You can find cheat codes published somewhere for just about every game, but never by the game producer. How do they get released? Nobody is tripping over these things by accident–they are typically very arcane, not something you could just guess. If the producer really didn’t want them made public you would think there would be sanctions on anyone who leaked them, and if they did want them public you would think they would publish them themselves.
Marketing campaigns for games often hinge on controlled trickles of information to the press: “Write an article about our game and we’ll give you an exclusive about this cool feature.” Cheat codes are part of that economy.
Are you talking about button combo, password, or glitch style cheat codes? Or are you talking about the ones for cheat devices that modify values in the systems memory (e.g. gameshark, codebreaker, action replay, etc.)?
If it’s the first, Hamsterking probably nailed it.
If it’s the second type, those cheats can be found by anyone with a little patience, and the right tools (hex editors, debuggers, etc.).
Yeah, to this day I remember the cheat code for DOOM. It gave you full weapons and ammo.
IDKFA
ID the software developer
K = kicks
F = fine (well, close)
A= ass
No one would think to enter that when loading the game if it wasn’t published somewhere.
Hackers will sometimes find cheat codes by looking through the game’s executable code, so cheat codes don’t always come from the folks who wrote the game.
Cheat codes are implemented by the developer for debugging purpose so they can test specific areas under specific conditions without having to play the entire game. These cheat codes do not get deleted even for the GM/RTM build since that would mean a rewrite of the code and no one is going to be messing with that before GM/RTM. Once the game is released, any one of the multitude of debuggers can disseminate the cheat code to game forums. Even if the cheat mode is disabled, it’s just a matter of another simple cheat code to enable them.
However, I think you’ll find cheat codes more and more rare. People are playing more social and multi-player games and no one wants to play with a cheater. Plus, they’ve learned to monetize “cheats” by allowing players to purchase more lives or stronger weapons.
I discovered this cheat back in the day purely by chance. It’s an old PC game called Street Rods.
I don’t assume to be the first to of found it, nor did I publicize it other than amongst my small group of floppy disk sharing friends at school. This would have been in the early 90’s.
http://www.gamewinners.com/Cheats/index.php/Street_Rod_(PC)
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Moving thread from General Questions to The Game Room.
Everyone knows that expansion of the acronym, but the truth is much simpler: The “KFA” stands for “keys full ammo”, as evidenced by the existence of another cheat code, IDFA, which gives full ammo without the keys. The game also had a number of others, like IDDQD or IDSPISPOPD (I don’t know the expansion of that one), which made you invulnerable, and IDNOCLIP, which turned off clipping (which in practice means that you can walk through walls).
Yeah, these days many “cheat codes” are actually joke-toggles, like “turn on Big Heads” or “replace all blood with flower sprays” or gravity switches, that kind of thing.
Here’s a neat example of such a thing from Sega’s “Power Drift” arcade game.
IDDQD is still burned into my mind, as is IDKFA. Doom was awesome.
Didn’t IDDQD kill you in Heretic?
Yes, “Trying to cheat, eh? Now you die!”
If you used the full keys and ammo code, it removed all your weapons and you can not use the wand for the rest of the game.
“Cheater - you don’t deserve weapons!” Showed if you used the code.
People do very often stumble upon cheats. You’ve got a lot of people playing, meaning lots of trials. I’ve stumbled upon a few cheats myself.
It’s especially easy if there’s some sort of place where typing in cheats makes sense.
Using cheat codes in Sims 2 is required if one wants to have apartments or dorms. One has to open the cheat panel and tell the game that the lot they just created isn’t standard residential but an apartment or a dorm.
A kid in school said it stands for “smashing pumpkins into slimy piles of putrid debris.” Always stuck with me.
That’s not really the case, unless the game is badly coded. A cheat function can be implemented with a simple hard coded flag. Set the flag to false before building, and the cheats are completely inaccessible. I’ve done QA on a lot of games that had very sophisticated cheat interfaces that were effectively excised entirely from the retail version.
Always made that last test pass before release a real pain in the ass.