Odd take.
I can’t think of a single thing that used to be a cheat code that is now a microtransaction.
Want easy mode? It’s now a menu. Infinite lives are the default. Immortality modes and slow motion aiming are often under accessibility options.
None of these can be purchased.
Old games had cheats because they were hard as nails, and a game where you can’t get past the second level wasn’t going to hold a kid’s interest for long.
Play a mobile game like candy crush or whatever, a sports game like 2k, etc and you’ll that op has a point.
I don’t think I ever even got a quarter of the way through new Zealand story.
I’m pretty sure I beat the first boss (the whale) without cheating. Anything past that wasn’t happening with my skills.
Uhh, that doesn’t add up. Cheat codes started getting used less, as far back as the PS1 generation - long before dlc existed. It was a pretty rapid shift from that point on.
It’s weird hearing incorrect things about history from people who were evidently not born yet, when I was there. How do I go back?
Cheat codes were a debugging tool.
As development tools got better, they became obsolete.
No, cheat codes as debugging tools is like 25% of the story at best. That may be how they got their start, but it completely misses how they were very much a wider cultural phenomenon for some time.
In 007 there’s a cheat to make everyone’s heads comically bigger. In Tomb Raider, entering a cheat input incorrectly causes Lara to explode. In Heretic, if you enter cheats from Doom you’ll get the opposite of the intended effect. In Gauntlet: Dark Legacy there is an entire litany of secret character models you can play as, if you choose the right character and give them the right name. There’s a cheat that turns Banjo-Kazooie into a washing machine. Another one that initiates a zombie mode in Scott Pilgrim. There was a golfing game where hitting the ball 100 times and then inputting a shortened version of the Konami code generated a completely different Fantasy Zone minigame.
Do those sound like helpful debugging tools?
There was a time when entire websites were devoted to cheat codes and easter eggs (of course the most enduring ones were the broader sites that included whole walkthroughs like GameFAQs), and entire books would be published just for cheat codes.
Ultimately cheat codes were far more about easter eggs and unique game experiences than they were for debugging purposes - especially since as plenty of people have already pointed out, it wasn’t long before better debugging tools were invented anyway.
The end of the day it was just a trend. People had interest in these things, then interest subsided.
IDK man, console access and cheats are still pretty common for PC games. Although there are exceptions too, at least one game series I know, first few titles had console access and cheats, then they removed it after they stupidly left DLC content accessible through console commands in the base game… Which is pretty much an example of what OP claimed. So maybe it’s not always the reason, but it sure is sometimes.
Which game was this?
Some later part of the Risen RPG series IIRC.
I thought cheat codes were there originally for debugging and playtesting
That’s what I heard and it made sense. You didn’t want the developer or tester to have to progress normally to test things.
But I guess now we have better debug tools, and release builds vs debug builds. Because resource isn’t a problem and we can insert all those extra info on debug build
The first time I ever paid for access to cheat codes was in 1990.
Provide examples if that is the case.
Cheat codes were originally for testing and, occasionally, for fun. Sometimes they became Easter eggs. I can’t think of a single game where your assertion is true today or in the past.
The gaming industry didn’t remove content from games because it takes too long to develop, they removed it so they could sell us DLC and a half finished game.
Quality shower thought
The only thing close to cheat codes I’ve seen are the bonus modes you unlock in Uncharted, like Slow motion, and mirror mode. Which are not DLC.
We were never meant to have cheat codes at all.
They removed them because they have the technical ability to do so (due to game engines, ease of testing, etc.)
Its ok to be stupid sometimes op.
The market is flooded w more games than ever…and there’s a brazillion games that dont do this.
Stop playing NBA 2k trash. Start playing indie trash at least.
This is the era where there’s more amateur smut than ever before. Learn to enjoy life. Even a cuck like u can find something good.
I mean you’re right but you don’t have to be mean about it.
There’s a big difference between cheat codes and paid stuff for whales.
I am gonna bet somehow epistein is involved
I thought it was because everything is a PC game ported to console. No reason to dev what modders do for free.
It’s more likely because cheat codes were development / QA tools to make testing the game easier. They got left in because they were behind hidden, strange button sequences etc, removing the code risked breaking something that would be harder to test without the codes, and they can be fun.
With better development tools, debuggers/profilers, and easier ways to distribute builds, they stopped being left in the game. And with the gamification from achievements/trophies, cheats would devalue/trivialise unlocking achievements etc and break their purpose.
cheat codes were development / QA tools to make testing the game easier. They got left in because they were behind hidden, strange button sequences etc, removing the code risked breaking something that would be harder to test without the codes, and they can be fun.
That’s maybe how they started, but between then and now was a time when developers would very specifically add in cheat codes that had nothing to do with development or debugging, and were often just extra things added in to make the game more fun to play. (See ‘paintball mode’ in Goldeneye N64 for a prime example of that.) But those kinds of cheat codes seem to have fallen out of fashion.
And Gandhi goes nuclear.
Edit: Sorry, was thinking of the nuclear dudes in AoE I.
That was an underflow error.
Sid himself ultimately admitted that the bug was possible. We should decompile the original and figure it out once and for all.
Not sure where you are taking that from. Wikipedia has
Later, in an Ars Technica interview, Sid Meier similarly stated that the bug was possible, “but it was not intentional”.
On September 8, 2020, Sid Meier’s autobiography, Sid Meier’s Memoir!: A Life in Computer Games, was released, containing confirmation that the Gandhi software bug was fabricated and a detailed background of the urban legend’s formation.
So this sounds like the statement you refer to was not “ultimate” but still part of creating the hoax.
Edit:
Quoting the translation of one of the sources here:The myth was also refuted by Brian Reynolds, the leading game designer of Civilization II - in a video for People’s Games, his quote is mentioned, that the game has only three possible levels of aggression, and not 10 or 255. At the same time, at the first level there was not only Gandhi, but also other leaders, which in this case should lead to similar bugs with many other factions.
[…]
It all started with Sid Meier’s Civilization V. In it, India really had the preference for nuclear weapons to other forms of warfare at a point close to the maximum - at level 12. John Shafer, the leading game designer of the fifth “Civilization”, made this parameter so high solely for the sake of a joke.Article goes into it a bit more, but summary it all started with Civ5 in 2010, where it was an intentional (joke) decision not a bug.
All nuclear ghandi stuff dates to civ5, it did not exist before that time. Then in 2014 someone on reddit made up the hoax and publications just ran with it.No, the sudden aggression of Gandhi was a noticeable thing in the original game. I played it a lot, and I remember it.
But now people want them back… It’s not like people didn’t enjoy them. They fell out of fashion because of the niche audience that kept using them and because eventually everything went digital and selling things like action replay and code breakers and game shark was a hassle to load the codes onto at the time because the cables were very specific but now everything has been transferred to Type C, computers are cheap, wifi isn’t shit there’s two young generations at play and digitally adding in mods is harder than using an sd card with a preloaded cheat code system ready to hack your games or plugging in a cartridge to a flismy cartridge that if you bumped it your game would fuck up (action replay 2006). The n64 game shark destroyed games. For any online system, if you got caught online with cheats you were still subjected to potential bans.
I get why they, “fell out of fashion” but they’re a niche thing that is still oddly enough an enjoyable part of gaming.
You know that Game Shark and all that didn’t use codes that the developers made, right? The “codes” those use are memory addresses and values to set them to. You are directly editing the games memory.
Those fell out of fashion because consoles are basically PCs now and you can’t really guarantee a hard and fast memory layout. Plus, Sony doesn’t want people bypassing DRM using a memory editor.
Improvements in development/debugging tools definitely explains part of the puzzle - but I think your last sentence is actually a much better explanation, because I absolutely remember games where cheats weren’t just in the game, but were explicitly available to the player through menus (the Ratchet and Clank quadrilogy comes to mind).
The culture around cheats has kinda just changed. People much more value either a vanilla single-player experience, or a truly modded one. Plus the prevalence of multiplayer games has increased exponentially since cheats were popular - and of course outright cheating online is a big no-no (though I wish that were the case with P2W)
Yeah, really need that sense of pride and accomplishment while we pay for another loot box
Also some of the creative and fun codes that did things like altering models in a comical way orreplaceing gunfire with cows mooing just aren’t added as part of development anymore.
Not if it’s blood is smiley faces, you fall down you land on a roof, your head gets bigger, omg you can fly!, everyone has a clown nose, you reveal a hidden set of armor that has no actual stats but is purely for looks.
If it’s, it skips you ahead, defeats a part of the game, unlocks achievements and has an effect on the online servers then I understand not leaving them in. If it’s fun garbage Easter egg bullshit, then it should be left in.
