Gamers miss good old-fashioned cheat codes in their games

Gamers are missing cheat codes in video games, and hope to see them return in future releases.

Back in the good old days, if a video game was too difficult you couldn’t just hop on YouTube and watch a walkthrough or tutorial.

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If you wanted to progress, you’d either have to chat with your friends at school (provided they played the same game) about how to beat it or search around for some cheat codes.

Cheat codes could sometimes be found in the instruction books that came with games, in gaming magazines, and even in hardware add-ons like Game Genies. There was even a Nintendo helpline to call at one point when you were struggling to beat a certain level or boss.

Now some cheats didn’t just help you make the game easier, some were just straight-up goofy. The best examples would be the pages of cheats for Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, some of which gave you some crazy weapons and vehicles or changed the behaviour of the world and NPCs.

It’s a real shame that they’re slowly disappearing, with basically all games now having difficulty settings, and mods acting as a way to spice up the content found in new, or old, releases.

That hasn’t stopped gamers wishing for their return though, as one user on Reddit recently said they miss the secret button inputs codes, or “finding secrets in the game to unlock them”.

Commenters gave their takes on why cheats have slowly disappeared from the latest releases, mainly due to the aforementioned lack of need for them.

“I'm pretty sure the cheat codes were meant to make developing and play testing easier. Now that games have achievements, DLC, and microtransactions the developer console is just left disabled.”

“Back in my day they actually sold game magazines that had cheat codes for all types of games.”

“Fan-made mods, microtransactions and achievements made them die out.”

It’s a shame cheats are going extinct, but we’ll always have DK Mode in GoldenEye 007.

Topics: Xbox, PlayStation, PC