Have you ever cheated at a computer game? No? Then you’re a liar as well as a cheat, and you will never marry my daughter. This article is a memoir of my own personal history of dishonesty, so if you’re a despicable shifty bastard like me, then crack open your flatmate’s beer, pull up a “borrowed” chair, and we’ll begin.

There is a culture and a beauty to good cheating.

Cheat codes were originally there so that programmers could test their games without going insane, but kids soon became obsessed with finding every code, not least because you bloody needed to cheat in order to finish some of those old “classics”.

In the 80’s, programmers seemed to regard games as a punishment they could visit upon the rest of the world for denying them the touch of a woman. Some games were literally impossible (Ghosts N Goblins, you stand condemned); others were merely dick-severingly difficult. So the cheat code was not just a luxury: it was a virtual necessity.

Jet Set Willy. When a game starts you off with 12 lives, it’s a fairly solid hint that you are about to get a ramming.

Soon, canny publicists realised that there was an  emerging “cult of cheating” which could be encouraged and exploited. Game magazines rushed to publish the latest cheats, let slip by the developers with an astonishingly capricious regularity. And all over the world, games that took years to create were being nonchalantly broken by dishonest little crap-kickers who didn’t even know they were ruining the spirit of sportsmanship.

Those were the days.

How I became a bad person

I used to own a Commodore Amiga, one of the most hilarious sumps of dishonesty ever created.

Every kid lusted after them, but the buggers were £300, an absolute fortune in 1988. There was seemingly no hope of getting one. But kids are clever. “It’s for my homework”, was the endlessly repeated line. “It can print stuff out, dad! It can do the maths that you are mentally incapable of doing, thereby sparing you the shame of failure as a father!” In the end, the parents caved into our relentless pleas. They knew in their hearts that they were being bullshitted, but they chose to believe otherwise because it was the path of least resistance. They were so very tired.

Not only was the Amiga’s butt bigger than your mother’s; the power pack was almost as ponderous as my dick.

This was the way I got my Amiga. I got it through lying. Through cheating. With this in mind, it was inevitable that I would cheat at the very games I bullshitted so hard to obtain, and the Amiga made it stupidly easy to do so. You could buy an external cartridge called the Action Replay which slotted into the side of your computer, allowing you to hack into the code of any program and change whatever variable you wanted. God knows how, but the cartridge even zeroed in on the code responsible for things like lives and ammo.

Suddenly, every game became an exercise in pointlessness as you sailed right through to the end in a soft, gay cloud of invulnerability. This should have killed all enjoyment, but oddly, it didn’t. When I think back to old classics like Turrican and Battle Squadron, I remember fondly how difficult they were, and how great I felt when I finally beat them. I conveniently forget that I beat them approximately 11 minutes after first loading them, because I gave myself infinite lives and used Action Replay to skip right to the end.

My whole life, basically, is a lie.

Winners don’t use drugs. They use dismal-looking 80’s peripherals.

And if I can fool myself so successfully about games, what else have I fabricated? Did my grandparents really move to Weston-Super-Mare? And why wouldn’t I let anyone disturb the two piles of dirt in the backyard? No one cares anymore but me, of course, so I shouldn’t beat myself up about whom I might or might not have murdered.

DOOOOOOOOOOOOM

With the golden age of PC games, cheating faced a new challenge. Games were no longer impossibly grim struggles retched out by programmers who never got breast-fed; they were now stories with some semblance of narrative, where you were expected to reach the end. Suddenly vanilla cheating began to lose its allure. There were some wonderful exceptions, however. Take Doom: it took the unprecedented step of giving you the ability to save anywhere, making cheats irrelevant unless you were cripplingly spasticated or a parent. So cheating assumed a new purpose: that of screwing with the game itself.

By far the most enjoyable cheat of this kind was a catchy little fellow called idspispopd, which turned clipping off, allowing you to walk right through walls as if ain’t nuthin. This, needless to say, was shit-awesome. Millions of kids had their first taste of existentialism when they thought “hey, I wonder what’s behind this wall” and discovered the brain-buggering paradox of an Absolute Nothingness that stretched on forever in all directions.

Turn 90 degrees right! Walk ten paces! Blow Mind!

There should have been idspispopd-related help groups. If only we had known, the world wouldn’t now be full of terrified hipsters wearing aviator shades to disguise their thousand-yard stares. Let that be a lesson to the next generation: it is not appropriate to confront the futility of existence while fucking about on Level Three.

The age of the meta-cheat

Amazingly, some game programmers became so cocky that they designed areas you could only access through cheating.

In Ultima 7, you can visit a pirate town called Buccaneer’s Den, which houses a dark and completely ridiculous secret. There’s a sealed room which you must cheat yourself into. Within this room is a dead alligator. Reward enough, you might think, but stick your arm inside the alligator, and what do you find but an entire grandfather clock! Evidently, Captain Hook not only had an evil sense of irony, but also various old heirlooms that were just cluttering up the house. They should have turned this into a regular feature, I feel. I’d pay good money for a game that gives you Achievements for finding all 45 mice with candles in their anuses.

QUICK! SEARCH THE FOX’S SPHINCTER FOR ASHTRAYS!

The cheat and the game… Become One.

In a flash of genius, 1999’s AvP turned the cheat into something you could actually earn, rewarding you for completing the game by giving you the opportunity to break it. Each time you hit a certain performance target, you unlocked a new cheat mode, although “cheat” should be taken loosely here, since some of them actually turned the game into a sadistic, vomit-spewing nightmare. But the crowning refinement of the cheating oeuvre? The games so creative that they make you feel as if you’re cheating, without even needing to do so. Take Jedi Knight. Without the Force Powers, it’s a straight first-person shooter, with guns, bad people and ludicrously unjustified levels of carnage. A solid 75-percenter, in other words. But add the Force, and suddenly you have all these fun ways to bend the rules of the genre.

Thinking quickly, Kyle activates Force Mincing and gays his way towards the opponent.

Here’s an example. You’re ambling down a corridor, lost in your thoughts, when suddenly you see a Rodian coming towards you with a big laser, and you think “ahh shit, I still owe that guy twenty! If only I could become…invisible…”

With a shimmer, you disappear. The Rodian walks up to where you were standing, sniffs the air with his nauseating proboscis, and mutters “hmm; could have sworn I saw Steve.” But Steve is long gone, Zoobydoob, and he used your money to buy low-grade porn.

Tim Cameron is a writer for www.TheSillyAddiction.com. He is aware that you’re already reading his site, thus making a blurb unnecessary, but he is including it anyway because it makes him feel like a big shot.

Filed under: Gaming nostalgia