A brief history of cheats

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 hell 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 documented, but the first instance we remember was in NBA Jam. Since then, too many sports games to count have included big heads and other body morphs as standard cheats.

MobyGames

While sports games are notoriously packed 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” 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 code.

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.