One GTA 3 veteran hid cheats in the code to stop hackers from finding them at launch, but his clever little trick accidentally tripped up speedrunners

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A lot can go wrong when you're tapping away at lightspeed

GTA 3
(Image credit: Rockstar Games)

A veteran Rockstar Games developer has shared the secrets behind Grand Theft Auto 3's cheats (as well as those in GTA: Vice City and San Andreas), how he attempted to hide them from the playerbase, and how that little trick messed with PC speedruns.

The ever-chatty Obbe Vermeij, who helped make every third-person GTA up until GTA 4, has jumped onto social media to share more under-the-hood details about the open-world classic. This time, his mini history lesson was about the ancient art of cheats, which would only activate on PC after you typed in a specific sequence of characters. Typing "ILOVESCOTLAND" would make it rain, for example. 

But Vermeij wanted to hide these cheats within the code so that hackers wouldn't discover them on launch day. "This is why I used 'hash codes' to store the cheats," he tweeted recently. "A hash code is a single number that is calculated from a string [of numbers]." Without getting too tech-headed, each letter has its own ASCII value - a capital A is worth 65, let's say - so these hash codes essentially added up the value of each cheat to avoid having them in the code as is.

"The hash code for ILOVESCOTLAND would be 983," he continued. "For GUNSGUNSGUNS it would be 951. The game would compare these hash codes with the hash code for the recent keyboard input. It worked. The cheats were not hacked. (They were eventually discovered by gamers trying random input)."

Using that clever trick also unintentionally led some people to discover cheats using different phrases. Players typing in "HDLMAAXOPK" would also activate the rain cheat, for instance, because those letters have the same 'value' as "ILOVESCOTLAND." As you can imagine, that sometimes meant that people would activate cheats accidentally, "sometimes during speed runs," Vermeij explains. "These speed runs had to be aborted as the rules are clear. No cheats."

For now, check out everything we know about GTA 6, which just won the Most Wanted Game award at the Golden Joysticks. 

Kaan Serin
Freelance contributor

Kaan freelances for various websites including Rock Paper Shotgun, Eurogamer, and this one, Gamesradar. He particularly enjoys writing about spooky indies, throwback RPGs, and anything that's vaguely silly. Also has an English Literature and Film Studies degree that he'll soon forget.