A Brief History of Cheating at Video Games

Cheat codes. Godmode. Game Genie. Those were the days. Here’s A Brief History of Cheating at Video Games from Engadget.

Throughout this celebration of subversion, PC game makers in the 1990s continued to load their products with effort-saving development codes as a part of the development process. Take 1996’s Quake, for example. Tapping the ~ button while playing brought up the developer console into which one could input any number of game-altering codes. Everything from status effects and level selects to noclip, fly and god mode could be accessed and key-mapped for instant deployment.

That practice, unsurprisingly, remains in place today. Devs still need to quickly access various portions of and situations within the game during testing, and enterprising players continue to look for shortcuts to victory. Doom (2016) for PC allows for an equally wide variety of cheat codes to be entered through the command line. After hitting Ctrl+Alt+~ to open the dev console, players can toggle god mode, receive fully upgraded gear and weapons, or reveal any unexplored areas of the mission map. The same is true for Fallout 4 on PC. Just hit that tilde (~) button and go to town.

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