Hi,

I remember when I was young, and many gaming magazines used to have whole sections for cheat codes. Of course all the games back then were either single player, or local two player affairs where allowing the user to enter cheats wasn't an issue.

Later there were games that featured some fun cheats for single player mode, e.g. grand theft auto.

As we've moved slowly to almost all games offering multiplayer and some games being multiplayer only, I'm seeing less and less cheat codes in games.

My question to you is do you still consider them relevant for enhancing play and adding replay value, as opposed to just bring used purely as developer features? Do you add cheat codes to your own games and if so, how do you "leak them" after release so they can be used and who do you tell them to?

I'm also curious if the cheat codes left in older games were used purely as developer hacks, or if they were for replay value and marketing... I'm sure someone here is able to answer that!

Please discuss :-)

Nowadays there are so many walkthroughs on the Internet that cheat codes seems useless. Just pull up your favorite site and have it tell you exactly what to do. If you still need cheat codes after that, either it is stupidly difficult or you just suck.

25 minutes ago, Alpha_ProgDes said:

Nowadays there are so many walkthroughs on the Internet that cheat codes seems useless. Just pull up your favorite site and have it tell you exactly what to do. If you still need cheat codes after that, either it is stupidly difficult or you just suck.

I might agree if cheat codes are just used to make the game easier. If you look at some games though, cheat modes add whole new dimensions of play, like the riot mode in GTA San Andreas, and sometimes just add comedy value (flying cars, corpses go to heaven?) I think you might be right though that YouTube walkthroughs haven't helped the fact that fewer games have cheat codes as they don't need them if they're only used to make it easier.

I would say: it depends.

Personally, what I'm in favor of, and what I do, is including features for debugging, and leaving access to them behind a really weak wall like typing in a certain sequence or something like that. Not only will it be a nice find for anyone who investigates the source code or just stumbles across it randomly, it means you don't have to make particular changes before every release to make it release ready, or set special environment variables, or pass arguments to ./configure, or anything else like that. I'm sure this is probably where a large number of cheat codes in old video games came from; the "NARPASSWORD" password in Metroid, for instance, is not a normal password and appears to be there for testing purposes.

Dedicated cheats can be cool too, though. It just depends on the game and what sort of cheats you implement. Skipping levels is lame, infinite lives should be the default, and simple invincibility is boring. But, for example, a secret code that lets you play as another character, like the villain for instance, would be really cool, and it's something I'm considering for the current big project I'm working on.

On 19-9-2017 at 8:47 PM, Brain said:

If you look at some games though, cheat modes add whole new dimensions of play, like the riot mode in GTA San Andreas, and sometimes just add comedy value (flying cars, corpses go to heaven?)

I think this is mostly covered in (generally fan-made) mods.

Developers don't have the time to do this before release.

A quick internet-search revealed plenty of cheat-codes for consoles, phones and facebook though.

On 9/19/2017 at 8:06 PM, Brain said:

I'm also curious if the cheat codes left in older games were used purely as developer hacks, or if they were for replay value and marketing... I'm sure someone here is able to answer that!

Fallout 4's console cheats seem like something the devs used intensively themselves.

Age of Empires' strange ally spawn cheats seem really created for their target audience.