However, a cheat industry emerged as gaming systems evolved, through the packaging and selling of cheating as a product. Sometimes the term POKE was used with this specific meaning.Ĭheating was exploited by technology-oriented players due to the difficulty of early cheats. In order to find them a hacker had to interpret the machine code and locate the critical point where the number of lives is decreased, impacts detected, etc. Magazines such as Crash regularly featured lists of such POKE instructions for games. Later revisions either included a switch, hid if the menu had been opened and closed before loading the game, or automatically hid.įor instance, with POKE 47196,201 in Knight Lore for the ZX Spectrum, immunity is achieved. The earliest models had no ability to 'hide'. Some games tried to detect the Multiface and refused to load if it was present.

The Commodore 64, Amstrad CPC range and ZX Spectrum also allowed players with the proper cartridges or Multiface add-on to freeze the running program, enter POKEs, and resume. Such modifications were performed through POKE statements. In the context of games for many 8-bit computers, it was a usual practice to load games into memory and, before launching them, modify specific memory addresses in order to cheat, getting an unlimited number of lives, currency, immunity, invisibility, etc. Gamers could reprogram a small part of the game before launching it. In a computer game, all numerical values are stored 'as is' in memory.

Stop startup delays, crashes and chest waiting. 1983 advertisements for 'The Great Escape Utility' for Castle Wolfenstein (1981) promised that the $15 product 'remodels every feature of the game. Within months of Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord 's 1981 release, at least two commercial trainers appeared. An early cheat code can be found in Manic Miner, where typing '6031769' (based on Matthew Smith's driving license) enables the cheat mode. Playtesters had to rigorously test the mechanics of a game and introduced cheat codes to make this process easier.

The first cheat codes were put in place for play testing purposes. Cheating in video games has existed for almost their entire history.

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