Many people have fond memories of cheating, if you were lucky enough to be around video games during the late 80’s most of you will probably remember “The Code.” This refers to a series of button presses that when done correctly give you what is now known as “The Konami Code (Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A),” first used in Contra to give players twenty seven extra lives per continue. Cheats such as these first started as simple debugging tools, allowing developers to run through their games easily while looking for bugs, pitfalls, and glitches, or to simply test how difficult the title was. After the immense popularity of earlier cheat codes, developers began releasing them publicly to give their older games an added replay boost. Soon thereafter developers began making codes specifically to add extra gameplay value, such as with Acclaim’s NBA Jam/NBA Jam TE codes. These allowed you to play as then President/Vice President Bill Clinton and Al Gore (among a host of other characters). Other codes, like super dunk mode, also allowed you to dunk from across the court. These cheats actually enhanced the normal gameplay and not just increased the replay value or helped with difficult areas. As secret characters, codes and debug menus became more and more popular, people began looking for ways to obtain better cheats. This mass hysteria of cheats ended up having a much larger impact on games than anyone could have predicted.
Non-gaming companies also began looking into ways to get cheats without being at the mercy of the developers or just random guessing. Even though the cheat arena had become popular, developers still retained codes and debugging menus that they programmed in the game, mainly because they feared that it would make the title to easy or just ruin the experience. Players and other companies simply saw a new way to enjoy an old game or a way to help them along a new one. Datel and Galoob were two of these companies searching for ways to enable cheats, even if they weren’t already programmed into the game. Both companies managed to do this in their own respect using much the same strategy and achieving the same great results.
Datel released Action Replay as early as the Commodore 64 era while Galoob began producing the Game Genie around the end of the Nintendo Entertainment System era. Datel has been producing its cheating product, Action Replay, in Europe for every major console since Super Nintendo. They have also been part of the Game Shark development team for North America along with Interact, which was first released for the Sega Saturn. Datel has since stopped producing the Game Shark and has begun publishing its Action Replay for both markets, as well as discs for individual games that do much the same. The Game Genie from Galoob was the U.S. market’s first big cheating product, but has not had the same long running success as its competitor. Originally released for the NES and Sega Genesis, Game Genie was discontinued after systems became CD based, with the 16-bit era becoming the final stage for Game Genie. Action Replay, Game Shark and Game Genie all work on the same basic idea: simply finding the information of the number of lives, continues or ammo and replacing these values with others more appealing to the user. Manufacturers have also found button combinations, such as the Konami Code, that have been hidden, or ways to access the game’s debug menu which allows you to change just about every attribute available.
Until recently cheating has only affected the person or people cheating. No utility or cheat code let you have an unfair advantage that your opponents could not see or enable themselves. This issue has become a huge concern of late with the explosion of multiplayer online gaming. Now consoles and PCs allow gamers to connect to other players across the globe for a quick deathmatch, a game of pool, or a war of global domination. With these offerings have come ranking systems to add to the competition, and with competition comes the ones who wish to use illegal methods to gain prestige. The major players in the development of cheating products have all agreed that cheating online is wrong and can ruin the experience of a game. Datel has told Totalgaming.net that they were able to crack codes for such online offerings as Sega’s Phantasy Star Online Episode I+II and EverQues,t but have kept the codes confidential to keep the games fair (and probably avoid a potential lawsuit). Datel has even released a code for SOCOM: U.S. Navy Seals which is online, but the code only changes the AI of the computer opponents, not giving any individual player an advantage. The codes that were found for individual gain, such as infinite ammo, have all been kept confidential and unreleased by Datel.
The people who are cheating in multiplayer games are individual competitors looking for an edge so they can appear better than they really are. Aim bots, map hacks, item dupers and numerous other cheat programs have been created for games of every genre. The impact of these cheats is enormous: Aim bots plague almost every first person shooter on the market, enabling the shakiest of hands to get a head shot and a great kill-to-death ratio. Cheats have even been created for games such as Yahoo! Pool, enabling insane combinations and guaranteed shots. Map hacks have become a major problem for most real-time strategy games, enabling one player to see everything that is going on and giving them a heads-up on what is coming, when it is coming and what strategy the other player is using. Item dupers are often found in RPGs or MMORPGs and are used to create a duplicate of an item that the user obtained so they can keep their item and trade the other for a high price. The dupes often disappear after awhile or get weeded out when the developers create a new patch, sometimes causing the people with fake items to get in trouble, even if they had no idea or nothing to do with any suspicious behavior. There are numerous other cheats and utilities made for numerous other games that are plaguing the online realm, but most have been isolated to PC, Xbox and the defunct Dreamcast. This is because both PCs and Xboxs contain hard drives where information can be stored and accessed as the games are played, or in Xbox’s case, because it has been modified so heavily. Even the Dreamcast, a system with no sizeable hard drive has been hacked, enabling people to create numerous cheats for most of the titles which they then load onto CDs and run from there. This is possible because the operating system for the Dreamcast is so easily circumvented, a cause of the system's failure.
The gaming community has finally stepped up to the challenge of combating this problem through force and humiliation. Blizzard is probably the most aggressive in it fight against cheating. They recently closed 53,928 Warcraft III accounts, banning the 8,168 Warcraft III CD keys used with the now-closed accounts from ladder play for one month, and 3,331 more have been banned from ladder play permanently. Blizzard still attacks cheaters in its games of yesteryear, closing as many as 131,000 Diablo 2 accounts, all for suspected cheating. Bungie, creators of Halo and Halo 2, has also decided to frag cheaters by releasing a patch through Xbox Live! exclusively created to detect modifications, illegal saved games, and various other hacks. Getting caught by Bungie will land you with a permanent ban from the Halo 2 online community, no questions asked. id Software has also been supporting an outside program called Punkbuster, which is software that server admins can demand be enabled by users if they wish to play on their servers.
Punkbuster was one of the first anti-cheating measures created, and has remained free to users since its release. The software is often distributed with online FPS titles such as Doom III, Battlefield 2 and Rainbow Six 3: Raven Shield. To this day the software remains effective - to a point - weeding out cheaters and giving admins added abilities to oversee their games, including a remote client that can be used anywhere that has Internet access. The way Punkbuster manages to do this is by allowing server admins to demand that players have the software fully updated. Each update contains the latest information on cheating, exploit programs and scripts that have been released. If the software finds something suspicious, the player is simply kicked, and the violation is shown to all the current players and sent to the admin and master server, so everyone knows what is going on allowing the appropriate action to be taken.
Other countermeasures have been created with the same idea since Punkbuster is not available for all games. Half-Life, Half-Life 2 and their mods, which Punkbuster has stopped supporting, uses a method of scanning the player’s hard drive for cheating materials. If something is found they get banned from the server and their WAN serial gets sent to a central server of banned keys that admins can use to make sure the cheaters can’t get on their server. The software works much like the Punkbuster system, except that for Half-Life there wasn't an auto-update feature and the user doesn’t install anything, which caused the admins to lose some of the security and control that Punkbuster offers. Half-Life 2 and Valve's content delivery system, Steam, has allowed Valve to have a large amount of control over the Half-Life 2 servers, creating a better field of play than its predecessor had. Unfortunately creating servers such as these and maintaining them comes at a high price, for the hardware and for the time that people need to put into making the server run smoothly. Well scripted servers with active admins are always the best to play on, but are often hard to find as they are normally for clans and often locked to the public.
Finding cheats in other offerings such as RPGs and RTS’s has proven to be a great deal more difficult. There has been no major release to date of an equivalent piece of software for any other genre but FPS. Blizzard’s Battle.Net team keeps a very close eye on their games, but this is much easier since they have closed servers and can simply ban people from them, which is just about the only place you can play. Blizzard manages to check for item dupes and other illegal methods in Diablo 2, but in Warcraft III they simply can’t check what the users have because they change every game. Instead they rely mostly on other players to report suspicious games or methods to them for review. This has lead to a mass frenzy of sore losers who simply blame their losses on the other people because they are hacking, flooding Blizzard’s reviewing service with hundreds of saved games. In the end this doesn’t help anyone, and only enables only the true cheaters to hide among the pack like fish in the sea.
Cheating in the titles that are out now probably won’t evolve much more. There is nothing better than a headshot, cheating any further in an RTS would require a change in the game’s structure, and item duping can only be stepped up by simple item creation, which servers would certainly not allow. Blizzard’s Battle.net, Valve's Steam, and Xbox Live’s closed systems are certainly a good idea, not only to consolidate all the games in one region but to be able to look over them with an iron fist. The only changes that cheaters could possibly make in the foreseeable future is to how the cheating is done, meaning changing how the head shots are calculated and other such things to make them faster and also better at hiding themselves from detection.
The evolution must come in the form of combating the cheating in any way possible. Blizzard’s method is effective but they waste time by causing the creation of fake reports from uneducated players. Programs like Punkbuster need to be spread across all games and receive funding from publishing companies so they can better adjust their methods. Any anti-cheating method for RTS’s and RPGs would be welcome since server scans just aren’t enough. Obviously the best way to stop the cheating would be to stop it where it starts - with the crooked users, but that will never happen.
Whatever the reason, cheating is still ruining the online realm of gaming by destroying gameplay and ruining the replay value of some fabulous titles. With the major push for online games coming from all console manufacturers, this next generation as well as the popularity of PC games such as Battlefield 2 and World of Warcraft, the development behind these anti-cheating systems might come to the forefront. Cheating was all well and good when it affected a single person, or was applied to the game as a whole, but an individual advantage is simply not acceptable.
Written: July 2005