A brief history of cheats

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An overview of the oft-overlooked insider lore that helped fuel the growth of the games industry

GRAND THEFT CHEATS

Grand Theft Auto is best known as being the father of sandbox games, but among fans it is known just as well for its brilliantly massive selection of cheats. GTA (and Rockstar in general) has a prolific legacy of sequential button pressing, and didn’t just influence the sandbox concept, but also the concept of total player freedom. Sure you can play through the games diligently finding weapons and completing missions, or you can spawn a tank and every weapon, slow down time, and intentionally tip off the FBI. Or perhaps just go for a nice fly:

GLITCHING

Glitching has been around since the earliest of games, but the term generally refers to the trend which began with early multiplayer shooters, in which glitches could often be used to gain a competitive advantage, or just annoy the hell out of everyone in the match. The more open-ended the game, the more glitches that likely made it through.

The Battlefield series, for example, is packed with code anomalies. Here are just a few of the ways you can destroy physics in Battlefield 1942:

If they ever manage to iron all of the bugs out of the Tony Hawk series, sales will go down - the series is a glitcher’s paradise. The “Bail Cancel Float Glitch” in Project 8 allows you to freeze your skater in mid-air, and if you’re real tricky, levitate over the ground in motion. If you’re uber tricky, you can levitate upside down. Oh, hi YouTube, you say you have a video?

But back in the days of NES games, glitches were just as important – mostly because the games were so damn hard. Early NES game Blaster Master was brimming at the rim with malfunctions, the most considerable of which made boss fights negligible. If the player paused the game as an explosion hit a boss, the damage effect was not suspended, and the boss’ life was depleted while the player sat back and sipped his iced tea…or whatever it was people drank in 1988. The player below managed to glitch his way out of the bounds of the level:

PAY-PER-CHEAT?

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GamesRadarTylerWilde
GamesRadarTylerWilde
Associate Editor, Digital at PC Gamer