We Need Cheat Codes Back

And I mean actual codes, not just settings in a menu. I want to enter in random combinations of buttons again!

Last week marked a massive anniversary for millions of people who love games. The 40th anniversary of the Konami code was officially on the 25th of April! For those not in the know (wait, how do you not know?) the Konami code was basically the first ever cheat code that was so damn popular it elevated a game from good to great. It started in the 1985 NES game Gradius and it was originally a way for the developer of the port of Gradius to get every power up easily so they would be able to test them without having to play the game through, as it was very hard. It then was promptly forgotten about and ended up in the final game before they had the ability to patch that shit out. Thus, the Konami code was born!

The code has obviously been everywhere in all of the videogame industry and is often referred to with other names like the Contra Code but in truth it’s the Konami code and that’s the only real name that fits.

But this isn’t an article about the history of the Konami code or the history of cheat codes, the second one is a cool idea but has been done. This is an article where I, a lowly Substack gaming blogger, making a plea to the industry to bring back cheat codes. Seriously, I know some developers read this, bring them back!

I intend to go over today why I think Cheat Codes are good for the industry, why I think they’re good for the games, and why I believe that if we brought them back it would help chill the whole industry out. So then, let’s press up up down down left right left right B A (and sometimes select start) and begin.

They help the industry have fun

In the past decade most of the industry has taken a swing towards the serious. Games like The Last of Us and Red Dead Redemption 2 were viewed as cinematic milestones that made the industry look like it had the chops to be taken as a serious contender in the art scene as opposed to children’s toys. This similarly mirrored the maturing of the film industry which largely went from more slapstick stuff early days into more and more serious storytelling.

The thing is that when you go down that road you lose a lot of things you had before. Many times that’s completely reasonable, losing some of the slapstick and, particularly, non-silent aspects for films allowed them to breathe more and become more of an interesting experience to behold. But games have always been a different beast. Games are interactive afterall.

In an industry where tens of thousands of people have been laid off, where more and more games are coming out that try to be taken seriously and fail miserably, where AI is starting to allow for more ripoffs, the industry feels stifling. Imagine working on a game for 7 or 8 or 9 years and it’s been everything you think of and it comes out and it flops magnificently. Far more than anyone expected. That’s soul crushing.

Okay imagine being on this team, how much it must have sucked to put so much of your life into the game only for it to fail so hard.

So what the industry needs right now is to find a way to have fun again. I believe part, and I must stress only part, of the way to do this is to bring back developers putting things in game that are hidden through cheat codes. Not easter eggs necessarily but dumb shit. I love me a good hidden part of a game but Cheat Codes are on a whole other level.

Developers still make games they love, don’t get me wrong, but why not go another step with it. I believe they need to stick in a big head mode into their games, or maybe a mode where everyone is facing backwards, or where every time a gun goes off it’s actually a duck quacking. These things are dumb, but they’re fun. They make people laugh and they would make the developers laugh when making them. They wouldn’t laugh because they are slowly losing it after being forced to work 16 hour days for months on end even coming in on weekends and then end up shipping a game that gets critical acclaim and the best sales of the whole series of games only to still get laid off because it “didn’t meet targets” leading them to realize that no matter what they do as long as they keep working in the games industry it’s going to keep meaning that they will only work at a place for one project until they are laid off at the end of it and likely have to relocate to another city, state, or country. Instead they’d laugh because they’re having fun making dumb shit to hide in the thing they’re making.

They are something missing from modern games

Modern games have a lot going for them over their past iterations. Not only is it currently the easiest time ever to make a game, it’s also the time with the best processing power to make basically any kind of game you could possibly want and make it look however you want as well. There may as well not be a limit on your imagination. Yet, modern games still do have limits.

Sure in most ways that’s monetary limits and managerial limits. But when it comes to Cheat codes they got dropped largely in the PS3 and Xbox 360 era and basically entirely dropped in the PS4 and XBone era. No longer could you tap in codes on the main menu and activate some weird shit. This was something that millions of gamers adored to do. I still remember being online and seeing people talk about this new cheat code they discovered in a game, but I’ll talk about the community aspect in the next section.

The Last of Us 2 Cheat Gameplay Modifier Menu that you unlock after your first playthrough.

In many ways, these things were either dropped or brought over to settings. The Last of Us 2 has a whole setting menu (which you can see above) where you can activate different things that used to be something you would have to do with cheat codes. I’m not opposed to that kind of thing, but with that movement it should mean cheat codes have to be more imaginative not just be left in the past.

Modern games have so much going for them, why not bring back something from a prior era? An era where games were less serious, even if some did take themselves seriously? Modern games need to be more fun first. There’s lots of ways to do this and the indie scene is fucking thriving with putting fun first, but I think a large step towards doing it would be to implement cheat codes again. Don’t tell people you’re doing it, just do it. Have fun with it, allow players to discover things like they currently do, but then make one much easier to activate than others so all of a sudden you happen to get the code and boom, your characters now all look like floating controllers.

My point is that the modern, mainly AAA, gaming space needs to be thinking more about enjoyment of the players and sometimes that means breaking your game, or being willing to let yourself be taken a little less seriously than you intend. Because it’s fun. Because it’s charming.

Important note: I think cheat codes should be for dumb stuff primarily. Things like Big Head mode. This means that you can have some funny shit in your game while not impacting achievement systems or difficulty. Keep difficulty to accessibility settings as opposed to cheat codes. Of course if you decide to also introduce the kind of Last of Us 2 menu that I showed above then just deactivate achievements when those are on. Honestly, I have more thoughts about achievements in general, but this is probably the simplest solution.

They bring charm to their community

Something literally anyone who is in any specific games community online will tell you is that they often have a tendency to get quite filled with vitriol and hatred. I was a part of the online Destiny community for a decade and it was always the same thing of you list million reasons why you hate the game, talk about how horrible it treats you, how the game itself is just kinda crap in a lot of ways, and then you play it for 2 thousand hours and spend a bunch of money on it. People would talk about how much Bungie fucked up this week, eventually death threats were thrown around and the whole thing came crashing down.

If you’ve been in any Helldivers 2 community you’ll likely also see how absolutely terrible the community can be.

Communities for games are meant to be places you go to share things you enjoy. Sure, some things will be annoying and you want to talk about that, but the core aspect is that you and the people in that community all enjoy that game, or series, and you’re there because of that.

There are many games out there that, when released have moments of “oh I figured this thing out, has anyone else” and you post about it and it brings to light a brand new thing for a large section of the community. That’s awesome! But those things can often just be mechanics, or better ways to use an item, or advice on a boss, or any other number of things that pertain solely to the core game experience. You usually don’t get people sharing “oh, did you know there’s this one setting that makes the game funny?

Well, that’s something cheat codes could bring back. To be clear, this used to be a thing. Back in the day, you used to be able to do cheat codes in loads of games and random shit would happen. I mean who doesn’t, if you’re old enough, remember buying those massive cheat code books that show you different weird shit you can do in the games you love? That stuff was awesome and being able to take those codes and share them with the people in the community or your friends meant that you all could laugh together, could have weird dumb fun together. Not that you’d just play the game better, but that you’d just have a more fun time.

This is what Cheat Codes bring to the table for the community. Connection. Charm. Dumb fun. These are simple things that might actually allow players to have more fun in games and not focus as much on the annoying thing they want to hate that week.

Screenshot from Kotaku because I can’t find my own screenshot from the Destiny 2 Glitch.

For a quick example, the most enjoyable moments in Destiny for me almost never had to do with how I was supposed to play the game and had to do with how Bungie didn’t expect us to play it. There was once a moment in 2021 where a glitch happened and you could connect a bunch more players to PvE activities than would normally be allowed. This meant you could do a Raid or Dungeon (endgame activities) with 12 people. And a Raid is meant for 6 and a dungeon is meant for 3. You could literally do nuts stuff. I was able to play the, at the time, most recent Raid with 9 people and it was the most fun I was able to have in the game in years. Not because we stuck to the rules but because we broke them. The community was flooded with enjoyment, people forgot and moved past some of the absolutely insanely bad decisions Bungie had made in recent years. Instead, what mattered was the fun.

Gaming communities are meant to have charm to them, they’re meant to be an enjoyable space where you can go talk about a game you love, not a place where you avoid because of the Hatred. Cheat codes could bring some of this back. Hide a bunch of them in your super large game, like a Crimson Desert, and watch as the community starts to explode with love not just for the cool things in the game itself but for the ability to make the game be dumb and funny alongside those other things.

The Conclusion

At the end here, I really can’t stress enough that I know there’s a ton of issues with the current industry approach to profit oriented development. I know that a ton of developers are losing their jobs, that management fucking sucks right now, that executives are breathing down their necks to develop games that make a gajillion dollars, that live service games are being developed in a time when the chance of a new one popping up and being a smash hit is very unlikely (even if possible). But those aren’t things that seem to be going towards being fixed. And I, as a random person on the internet who just writes about videogames, can’t have any impact at all on any of that. But I can bring forward the idea that there are other ways to improve how fun a game is and that one of those ways is god damn Cheat Codes.

Rant over.

Okay but what about you? Do you have memories of spreading a cheat code or learning about one from a friend? What about buying those big cheat code filled books? Would you like or love the reintroduction of cheat codes to games you know and love? I would love to hear from you in the comments! Even if I don’t end up responding to them I still read every one and appreciate you for posting them!

Meow,

Cat