From the famous Konami code to the Doom modders, we look at some of the early examples of cheat codes and cheat devices in video games.
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Welcome to tex Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio. A there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, job and Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio and I love all things tech. And for some of you, the following sequence will have at least some level of significance. Up, up, down, down, left, right, left right, b A, and maybe start. For those of you who have never heard of that, that is the famous Konami code, which was first used in a Nintendo Entertainment system part of the arcade game Gradius way back in n And what did that code do? Well, actually could do a few things. If you put it in during the title screen of the game, you would start the game with thirty lives during the game. If you paused it and you put that code in, you would receive extra missiles and a speed boost and some other goodies, but only once per level. It's arguably the most famous cheap code of all time, one that has appeared in multiple games, dozens of games, and also on other platforms not just games. And sometimes it's a cheap code, sometimes it's an easter egg. It goes well beyond Konami games. But why would Konami even include that code in the first place. Well, see kiddos. When video games were young, they were also vicious, Like early video games were mega difficult and unforgiving. There's been a resurgence of those kind of games recently, largely because the people who played them as kids are adults now and that's the kind of games they like to play. But some of those early titles lacks stuff like continues, so once you round lives, that was it. In fact, in the early consoles, there was no real way to save your progress at all. Some games would sometimes include a code at certain points of a game, and if you were to write down that code and then enter the code in a future play session, it would allow you to start from your finishing point. So that was sort of a workaround for the lack of a save function. Before you had stuff like memory cards and other ways of like onboard storage that you could use to to save games. But my point is these games were wicked hard, and they weren't just hard for consumers, you know, they were also hard for game developers. And sometimes you just need to test the game code to make sure everything's working. You want to check the graphics and the gameplay. You might need to see how transitions are working, and you want to make you know sure that the stuff is behaving the way you want it to. And this can be really slow going if you know, it's a bullet hell style arcade game and it's so hard you can't even get very far to test things, even though you're the one have made it. So this programmer named Kazuhisa Hashimoto decided to include a code that would give him some boosts so that he could continue to play this game he was working on. He said the arcade version was so difficult he could never play through it, and he was in charge of creating the port, so it's possible the code would have remained more or less unknown. I mean, back in those days, the average person didn't have access to the Internet, and there was no such thing as the World Wide Web at that point. In fact, most gamers would just get their information from hard print magazines like Tips and Tricks or Nintendo Power. So while some curious folks would likely have uncovered the code one way or another, it was possible that word wouldn't have really spread very much. But Konami also included the same code in another game. This one called Contra. This was in Contra was a big hit in America, but it didn't take long for word to spread that the code that first appeared in Gradius is also in contract. Soon folks share the information in various ways, like word of mouth or in one of those video game magazines. Will come back to that in a second, and the Konami code was well on its way to becoming one of the pillars of gaming in its own way. So I thought I would do an episode about cheats and video games, and some of the examples I'll mention are things that developers built into their own games, either as like an easter egg or sometimes like Hashimoto, as a way for allowing developers to test certain game aspects without having to worry about, you know, a ghost gobbling them up, or a space marine stomping their brains in or whatever. I also want to touch on, you know, the black market industry of game hacks. These are tools that give players unfair advantages in games, mostly you know, multiplayer competitive games. We're gonna focus on that more in the following episode or Wednesday's episode. I should say, I'm sure any gamers out there have encountered sort of thing at one point or another. If they play multiplayer games, I'm sure you've had an experience where you've encountered a cheater. I know I have. I remember playing a game of pub G where I was in a car going very fast and got sniped with one bullet to the head by a player, And when I watched the death cam, I saw that they weren't even in line of sight with my car, and I thought, huh, that seems suss And then considering that, that player then went on to like headshot three other you know, players in the same moment told me they were cheating. But I hope none of you have actually made use of those kinds of cheats, because, let's face it, that kind of cheating is totally lame. If you're relying on code to give you an edge on other players, well it's not really you that's putting in the work, is it. But again, we'll get to that in the next episode. Really, honestly, the history of cheat codes predates the famed Konami code. I figured I had to start there because it's the best known cheat code of all time. I think before codes were really that accessible. However, players have to put a little more work into cheat in a video game, a computer game specifically. Now keep in mind when personal computers were relatively new, they were largely the domain of hobbyists and hackers and amateur programmers. And remember, the hacker in this sense is a more broad term than how it typically is used by the media. Hollywood version of a hacker is someone who specializes in infiltrating secure systems and then messes around with stuff or steals data or whatever. You know, someone who's hacking into the Pentagon or something. But that's just one type of hacker. The more broad definition of hacker is someone who is interested in learning how systems work, typically computer systems, and then finding interesting things that they can do within that system that perhaps were never intended by the people who built the system in the first place. Like you might discover that if you were to look at the code underlying a program and changed a few values, you can make the program and do entirely different stuff, or you might just break everything and have to go back to the original code. While on the old days of computer games, hackers would use the good old peak and poke method, now peak refers to getting a look at computer code stored in a computer's memory. Now, remember, back in the early days, we're not talking about computers that had like hard drives and stuff. They were typically reading media from some form of storage, right, They were reading it from a disk or a cassette or something like that, and it would load information into the computer's memory and then execute instructions upon the information. So if you were able to look at the information that's in the computer's memory, and if you're really able to look at it carefully, you might be able to suss what is doing what. You might be able to say, oh, when I shoot my gun, this one value changes, so that value has something to do with me shooting my gun in the game. Poke refers to changing those values within the code in the computer's memory before you load the game in, So you're poking or prodding the code in order to see what happens. So let's use a theoretical example. Let's say you're playing an old computer role playing game, something that clearly drew inspiration from Dungeons and Dragons and and other pencil and paper RPGs. There were tons of these in the early days, Like I remember games like Bard's Tail and Wizardry and countless others. Part of these games revolve around creating a character, and each character has ability points or attributes that have a number that describes how their magnitude. Right, So if you were doing classic Dungeons and Dragons, you would have an ability like strength, and it could range from three to eighteen because you would in the old days, rolled three six sided dice, So the lowest you could get would be three. The highest you can get with you an eighteen, and the average human would be somewhere in the ten to eleven range. So if your computer generated character has a strength of six, because that's the quote unquote random number that the computer generated for that score, that would mean that that character would be a little bit on the weak side, and that would affect what kind of class you could play, or how much damage you would do with a melee weapon, or how much your character might carry that kind of thing. However, let's say you peak at the code in computer memory and you suss out which bit represents the ability scores, and then you go in and change a few values, and you reload the game, and now you see that your previously feeble character has been buffed out to eighteen strength or heck, you know, some games actually didn't have limitters on them, like within the game you could only get up to eighteen, but if you went in and set the strength higher, then you would effectively have that as your strength. So while you could not at it through the regular character generation, by manipulating the code, you can give your character like strength and suddenly they would be way more powerful than any other, you know, regularly created character. I mean you could, uh just you know, you create an entire party of characters this way, and you can max out all their stats if you wanted to and just roll over anyone who's in your way. Now, that could get old pretty quickly because there's very little challenge in the game left. But on a meta level, you would be learning more about how game designers were building out their games and designating the variables that determine how the game works. So there was another level going on in here. But anyway, the peak and poke method wasn't exactly super accessible. Most folks didn't own a computer back in the early nineteen eighties, and the people who did own a computer, a lot of them weren't necessarily savvy enough to get their hands dirty with altering code in computer memory. I certainly did. Like I that was a step further than what I was comfortable doing when I was a kid, And some computer systems made this a bit more tricky to pull off than others. But you could think of that as sort of the predecessors to computer game hacks. But then we get into the mid nineteen eighties and then Nintendo Entertainment System. Earlier consoles like the at Ty had games that had exploits built into them, or sometimes they were just errors that developers had made and players found them and found they could exploit them. But it was the Konami code that really established the video game cheat. I would say it's not that it was the first one, but it was the one that kind of set the bar. And again, early on, this was something that game developers would include so that they could continue to test and build out a game without having to worry about being pixel perfect with their jumps and whatnot. The only reason they made it into the final product is that by the time these developers were done building a game, they just kind of wanted to ship it. Sometimes they just had to hit a deadline, and you don't want to take the time and trouble to go in and remove code that you inserted to make it easier to navigate through the game. For one thing, you might break something just by removing that code, and then you're, you know, back to square one. And I'm sure a lot of developers thought, who the heck is going to stumble across this seemingly random sequence anyway, No one's gonna just randomly do be A B A, you know whatever, whatever. Except there was one step in this process of bringing a game to market for the Nintendo Entertainment system that guaranteed people will learn about these tricks. See, Nintendo decided to do something that Atari did not do back in the pre video game crash days. So before, n Atari tried to be the only source for games for the Atari console, but disenchanted developers who wanted more credit, not to mention a share of revenue generated by games, they left Atari to found their own studios, Activision being a famous one. You know. Back then, if you programmed a game and it was a smash hit, you essentially got paid pretty much the same as if the title had turned out to be a dud. Atari didn't give like royalties to people even if their game sold millions of copies, or really, we should say tens of thousands of copies. It wasn't quite in the millions range for the most part, except with the exception of a few titles. So influential developers at Atari decided they would leave and create new programmer centric business model companies like Activision, at least the original Activision anyway. Atari tried to fight that, but they lost, and third party developers had the legal right to create titles for Atari consoles. But this also meant that a bunch of sketchy companies began churning out junk titles for the Atari twenty s DRED and the console's reputation suffered as a consequence. Now, whether those junk titles actively contributed to the video game Crash of three really depends upon whom you ask, but it definitely didn't help Attari's reputation. When Nintendo entered the market with the NES, one of the decisions the company made was to require developers, including internal Nintendo developers, to submit games to a certification process to make sure that the games, you know, worked. They didn't have to be a masterpiece. I'm not saying that every game that came out for the NES was a show stopper. There were plenty of bad games on the NES, but they had to at least work properly. They had to pass, you know, at least a cursory inspection. Part of that submission process meant the developers also had to reveal any codes that they had built in that would allow for different features in their game, even if those codes were only put there for the purposes of building out the game in the first place. So again, let's say that you've created a game that has you know when he levels in it, and for the purposes of developing the game, you have a code that lets you skip levels. Well, you would have to disclose the information when you submitted the game to Nintendo certification process to let them know this exists there. Now, it doesn't matter that it existed there just for development. As long as it's in the game, you had to disclose it. And part of this process also meant that Nintendo Power the magazine, would get access to that information. This was partly to help reviewers get through particularly difficult sections of games so that they could write a thorough review of a game as a whole. Like the reviewer might only have a few days with a game maybe just a day or two, and they need to be able to write a comprehensive review, but they might not have the ability to play the game all the way through, so they might make use of these codes. The only catch was that the magazine was to hold off on publishing those codes, at least for a few episode issues, rather after reviewing the game, so they couldn't just say, Hey, the game's great, and here's how you get god mode on it. But then once a few issues had passed, they could publish the cheap codes and they would make the pages of the magazine, and gamers would learn about the codes either by reading about them or as was pretty common on playgrounds in the nineteen eighties, through scuttle. But I'll explain more about cheat codes after we take this quick break. Okay, So magazines like Nintendo Power start to publish cheak codes, and once people learned about the Konami code, it became a way for developers to kind of play with gamers. So in some games like Castlevania, the Konami code would unlock tons of extra lives. I think you got fifty lives when you used it, which was really useful because that was a very challenging platform or otherwise. In other cases, like an early teenage Mustant Ninja Turtles game, if you put in the Konami code, it would unlock a feature in which the characters made weird noises when they moved around. So it wasn't always advantageous. Sometimes it was just a funny little joke. So the Konami code wasn't just a developer tool now. It was a fun surprise for gamers who took the trouble to learn and use the code in the first place. It would also go on to inspire future generations of game developers. They're still games coming out today that pay tribute to the Konami Code, though it's pretty rare for the code or the equivalent of that code to actually unlock, you know, game cheats. You're more likely to unlock an Easter Egg or maybe even a reprimand sometimes putting in the cheat code gets you a message from the game saying, uh, but it's you know, it's a tougue in cheek, Hey, I see what you're doing their kind of thing. For example, in the recent and reportedly terrible remastered Grant Theft Auto the Trilogy, the Definitive Edition, which is supposed to be a remastered version of Grand Theft Auto Three, Grand Theft Auto, Vice City, and Grand Theft Auto San Andreas, but has turned out, at least according to most reviews I've read, to be awful. Anyway, the Konami code on that one apparently turns everyone's heads larger, so it activates big head mode, something that was made famous in games like NBA Jam and based on how some of the quote unquote remastered characters look, that sounds like it could be pretty horrifying. By the way. I do plan on doing a series of episodes a little bit later on about the history of the g t A series because it's really bummed to see how the g t A Trilogy came out because Vice City was one of my favorite games back in the day, even though I also recognize it as a very flawed game. Anyway, I mentioned earlier the peak and poke method of cheating. That was something you could do on computers, but it wasn't so simple to do on consoles. See, this was the time of video game cartridges and the games were physically programmed. They were hardwired in read only memory format. That's wrong, which means you can't make changes to it. You can only read information from it. And they were hard coded onto circuit boards that were housed inside plastic cartridges. So when you plugged the cartridge into a console, the circuit board has little contacts on it that would come into connection with elements inside the console and it would complete a circuit. And thus the the console could consult the video game cartridge and pull the relevant information needed for any particular part of the game, and you play your game as the console would load stuff into the console's memory. But there was no easy way to interact with that system beyond just playing stuff in a straightforward way. One company that tackled that problem early early on was a company called Detail based in the UK. The company created a piece of hardware called the Action Replay now the O General. Action Replay Device worked on Commodore sixty four personal computers and you would plug this into a serial port in the Commodore sixty four and it would let you do stuff like freeze a program, like say a game, as it was running, and it would reveal the code that was in the computer's memory. That gave you a chance to peak and poke essentially, but it was pretty challenging for the average user to do this, and it also followed on the heels of older devices that would let you do stuff like bypass copy protection or alter code, again tools that were mostly useful for folks who had a bit of programming knowledge already, but it would spawn some heavy hitters in the years to come. Enter the Game Genie. This was a device that acted as a middleman between the game cartridge and the game console. So you would plug a cartridge into one end of the Genie and you would plug the Genie into a video game console. So there were different versions of the Game Genie for different consoles. So, for example, the Nintendo Entertainment System had a Game Genie version, and this would mean that if you've plugged this kind of thing into the Nintendo Entertainment System, the little door on the NES wouldn't be able to close, the cartridge would be sticking out. But it totally worked. The Genie came with a book of codes for various games, and the codes would allow a player to set values for stuff, similar to the poke approach with old computer games, but all the work had already been done for you, so when the console went looking for specific information. The Genie would intercept that request and replace whatever the intended value would be like if it actually came from the cartridge with a new value. So, for example, let's say you were playing punch Out on the NES and you really wanted to knock out Mr Sandman, but you never could nail the timing. Well, you could use game Genie to enter in certain codes that would mean you would never lose stamina when you were hit, or that you would take us damage when you were hit, or that you could knock down your opponent if you just land one punch. The game Genie would understand what information to return to the console based on whichever code you entered into the Game Genie, and the NES would say, oh, here's what I'm supposed to do, because it would be getting the information from the game Genie thinking that that information was coming from the cartridge itself. So it was a workaround. Now, how did the game Genie programmers even do this, Well, they probably use something like a debug kit and they ran cartridges through their debug kit. Deep bug kits are essentially special versions of consoles, in this case for video game consoles specifically, and they're meant for developers to use so that they can look for problems. Let's say that they're designing a game and something's not working correctly. This is a way where they could run it through a debug kit. They could create whatever the scenario was and look for the code to find out where the problem is. That's the purpose for a debug kit, but it also means that if you were running a game and you have a debug kit on, you could watch those values and see which ones change whenever you do something specific, like when you jump, and then you might say, well, what happens if I change the variable there? What if I change a number and see what that does? And you find out, oh, this makes me jump much higher or much lower, or much faster or whatever. It's a bit of trial and error, but it's one way to figure out how the game is working. It's essentially the peak and poke approach, and once you know how it works, you can create instructions that tell the console to do something instead of what it was supposed to do, like give you extra lines, or make your character stronger, or whatever it may be. The game genie codes were typically in the form of eight characters, you know, usually letters, So if you wanted to be invulnerable and punch out, then you would enter into the Game Genie code s z v A L P A X, and then you would never lose stamina. That code is effectively an instruction to the Game Genie. It tells the Game Genie what to look out for when the console requests certain information from the game cartridge, and then what information it should send back based on that request. Now, Action Replay also had devices out for the NES and other consoles you know, so Game Genie was not the only game out there. But unlike Game Genie, the Action replay systems frequently incorporated a code trainer in them, and the trainer, as the name implies, would search for recurring codes that might represent something important within the game, an important effect in the game, such as what happens if you lose a life in the game, and so. Theoretically, anyway a player could use the trainer to figure out which lines of code we're creating these effects and then substitute their own values in that code. Means the player could actually change the way the game works. The trainer meant that if you had a bit of determination and patients, you could have practically limitless abilities to change the way a game performed, rather than relying upon a sequence of codes coming straight from a company like Game Genie. Despite this technological advantage where you know you're no longer just limited to whatever a company publishes, you can do whatever based on the amount of time you spend trying, the Game Genie ended up really dominating the space. So while action replay had advantages, it could not compete with Game Genie on the market. This industry, by the way, was really tumultuous. For one thing, Nintendo was none too pleased that companies were producing hardware that's circumvented Nintendo programming, so the company would end up suing Galobe. That was a toy company that had acquired the distribution rights to the Game Genie, and at the heart of the lawsuit was Nintendo claiming a copyright infringement against its property. So Nintendo's argument was that the Game Genie, by altering the code, or rather by substituting new code for what was supposed to be fed to the game console, was essentially creating a derivative work. That is, the game that a Game Genie user was playing wasn't the quote unquote original Nintendo title but rather a game based off that title because the code had been altered. The courts, however, didn't buy Nintendo's argument. Essentially, the court said these devices don't create derivative works and therefore are not part of a copyright infringement scheme. Now, this set of precedent that allowed the game enhancement business, because that's what these devices are largely referred to as as game enhancers. It allowed that business to flourish without the fear of copyright infringement lawsuits, particularly from Nintendo. Glube supported the game Genie Brandon products for a few years, but by the mid nineties decided to get out of that business. This gave day Tell, the company behind the Action Replay hardware, a shot at really establishing a presence in the North American market, because while the Action replay was, you know, fairly popular in the UK and in Europe, it never really took off in America. So Detail would partner with a company called Interact, which has its own interesting history, fairly brief but interesting history. But the important bit for our story is that Interact had established a reputation as a company that carried pretty good quality third party peripherals for big video game systems, so stuff like controllers that included features that you wouldn't find on the bog standard version of the controller that would come with a console. So day Tell had a partner in North America that had established relationships with retailers, and finally, Detel had an opportunity to get its hardware a good chance in the North American market. The company decided to introduce game enhancement hardware with a new brand, So instead of using the brand Action Replay, the new hardware had the name game Shark. The first two products that Interact released were game Shark devices for the original PlayStation as well as for the Sega Saturn. Now that's interesting to me because by this time, most of the game console world was migrating away from cartridges and heading toward optical discs a a compact discs or c d s. Nintendo would actually be an exception to this. They held onto cartridges a while longer, largely because it's more challenging to copy a cartridge than it is a CD. But there are a few other benefits with cartridges as well, like load times are typically much lower with cartridges, but the capacity of a cartridge is much more limited than on optical discs. Alright, so see d's gave developers more room to build games. They didn't have the same limitations as cartridges though, as I mentioned, you know, you had to figure out stuff like copy protection to mitigate things like piracy and emulation. That was a challenge with CD based systems, especially as h C d rewrite capabilities hit the market. These game Shark devices would plug into you know, an expansion slot, serial port, or a memory card slot on consoles like the Sega Saturn. Uh. There would be other versions for game Shark that were for older cartridge based systems as well, including the Game Boy handheld consoles. And there were lots of different game Shark products, but the ones I found most interesting had the game Shark Pro designation. These not only could store thousands of codes within the game sharks themselves, they also included memory space. Back in the day, if you were to buy say a Sony PlayStation memory card, you would have enough space on there to store were a whole fifteen game saves and that was it. You could save fifteen times, not just in one game, I mean in all of your games. You could have fifteen saves stored on that card and that's it unless you were to delete a save. The Game Shark Pro for PlayStation had enough memory to store a hundred twenty saves, and you know, it was way cheaper than buying the equivalent number of memory cards. So even if you looked at this is just a beefed up memory card, had a lot of value. The Sega Saturn version of Game Shark Pro similarly allowed players to have way more storage space than a standard Sega memory card. Now, for the original PlayStation game Shark, that device plugged into a port on the back of Sony's original PlayStation, not the memory card slot, but like a serial card slot, and eventually Sony decided to get rid of that port entirely, possibly in response to the Game Shark's rise and popularity, so later versions of the original PlayStation had no port in the back of them. But never fear, Game Shark released products that included a boot up CD that you would insert before you would launch a game, plus a device that plugged into the standard memory card slot on the front of the PlayStation. The device would store codes generated by either of the system itself or by the user. More on that in the second Game Shark codes have two parts to them. The first part of the code was the memory address for the line of code that you wanted to change, so it might be a line of code that represents your number of lives or your amount of health. The second part of the code represented the value you wanted to substitute, which is pretty simple really, so like if you found the line of code that was for the number of lives and you saw it started at three and you change that to boom, you've got ninety nine lives. And like the action replay pro models that came before it, the Game Shark. Game enhancement systems had ways to train codes, giving users the ability to make their own game cheat codes and not just rely on ones that were previously published. The system would look out for potential lines of code that might represent something important and give users the chance to insert new values. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't. Sometimes it would take multiple attempts to find just the right line of code. But this provided a level of flexibility that you didn't find in earlier products like the game Genie, and again the Game Shark would inject this code to stand in place for what was supposed to happen. You could also do stuff like search for specific types of files in game data, like music files or video files, which would allow you to play those media files on demand. That was pretty cool. So you could like turn it into almost like a CD of music. You could pick which tracks to play. Or let's say that there was a an in game cinematic that you had never really seen, you could find it in those files and play it on demand. One Nintendo sixty four version of the game Shark even included the ability to connect to a phone line and access the Internet. This was a pretty amazing thing. It gave you Internet access, limited Internet access. It was kind of curated by game Shark, but you could do it through in sixty four. Uh the The whole thing came with a keyboard and the connectors that you needed to tap into Game sharks online services, which included the ability to upload and download saves two different games, as well as cheat codes. There's a pretty phenomenal development for the time, particularly for a game console that wasn't natively Internet ready. Uh Nandanto would later release its own peripheral called the sixty four d D that allowed players to connect to an online service called rand Net, but that peripheral wasn't available for very long, and I personally don't know anyone who had one. Uh. While Game Shark made a name for itself with gamer Circles, the parent company of Interact, it's North America distributor, was in financial trouble. In fact, its parent company was in financial trouble at the end of two thousand to Detail would part ways with Interact and lose that North American presence, and Interact retained the game Shark i P. Interact would later sell that I P to mad Cats, another third party peripheral company, and they did that in two thousand three. Uh Katon or recod Tan if you prefer, that was the parent company of Interact. It actually went into bankruptcy not that long after having sold off the game Shark I P. Detail meanwhile formed another relationship with a company called Rocket Game Products to market devices similar to the Game Shark in North America, and it turned out that Rocket Game Products was really a sister company to Daytail. Game Shark would undergo a major transformation under Mad Cats. It it shifted more towards downloaded save points to let layers skip tricky parts of games rather and entering cheap codes. The fact that products like game Genie and game Shark even came around would mean that console manufacturers would look for new ways to build in systems that would prevent such stuff. Moving forward, when we come back, we'll look at the next era of game cheats. Let's talk about another cheat code that would hold a special place in video game history, at least here in the United States. And this was one that players could put on a certain game for the Sega Genesis, that code was A B A C A B B. I'm curious how many of you out there already know what I'm talking about. The game was Mortal Kombat, and the code was the so called Blood Code, which would allow players to experience Mortal Kombat more or less the way it was in the arcades, namely as a gory, bloody fighting game. You see. Midway Games, the creator of the Immortal Kombat franchise, had banked on shock value being a big part of the Mortal Kombat game, and it totally worked. It was a huge hit in the arcades, but the home market was a different beast from the arcades, and Midway wanted to tread lightly so as not to invite regulatory oversight from the US government, So for most of the homeport releases of Mortal Kombat, the rule was that the gore and the blood would get toned way way down. Heck, Nintendo's version of Mortal Kombat replaced the blood with this grayish stuff that I guess was supposed to be sweat. Those fighters sure do sweat a lot when they get kicked in the face. Anyway, the blood code on the Sega Genesis restored the bloody nature of Mortal Kombat and became a big selling point. In fact, it really played into Sega's slogan, which was Sega does what nintend? Don't I stumble over that because I just think it's clunky, but I get what they were saying. It was cute, and that indicated that the Genesis was a console that wouldn't sugarcoat game content. Predictably, this marketing philosophy attracted not just gamers, but concerned politicians who, if you're being generous, they were earnestly concerned about child well welfare. But if you're more cynical, you might say they just wanted to score some political points among older voters who are far more likely to show up on election day. Joe Lieberman led the charge back in those days, condemning violent games as being harmful to children. Somebody please think of the children. Sag of America's VP said, Hey, old dude, games just you know, they're not just for kids. In fact, most people buying our games are adults. I'm paraphrasing here. That's not word for word what was said. But this was an early example of the video game industry trying to fight back against the stereotype that video games were solely for children. It was also another example of a younger industry having to with the fact that the people we have put in charge of making laws, at least here in the United States, tend to be, you know, a little bit older, like sometimes around twenty years older than their average constituents age yikes, and older people may have antiquated ideas about technology and media. The brew haha would lead to the emergence of the Entertainment Software Ratings Board or e s r B, which is made up of industry representatives who self monitor game content and apply labels to alert consumers about the kind of stuff that appears in video games, and also consequently would lead to the founding of E three. But That's another story that I've already covered on this podcast in the past. But yeah, this is kind of like the mp A A for movies. You know, it's that rating that tells you, you know, who is this game suitable for, or rather, who is this unsuitable for. If it's an imframature game, you shouldn't be, you know, letting your eight year old play it. Right around all that mess, It's Software released a game that I'm pretty sure Lieberman would classify as the equivalent of a nuclear bomb for children's health. That game was Doom, which introduced a new approach that ties into cheats because you you actually did have cheat codes in Doom, like, for example, you could type in I D D q D and that would make you invulnerable. There was another code that would let you walk through walls, the no clip code, and those were present in Doom. But beyond that, it also introduced the WAD file extension w a D. At least according to some sources, that w A D stood for Where's All the Data. It was a file type that held information data for a Doom Engine based games, like a lot of the game's resources would be stored in that file. The WAD included rees sources like graphics and sound. It had a header and a directory as well as all the different resources, and when you paired it with a WAD editor like there are tons of them that became available, and most of them were free to use. Players would be able to access the files, you know, the WAD files, open them up, and change them. This took a huge step beyond just making a character immune to damage or allowing the player to walk through walls. Players can make changes in Wade to create mods for Doom. This opened up the ability for player generated maps and graphics. You needed the Doom engine to run the mods, but this meant that talented monitors could make their own levels and their own monsters in Doom. They could challenge players to complete those levels, or you know, sometimes they would just create jokes that were meant to make folks laugh as they blast you know, I don't know, smurfs instead of demons or something. The WAD files allowed for a pretty generous amount of of custom szation. Now, there was some stuff that was still set in stone that you could not change. There were certain gameplay elements that tied into other parts of the game engine, so you couldn't change everything, but you could make a lot of interesting mods. Uh. What the Wade development really did was encouraged communities of modyrs, which would be related to, but often distinct from, the communities of hackers and gamers looking for exploits. By the time we start creeping through the two thousand's, the landscape was changing rapidly. For one thing, Microsoft introduced achievements and Sony would follow suit with the trophy system. These systems reward gamers who complete certain tasks, some of which are notoriously difficult to pull off. The achievements or trophies are badges of honor. They showing that the gamer has managed to do something that was notable in some way. But obviously the value of those badges it vanishes if it turns out you can cheat your way to earning them. Uh. There are lots of games that include these sort of things, not just on consoles. You know, Steam games have these two. So as such, Microsoft really clamped down on cheating in two thousand eight, stating that if a player were caught cheating in an effort to boost their gamers score, that score would be nullified and the person would forever be branded as a cheater. Now, I'm in favor of that, in that an achievement really only means something if you've earned it. I'm sure all of you have witnessed some moment where someone received an award or something and you felt deep down to that person or that company, or that movie or whatever didn't really deserve that award. That kind of thing tends to tarnish the awards themselves, and it's a pretty hard thing to shake. And so Microsoft said, yeah, if we catch you, your toast. Another thing that made it important to scale back on cheating was the emergence of online competitive play. So in the old days, games are typically played on a single machine, so they were often single player games. Sometimes they were multiplayer games, but they were restricted to however many people could connect to a single system at that one time, so for a lot of consoles that maxed out at around four players, Cheats were usually something that a player could use against a system itself and give the player and edge against computer controlled enemies and that kind of thing. But in an era in which people could network computers together in a local area network or land, or later on connect via the Internet, there was this need to prevent cheating. That became more evident now it was no longer a tool that someone could use to experience a tough game that they otherwise would be unable to play or unable to finish. Now we're talking about tools that could be used to give one player and edge over other players. That's a different matter. Like I actually do think that cheat codes have a place in games. I don't think they are good for multiplayer games unless it's you know, to do stuff like cosmetic things that are just jokey kind of stuff. That's fine. Uh, And if it affects everyone equally. I don't really have a problem with that either. What I also don't have a problem with our single player games where there's a cheat code that would let someone experience a game that otherwise they might not be able to finish. Like, folks, I'm old, I'm I know that's not that old. I don't don't don't at me, But what I'm saying is that my reflexes are not what they used to be. And I was never a elite gamer by any stretch of the imagination. So there are a lot of those games that I probably never would have seen the end of, unless either I watched a video of someone else playing it, or I used some sort of cheat in order to be able to get through parts of the game that otherwise I just couldn't make it through. In those cases, I think cheats have a valid place, But when you're talking about multiplayer, that's a different story. And that was just a preview of the troubles we would see before the birth of e sports. Now, once e sports came along, you know the organized play of video games. We're talking about like seasons and tournaments where you have professional video game players pitting their skills against elite opponents, often for impressive prize money. I mean, obviously, just like in any other kind of sport, cheating would be a serious problem for that kind of competition. If someone were relying on codes to give them an edge over opponents, that could invalidate an entire tournament, and that has happened more than a few times. In fact, in our next episode, I will talk more about the cheating tools that have popped up more recently. These are the kind of things you'd likely to encounter if you were playing an online competitive games, So we'll talk about wall hacks and aim bots and that kind of thing and how those tools have created huge headaches for various studios and e sports organizations. Will also talk about some of the systems that are in place that are meant to detect that kind of cheating and then respond to it. And we'll cover a few instances of notable cheaters as well, including folks who try to cheat during massive et sports events and got caught in the process. Because you know, when you're talking about big prize money, it actually becomes a big business. Not only that, but then you've got the people who are developing some of these hacks who might be selling them on you know, the black market essentially, And there are gamers out there who will pay for that because they want that experience of being elite gamer, but they lack the skill and ability to actually do it. Like if I if I compete in any online multiplaying game, I guarantee it will be a miracle if I'm above the bottom. I mean, I just know that because my skills are limited. Uh, but I wouldn't want to cheat to boost that because that's not really me anyway, right, I Mean, it wouldn't be me being a higher scoring player. It would be the code I was using there's no accomplishment for me there, so I'm comfortable being the bullet sponge. That's my most valuable asset to any team I'm on that trust me. As long as I'm there, you don't have to worry about getting shot. I'm gonna be attracting every bullet in the game towards me, so you'll be okay. But yeah, we're gonna talk about all that in the next episode on Wednesday's episode, and uh, it's it's an interesting thing to really look into. It's also interesting to look into the ways that various companies have tried to detect and counteract cheating two different levels of success. There's some games that are notoriously rife with cheaters, and every now and again you'll see a big perch and then over time they build up again. So we'll talk about those in the next episode as well. If you have suggestions for topics I should cover in future episodes of tech Stuff, reach out to me. The best way to do that is on Twitter. The handle for the show is text Stuff hs W and I'll talk to you again really soon. Text Stuff is an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the i heart radio, app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.