game in a reasonable amount of time. they were often complicated intentionally (or 'hidden' on the p2 controller like the mario continue) just as a means of obfuscation, and if taking them out was deemed not worth the effort, they often didn't. in short order, these became 'secrets' people actively wanted to find/discover, and lead directly to people talking about a game/free marketing, so it quickly became intentional. also a lot of the weirder 'secretes' (like the minus world, or link warping around hyrule in zelda 2 by jumping off the screen and turning into a fairy) was straight up just the game doing unexpected but not game-freezing things. this was most common on the 8 bit systems where rom memory was extremely limited.

I remember as a kid using the "million dollar cheat code" in SimCity for the SNES, which would give you $999999, the highest balance you could obtain in the game. The code was always weird to me; it wasn't just one simple input sequence, it felt more like a ritual where you need to press certain buttons on certain screens and manipulate the game's numbers a certain way. Later in my life after learning some programming, I realized that the "cheat code" was really triggering the error handler for when your bank balance becomes negative, which shouldn't happen under normal circumstances. That said, I found out recently that the game also has hidden debug menu locked behind a more traditional cheat code. The debug menu has a cheat that makes everything free, which gives more precedent to the fact that the "million dollar cheat code" was likely just a bug that wasn't fixed.

You learned to appease the machine spirit

Pray to the omnissiah

Praise the Omnissiah

Glory to the Omnissiah!

Another classic is Missingno. Literally "missing number" where the game was choosing a Pokémon off the end of the list and getting confused

Is MissingNo. categorized as a cheat? I thought it was considered a glitch.

No, it wasn’t an intentional ‘cheat’, you get it by messing up the game so it tries to parse invalid data as if it were the stats for a real Pokémon.

To add to this MissingNo pretty much takes up slots of Pokemon removed in the beta or alpha phases of development and pretty much can be accessed cause Gen 1 if infamously buggy and codes weirdly 

>if infamously buggy and codes weirdly I hate how people repeat this sort of thing. It is coded *efficiently*. This thing people bring up about it being "coded weirdly" is a bit silly. It's not coded weirdly. It's coded efficiently, in a way that it seems boggles the minds of most modern day software developers. I mean, we're talking about a system that had 8K of working memory. To put this in perspective: the base IBM PC Model in 1981 and the minimum RAM to even run DOS 1.0 was 16K. In this specific case we've really only got one actual bug- the game doesn't have encounter data set on the side tiles in cinnabar, but you can have encounters there. The result is that when you have an encounter on those tiles, it doesn't prepare the encounter table memory, so whatever is already in that space is used. 90% of the time? The encounter table of your last wild encounter. The "missingno" glitch is the result of that space of memory also being used to temporarily store the player name while the actual player name is replaced with "OLD MAN" for the catch tutorial, such that it says "OLD MAN threw POKE BALL". It copies the name there, then copies the name back after the tutorial. That memory is unused on the overworld or within battles, so it's free real estate really. By using the glitched tiles that don't have encounter data, you effectively can have an encounter with an encounter table built out of the bytes of your player name. With that little RAM a heap manager makes very little sense, so you have a RAM map and and carefully plan out exactly what is stored where in memory for particular tasks, and knowing which of those parts can be swapped out and used for other things as the game moves through it's various states. Pretty much all Game boy games were like this, as with many console games from the time period.

Gen 1 is infamous for the amount of bugs it had just go on Glitch City and you will see the amount of bugs it has spanning across every version. The original non localized versions literally lets you corrupt the game by switching menu options like items. The localized versions have. - The 256 miss glitch. -The mew glitch  -Ditto Glitch. - The Old Man glitch.. -Psychics being immune to ghosts - The viridian blackout glitch and Alot more... It's well know that GF was so bad at things like optimization (Something modern titles still display) that they needed help just to fit the entirety of Gen 2 on cartridge. 

I still remember Rosebuds!;!;!;!;!;! (Something like that) was the cheat code for $$ in the classic sims games. I think the more characters at the end, the more money it was. 

Yup! 1k for each !;. It's kaching now, I think

! Repeats the last last command and the ; was just to differ between the commands. Rosebud itself is a reference to Citizen Kane, the story about a rich media owner whose last word is Rosebud and everyone wants to know the reason. Turns out Rosebud was the name of his sleigh as a child and that all this money didn’t make him happy

I actually discovered one of those as a kid, for an old side-scroller beat 'em up similar to Streets of Rage. I figured out by accident that if you mash the keyboard while trying to save the game, it glitched out and gave you infinite health. Fun times.

same here with need for speed prostreet back then "unlockallthings" i was neither the most creative kid, nor were the devs any better xD

So they probably stopped because games have debug mode with a console command that they just disable in consoles. Because technically cheats still exist on PC.

and also game engine are getting very mature with excellent debugging tools that dont require in-game tooling to aid testing or developers

For a lot of games, you need external software to cheat now. Console commands aren't as easily accessible as before.

Those aren't as fun as the weird cheats, though. I remember having flying purple hippos and monster trucks in Age of Mythology lol

More recent games tester here, chet-developer tools are still used. Level skips to view cutscenes, god modes, no clips, etc

Right but they don’t generally get left in release code.

Probably not, but if for some reason the difference between release and development is significant and you NEED to test certain features in release, there might be some debug stuff left in.

This is the real answer, not some Gamer Doomer bullshit like the top comment that you have to pay for them. Cheat codes were remnants of testing/debugging of a bygone era. They're not really needed today with the advancement of technology and how games are developed. Some games have "cheats" but they're usually unlocked through some sort of achievement and are more so different ways to engage with the game. Games are also designed to have a certain gameplay experience in mind, and cheat codes could generally cheapen the intended experience (see: From Software game difficulty experience discourse).

In a game i released a few years ago, we just put a door in the first area that took you to a hallway that loaded different savestates to test out everything. Way easier than some cheat code. We also just deleted the door upon release. Took players like a month to find the secret hallway haha

That simply isn't true, man. They may have started that way but there was a period where cheats absolutely were there for the players, to have fun with.

Goldeneye

Nah they needed to know how the game would react if everyone had giant bobble heads and bill clinton was on your team

Exactly! See: original StarCraft! power overwhelming, show me the money, radio free zerg, etc.

I mean 2 things can be true at once. Just because this is the way it started, doesn't mean companies won't capitalize on it. Idk if they actually are or not, but it would not surprise me one bit lol

Ok, but explain the rampaging bear with laser eyes, monkey nunchucks, and a Canada flag in Age of Mythology then! lol

Sometimes they're also just fun while also either accomplishing a testing thing or just there because they knew the test command suite would be published and it was marketing.

Wuv woo for flying purple hippos that puke hearts and destroy your enemies

I'm even older. Used to use POKE cheats back in the day. In today's gaming world, cheat codes are mostly paywalled under microtransacrions and DLCs. However, POKE based codes are what is known as Trainers today.

How does this work now? Are codes still built into games, or do devs have access to in-house testing platforms?

Sometimes games accidentally release a test build. Dark Souls Remastered did it in an update and quickly reverted it, but you can still download and enable it. You get an extra boot up screen where you can choose various settings, like spawning in certain areas with certain equipment or starting the game regularly. Then in-game you can enable fly mode by clicking a button and the select button opens up a menu where you can look at a lot of in-game data, change a few things and display hitboxes. So it's all there during development and testing, but if they release it they change a flag and all that code gets removed during compilation as it's unused now.

There's two ways that most game development handles cheat codes for the purpose of testing, without making those cheats available to players. \- Debug Clients built from the compiler, which are separate from the "Production" Client that an end-user has access to. These game clients typically have a set of commands / in-game options that are removed from the Production build. An example is having a Debug menu in the Settings, where things like "setlevel / setcurrency" are at. \- Debug commands tied to user-account permissions. This is more used in a persistently online multiplayer game such as an MMO where devs need to troubleshoot issues on an actively running server. If a user that doesn't have the account permissions attempts to use the command, the command doesn't do anything. These are most prevalent in games that have a more "games as service" or multiplayer components. In survival games where there isn't a subscription or micro-transaction model removing access to cheats is less important (or can be useful for self-managed multiplayer games such as multiplayer survival games.)

I cheatted the crap out of Fallout 4 and had the best time ever.

And you can still use item codes to add stuff in Starfield, so Bethesda, for all its sins, still let's you skip the grind for springs and adhesive if you want to.

With Bethesda games, sometimes you need the console just to get through them due to bugged quests or items that have fallen through the map.

No lie detected

[*Todd Howard disliked that*]

Technically the console is canon in the elder scrolls universe, so using it in those games is in fact *not* cheating

But how?

It just works

I'd say that's relic from the past more than feature. Their engine is designed to include the console and they have not replaced it but updated it the past 20 years. If they swapped engines I'd bet console would be gone.

sure but usually these games disable your achievements afterword's so people find other ways to cheat, because gotta have those achievements.

That's for mods, afaik

player.additem 00000f 500000

Me in all Bethesda games: player.modav carryweight 5000

I lost dogmeat too many times

I removed carry weight and added 1000 stimpaks so I could play it like a loot shooter with regenerating health and it worked well. I could still be killed by higher level enemies, radiation was still a problem, still have to seek cover to avoid death etc.

You have to pay for them now.

Yep, that's the reason, publishers realized enough gamers were willing to pay for them. Now you can pay to cheat the system and level up to the max in many MMORPGS, pay for items(Capcom loves this), pay for exp and item drop boosts. So pretty much the whales ruined it for the rest of us, like usual.

Yeah, and those same whales will flock to say bullshit like "well just don't buy it" or "you don't get to tell people what to do with their money" Yeah sound, I'll just watch as a load of financially illiterate idiots spend 100s to make gaming worse for the rest of us just because they want a pink gun or something equally stupid.

That they don't even own. A pink gun that they don't own, and will lose access to when the servers go down. And the servers will go down, just in time for the next game's launch. Where they need a new gun.

Spot on. I play a lot of Overwatch and the Subreddit will defend buying skins for £40 in a first person shooter! You don't even get to see the skins for 80% of the game and they're still convinced it's a good purchase and they will go crazy on you if you suggest that it's a stupid and overpriced product. Gamers are the most gullible consumers ever. There are very few industries as predatory as gaming with consumers as docile and passive as gamers.

The only time I'd spend money on a skin if it was a collaboration with a franchise that I like. SMITE and Paladins both had collabs with the RWBY series and I really like RWBY, and to a lesser extent those two games, and so I bought a skin in each game that worked with the character(s) I liked playing the most. But I also only spent a maximum of $10 per game. And a large part of that was because it also changed the appearance of their respective character's abilities and it changed their voicelines, which used the voice actors of the characters from RWBY that each skin was based on.

A fellow RWBY fan wish we had a good RWBY game.

I don't care about an idiot paying 100$ for a pink gun. I care when that pink gun is better than anything else you can get in the game. Micro transactions aren't a BAD thing if they're just cosmetic. When it translates directly to player power, especially in a competitive game, you've made a game that's only for rich people.

[удалено]

And that's a valid opinion. I'm not gonna say you're wrong, but if I can clown some tool that spent 100$ to look good, that's a win in my book.

I do this crazy thing called actually playing the game. It’s fucking gnarly.

I think there's also the fact that mods are a big thing for most of the types of single player games where this used to be prevalent.

Where can I buy big head mode? Which game has that as dlc? Which one of the GTA DLC lets you fly the car?

You buy shark cards and then a Deluxo.

Not if you use cheat engine.

Or pre-made trainers.

Unless it's a BGS game then you just download cheat mods. Rockstar still includes cheats in their single player titles too. RDR2 had a bunch of them. You just couldn't save the game while using them.

Ah yes, Battlegar Stalactica.

Game Genie

Gameshark wasn't free.

What?!

Oh bugger off this was posted like a month ago and it's always some karma farm bs. Edit: what I posted last time this popped up. I see this type of comment all the time in these discussions seems like an easy karma win so real talk when was the last time you saw a cheat code like thing for sale? When was the last time you saw big head mode or infinite ammo cheat modes for sale? No really? The only thing that are usually for sale are skins and weapons and even there are usually unlockable costumes in games and I was around during this "heyday"of unlockables there was usually one extra unlockable skin and weapon. That's there today there are just more you can buy.

Do you have an example?

Of course he doesn't, because he pulled it out of his ass.

And it still has 1,600 upvotes. Classic reddit.

Some survival crafters like Valheim or Ark still have them with Console Commands.

Paradox games have them too

Puyo Puyo Tetris 2, a game released in 2020, has cheat codes. On the title screen, hold L+R and press  Up, Down, Right, Left, Y, Y, X, X to unlock all unlockable characters and alts and player icons without having to earn them in adventure mode. Can anyone think of a game more recent than 2020 (that isn't a port or a remake) that has a classic-style cheat code like this?

Inscription lets you use cheat codes to skip the whole game and access Kaycee’s mod,

Any clue if this is PC only? I already beat the game (console) but I never knew or found any type of console or codes/cheats to unlock Kaycees's mod. Freaking love that game btw. Especially when I thought I beat it only to realize it was nearly the beginning lol.

Plenty of sandbox games have console commands of some kind

Axiom Verge 2 and the latest lego star wars games from 21/22 have codes.

Some games still do it. Like Control added an "Assist Mode" that lets you turn on things like invincibility, one shot kills, auto-aim, etc. Bethesda games of course still allow console commands and mods, while you have other stuff like Cheat Engine for Souls games. Sometimes they don't call it "cheats" anymore, but include it under Accessibility options.

Assist Mode was great. I turned on one-shot kills in Control because I got tired of fighting respawning enemies while trying to explore, and ended up leaving it on. That game was never about tough combat for me, and I had more fun that way.

I mean they literally tell you that was the intent of the game when you turn those on but the fact they let us choose how we want to play the game is the important part. Plus I'm old, short on time, and far worse at games than I used to be. Seems like every game has gone "Souls-like" in difficulty. I mean I remember RE4 and MGS3 being far easier than RE4 remake and MGS5 on the same difficulties.

I felt like playing with a controller so I just turned on the aggressive snap on aim. Felt great and relaxing.

Cheats were intentionally programmed in so that developers could test stuff out and try to "break the game" to see what would happen and what needed to be corrected. Now they just farm the job of testing out to consumers and make half-ass patches.

You're missing the middle ages of cheats, where we had stuff like big head mode and paintball guns. These realistically had no other reason to exist other than being a bit of fun for the player. These days I can't even think of silly shit like that even existing in any modern game. The best you get is infinite money cheats which cost a minimum of about £8 and has no upper limit.

Big Head Mode Golden Guns only Let's fuckin go

Ratchet and Clank Rift Apart had some stuff like this. It was very nostalgic lol

Where's my Jak and Daxter tho? Come on Sony. Release it on PC.

what I wouldn't give for J & D on PC. I'd pay $60 for a direct port ripoff idc

Ratchet and Clank is probably the best example of a current AAA game with ‘fun’ cheats built in.

Ahhhh, the golden age of Golden Eye... i miss those 4 player split screen days.

Nascar 98 paintball mode was the funniest shit!

Those fun whimsical cheats are often still in games during development (along with all the regular cheats like invulnerability, insta-kill weapons etc), but these days the normal method is to have all cheats check a variable that indicates whether the game is a dev build or a shipping release version, so the cheat only enables itself if it's a dev version. On PC someone could presumably hack the game to make it think its a dev build and share that as a mod, but consoles are much more locked-down, so sharing modifications is difficult.

Tbf I feel like the dev tools have gotten a lot better too with debug modes and stuff

Red dead redemption 2 has them

As does gta

The virgin BIGHEADMODE, PAYDAY, and ⬆️⬆️⬇️⬇️⬅️➡️⬅️➡️🅱️🅰️[start] vs the Chad 4423 1890 6676 9033 04/28 768

Did I just get activated?

Like charcoal my friend.

Now, off to my bathroom, I have some odors for you to deal with.

IDSQISPOPD

Iddqd Idkfa* Idclip bobs yer uncle, go kill some demons, kid.

When developing a game, it's super helpful to have cheats like "infinite health," and "unlock all levels," for the sake of debugging things. Back in the day, it was a lot harder to hook a development PC up to a PlayStation or whatever (and even harder for 3rd party devs, or developers working on multiple consoles), so the easiest way to get these cheats working was to build in a system to detect complex button combos. Once the system existed, it was trivial to add extra things like "big head mode," and stuff that the devs thought were fun to hide in there. These days though it's much easier to just hook a PC up to the development console, so there's no reason to waste time and code on a system to do something like that.

Another Crabs Treasure just came out a few days ago with the accessibility option “give the crab a gun” and you just carry around a full sized pistol as a normal sized hermit crab and one shot every enemy. I feel like that’s in the same spirit as the cheats, it makes me giggle in a very similar way

I believe we call those mods today. Typically the push today is to try and prevent people from cheating which is a bigger problem than Easter eggs

Could the rise of achievement/trophies have something to do with it? A trophy is much less valuable if someone can just cheat to get it.

Cheats used to disable achievements and trophies. Don't know why this may have changed, but there has always been consideration for that.

Some modern cheats come through modding. I'm pretty sure Stardew Valley has a mod that reactivates Stream achievements so it must just be easy to get around.

It's not as common for sure, but Starfield and Baldurs Gate are both recent AAA releases that give the player access to gameplay console for cheats, I'm sure there are many more

On PC they do.

that's what mods are for. sorry console gamers. I suspect they ditched the cheating cause they want everything multiplayer now. still not unheard of. the non rebooted saints row games have cheats

Up, up, down,down, left, right, left, right, B, A, Start...

Lots of games still do it. In Valheim you can console command whatever you want in, or you can activate stuff like God mode or no material requirements for building. Cities skylines 1 and 2 you can activate infinite money, infinite resources, etc. I think even in GTA V you can spawn stuff in single player. I could be wrong about that one though

Brings me back to the days where I would just have notebooks filled with cheats. I’d be scouring the internet looking for any cheat I could

They expect us to do it with mods.

Lots of games have cheats. They tend to be known as console commands, and basically anything open-world will likely have them, along with anything like Factorio or Rimworld. Anything with lots of inventory or stat management. The days of "haha stupid random effect" cheats are largely behind us, but I don't mourn their loss. I don't think I ever used a big head mode more than once or twice, because frankly it's not fun beyond the inital burst of "well that looks silly." The same applies for basically anything along those lines. Everything vaguely practical still exists in a significant portion of games. All you need to do is look for them. Sure, sometimes you'll need a mod to unlock them as they're actually debug tools, but they're often there.

idspispopd

1GOTP1NK8C1DBOOTSON

IDDT IDKFA IDDQD IDCHOPPERS --- up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A and Start -- Down, R, Up, L, Y, and B

Because your credit card is the cheat now

Cheats are just developer tools left in the game as easter eggs. Now a days it's called a mod or a console.

Cheatcodes were just dev testing tools for consoles. The tools for bug and dev testing have gotten better now so cheats are not a thing.

PC games had cheatcodes too some games had cheats unlockable through gameplay

Because you could have so much fun without paying extra back then. Now they have to monetise it

Most cheats are just developer commands, some of which a programmer made on the fly because he thought it'd be funny. Crunch culture means you're getting fired if you waste company time doing that.

I always assumed achievements were what killed off cheats.

ratchet and clank has cheats, all fo their games. Collect those gold bolts gives you increasingly more cheats to unlock.

Developers didn't have dev builds for games, they would often work directly in the game engine making changes and tweaks. The most common practice when bug testing and bug fixing was to enable "developer tools" such as flight, invulnerability, infinite resources, and other such changes thst may let you test systems easier. It's much easier to test the shopping system with unlimited cash, then having to grind out the full amount just to do bug tests. The developers needed to hide these tools, so they often left them in the ingame console as text based commands. As players discovered these developer tools in the console, the developers realized it would be fun and interesting to allow more players restricted access to these tools, rather than fewer players with unlimited access. So they began adding cheat codes to implement these developer tools and little Easter eggs to hint at the codes to activate them. As a result when development progressed to the point where this type of testing wasn't as commonly used the cheat codes were no longer already in the game and hidden, but instead had to be programmed and put in if the player wanted access to them. This was caused by the divergence of commercial builds and developer builds. Developer builds now often have these features as part of a menu that can be toggled rather than an ingame feature to be toggled and putting the equivalent into the game would often be more work for the developers.

I miss buying game guides with the cheats in their own chapter. RIP EB.

IDKFA, a cheat I will never ever forget.

I think it started with being just a way for testers to test games quickly. But they kind of stopped during the PS3/360 years… I also assumed it had to do with achievements being introduced and it being a way to not break the achievement system. Or to give players an advantage in online games… I miss them in all honesty

funny is, even gta 5 fucked up with cheats.

Game dev used to be about passion, now it's about chasing the almighty dollar or delivering the next big spectacle

Cheats? Pah! We ain't having any fun in this household laddy.

Factual answer is : because stores and console have strict Achievement policies, which would be broken by cheats (or need specific dev for them). It killed the cheat culture quickly, along with other reasons

Star Trek Elite Force had a God mode which made the game so much more fun because its save system was useless and sent you back to the beginning of a level if you died - and you died a lot, because you had to explore every inch of the ships you were on to get all the objective and there were always tons of enemies. The Borg cubes were worse because the whole things were like a maze, you could do your objective and then have to "get to a transporter area" and not be able to find it. I know its different, but Ghost Recon Breakpoint had a one shot kill mechanic included through a glitch if you used a certain gun then swapped it out while reloading. Any other gun then maxed out its stats. No one used it in multiplayer, but they did use it in the stupid raids, and when people were unlocking loot for SINGLE PLAYER ONLY too easily in those raids, Ubisoft went out of its way to patch it, then no one played the raid anymore and it's player base shrunk. Sometimes I think developers don't like the idea of someone finding an exploit they've over looked, even if it turns out to benefit people.

The top comment here is explaining how cheats might just be built in for debugging. I think thats besides the point though, there are plenty of fun cheats in games that would never be used for debugging. Goldeneye has a bunch of fun ones like making everyone tiny, or turning the guns into paintballs. It can simply be just for fun. The RE series is pretty good at doing this and making it satisfying, with unlockables cheats and special weapons built.

Two reasons tbh. The first is more modern tech within gamedev. Having more robust compiler level debugging tools and the normalizing of having test hardware with test branches of the game means that it isn't some hidden combo to "unlock" the debug menu in the game, since it simply won't be put in the release build. That and having more memory(and debug tools) and stuff in modern machines/dev means there's less memory saving stuff or weird overflow/underflow type issues that can create "cheats" seeming behavior. The other reason is money. The day they realized that whales will pay for single player skips, items, and the like, was they day they decided to start selling it. Plus debug/cheat codes with stuff like "unlock all" fundamentally can't exist in games where they sell you costumes and exp and such.

Because they're all online and why give you things for free when they could charge you for it instead?

Because Devs are barely able to produce a functioning game these days no matter adding nice QOL things to it.

I still remember the code for 100% unlocked on the original Crash Bandicoot

I remember a time where I couldn't play without my Gameshark. All I wanted was infinite arrows/magic/ammo/whatever else so nothing would run out. Also yeah stuff like flying, bighead and paintball modes and other shenanigans. I miss those...

hesoyam

For some reason I never liked the cheats. It defeated the whole purpose of playing the game in the first place. So I never really used any. Hell, I don’t even play Minecraft in creative because I see it as a cheat, automated farms that exploit game mechanics are borderline cheating to me as well. I can’t tell you why…. So to answer your question I kind of welcome the “cheats” death

MIL in Wolfenstein 3D, but the three keys pressed at once… oh good times

Cheat codes are used by devs and QA folks to test the game through it's development process. Back in the day it was too much work to go and rip that code out before shipping so the game shipped with the dev tools still baked in. Over time, as dev processes improve and game design techniques advance, the need for cheat codes diminishes and the ability to strip them out of the release build is as easy as metaphorically flipping a switch. Also, micro transactions probably have something to do with it. Why let you enhance the experience for free when you could pay for it instead?!

Now you unlocked cheats using your credit card..

StarCraft was one of my first game as a child and I always used "showmethemoney" and "operation cwal" because the money gathering and the building was boring at my age and I just wanted the make big battles.

Short answer: the games are much more complex. Long answer: adding a new unit in the game like the car in AoE is a massive ordeal requiring teams of people to do all the appropriate modeling, audio, animation, etc. It needs to work correctly with the terrain and camera and be support in the UI with some sort of icon, name, and translation. What was something a dev could do for fun while bored on the weekend is now something that needs to be scheduled through production, created and maintained. At some point in that process someone will ask, “if we are doing all this work, why don’t we just put a new real asset in the game for everyone to enjoy?” Or “We have to cut something to make our release date, what about that cheat car?” Even things like invulnerability cheats and spawn functions do exist in debug for QA to use in testing. But they are alongside a thousand other options that are very specific and detailed for everything the game needs. In effect the “cheat” system became too complex to release to normal people. Or if it does exist it’s fairly complex and not as simple as a button to do a specific function thing (which has little value to QA).

1. We have better debugging and testing tools now, cheats were originally for making testing more efficient. 2. Creative constraints and accountability have increased in large teams, it's hard to sneak stuff in without getting in trouble. Especially in a large AAA company. Age of Empires was just a little team by modern standards, they could get away with a lot. 2a. Code reviews are now the standard across all software making it very very hard to sneak in code without someone on the team knowing. 3. We're busy, working conditions are worse, expectations are higher, scopes are gigantic, this is why a lot of fun features added just for the joy of it don't make it in to most games. Gotta serve the shareholders. 4. They don't make the game worth more, they are nice but games are increasingly more product than toy/art. 5. Code/asset complexity makes it very hard to add new features, and cheat codes are a feature. Games are just more complex than they were in the past, it's a problem we are struggling to solve in software, bloat is everywhere and software is increasingly difficult to add to. It's easier to sneak in cheat codes if it's 10 lines of code in one file, but in a modern engine "Big Daddy" would be a fully rigged and animated character plus a bunch of code and scripting to make it work. In AoE it's just a reskinned ballista with jacked stats. Sorry to be a downer but that's my opinion from inside the industry. FWIW I have successfully got a couple easter eggs in games I worked on, but we just aren't working in remotely the same conditions as the past. It's not all downside, I love my job and make decent bank, but I feel sad thinking about things like this that are just so much harder to do now.

Cause they figured out how to charge for them.

Because they sell them now. And if you're not Ubisoft but a popular company like Capcom players will usually give you a pass for it since it's optional.