I’m a pretty honest gamer myself, and don’t enjoy robbing myself of $49.95 by whipping a game in the first 2 days of ownership. That being said, I will go back on games I’ve beaten and wreak a little cheat code havoc if I can. I go on the net, Google “Tony Halo’s Pro Deathmatch Racing 2 Cheat Codes” or what have you, and boom. There they are. Dated a day or two after the release date. How is it that these codes are gotten so quickly? Are they quietly released by the design house, or is there (I imagine) a class of master gamers who try every button combo and cheat phrase possible instead of actually playing the game?
Most likely they’re leaked in the majority of cases.
One can “disassemble” a program and look for certain I/O operations and then figure out the logic necessary to get thru a backdoor. I have disassembled and patched many programs in order to get them to work the way I want. E.g., I want a different key to do a certain operation and not the default key.
Having said that, Ultrafilter is right about the vast majority of them. Some cheats are built-in on purpose so that testers don’t have to work thru the boring beginning of the game to test a feature farther along, etc. These testers have no qualms about spreading the cheats to other gamers (even though they risk losing their jobs). Some cheats are really “Easter Eggs” designed to be searched for. Far fewer people at the game company would know about these. But someone always knows and likewise spreads the word.
I always got the impression that the cheats are also published on purpose, so that even if you lack the proper sportsmanlike attitude - or are simply really bad at it - you are not frustrated too much and possibly lost as a customer.
Cheats used to be only a backdoor for the programmers (or for their amusement). Now they are there mostly for the consumer. They used to be secrets that were leaked to the public. Now they are published with permission and cooperation of the company. Bottom Line: money, cheat codes sell magazines and stragedy guides.
If you play Sims2, the cheat codes are printed in the manual :eek:
Sure, a lot of them are leaked. The Mortal Kombat blood code for Genesis was leaked with a quickness. And it was, pardon the pun, bloody obivous. You put it in at a screen that rambles on and on about codes, ferchrissakes!
On the other hand, I remember reading in a game magazine last year that they had just discovered a cheat code for Metroid. Yes, the original 1986 NES Metroid. And it wasn’t the “Justin Bailey” code, either. The odd thing about it was, you put it in at the password screen, but you skip the last segment of the password.
Also, I strongly suspect that the nude code for the Sega Genesis game Rings of Power wasn’t leaked by the developers.