Cheat codes

I saw Pixels for the first time the other night and I was really enjoying all of the video game nostalgia.  I was so distracted by the concept that I was actually surprised by the plot twist that Eddie used cheat codes for the Pac Man sequence.

First of all, I didn't realize the oldest games like Pac Man and others on display in this movie had cheat codes. But I'm not surprised.  In the movie, Eddie uses the cheat codes to win at an official competition in 1982 and again in the war with these Pixel aliens, making his win illegitimate.  I suppose if you're in an official competition or war with video game aliens, then cheating would be a bad thing, but I never thought of cheat codes as cheating.

This video demonstrates one of at least three glitches in Super Mario World for SNES that enabled a person to get 99 lives.  It's not the one I personally used.  I went into a different level and flew over all of the enemies until I got to a point where I found a point button that, when pressed, would turn all of the enemies into 3 lives-up coins and go through the level a couple of times.  But these glitches were purposeful.  In Super Mario World they had a section where you could go in and pick up a free Yoshi and cape without being bothered by any enemies, so it makes sense that they'd hide other helpful Easter eggs throughout the game if you spend enough time exploring and trying different things.  There wasn't much else you could do to cheat in Mario, but this was a great little glitch for people like me who aren't good players and died a lot.

Unless you had a Game Genie and there was one for all of the different consoles at one point.  This would give you options for making winning the levels of the game easier as the later DOS game cheat codes would do.

Fast forward to the old DOS games for the PC.  Duke Nukem, Doom, Wolf 3D, Blood, Redneck Rampage.  They all had cheat codes to enter on the keyboard that would do a variety of things, some of which are demonstrated in this video.  I've met people that think that this is the stupidest thing - why bother playing after all?  But the thing is, most people wouldn't use every single cheat available.  I never used the ones to show me the map or to have all of the keys because solving the puzzle was the fun part for me.  I liked blowing away the monsters but I didn't want to be hindered from solving the puzzle by dying every couple minutes, so I always used "God Mode" and a cheat that would give me all of the available weapons.  Because, lets face it, the weapons were all very cool and you didn't get a lot of opportunity to use them all and not for very long depending on how much ammo they carried.  It was more of a way of customizing your gaming experience than a way of actually cheating.

And you couldn't always use them.  In the difficulty settings, if you chose the hardest setting, you weren't allowed to use cheats at all typically.  I guess the thinking behind that is if you're good enough for that setting, you don't need to cheat.  Or perhaps because you're that good you wouldn't want the cheat.  The thing about "cheats" is that they weren't always there to make things easy.  I can't find examples on the internet, but almost all of these game had a code that would start you in a level with only half of your health or ammo.  You could enter these codes if you wanted more of a challenge.  I wouldn't call giving yourself a disadvantage deliberately cheating, would you?

Being open source, a lot of them had silly patches to use too. Patches that would turn all of the monsters in to Barney.  Or make your heroes Beavis and Butthead.  I think Duke 3D had a nudity patch.  Silly things like this to customize and play with.  Those were the good old days.


Anyway, I miss cheat codes.  Playing until a feature is "unlocked" isn't quite the same.  I don't have the skill to play games like Call Of Duty which look like a lot of fun, but without a little edge, I'm stuck with the Fable series.  It's not a bad series and I love it to pieces.  But the gaming world has kind of passed me by since the old cheat codes have gone out of  fashion.  Sill fun to reminisce about.