A brief history of cheats
An overview of the oft-overlo𒉰oked insider lore that helped fuel the growth of the games industry
CHEATS FOR THE SAKE OF CHEATS
Eventually it occurred to developers that while cheats for testing purposes were great, there was nothing wrong with inserting cheats for the h🌺ell of it.
The “big head mode” is probably the most well-known cheat of this type. It’s tough to say definitively where or when it began, because it isn’t exactly docum🔜ented, but the first instance we remember was in NBA Jam. Since then, too many sports games to count haveꦏ included big heads and other body morphs as standard cheats.
While sports games are notoriously pac❀ked with odd cheats, they appear in games of all genres, and have become expected of many franchises. Most of these “for the hell of it”ꩵ cheats roughly fall into one of the following categories:
Hoh-boy, Nazis aren’t hot dogs!
CHEATING DEVICES
With a technique similar to the POKEs mentioned earlier, products like the GameGenie and GameShark manipulated games’ memory, 🐈and even cꦆode.
The only problem with these systems was that they were made of ultra-breakable plastic, and possibly built by ✨actual sharks. It wasn’t always easy to keep them working, but when they were, messing with the codes became more fun than actually playing the games.
Weekly digests, tales from the communitꦺiesꦕ you love, and more