“So I was playing some B-Ball with some of the boys and I was knocking their ass to the curve. I decided to show off by jumping off another guy’s back and do a twirling slam dunk but then my head grew three times in size and I caught on fire.”

Well that’s just absurd, yet sounds oddly familiar, so familiar in fact, it was in a lot game in the nineties, specifically as the “Big Head” cheat. Well, what’s the point of that? To add some humor and fun without distracting from the gameplay, it was a “cheat” that didn’t side with the player or help the game; it was there just for fun. Oh, there was numerous cheats that were available to play around with, things to just screw around with. Not like those other do nasty cheats that give you infinite lives or something, but even those are somewhat lost in time to grant something to the player.

I’m here to mourn the death of the input code cheat, the do something spectacular cheat, the access more content cheat, the password cheat, etc. Justin Bailey must be rolling around in the ground right about now to see that these kinds of cheats are gone and forgotten.

Not all “cheats” are to get ahead in the game, they were just to add some silliness or give easter eggs that I so enjoyed. But then there are the other cheats that give infinite stuff or invulnerability, I really don’t have anything against those, and sometimes used them after I already beaten the game, or something to do to screw around with. So I’m wondering why the developers stop using these? Not only that, there’s no real game genie equivalent these days either, the action replays or the code breakers don’t feel right to me.

Instead of the extra content through cheats, we get Downloadable Content, free is good but when you start charging, it doesn’t feel right, because most of the time, it’s not all that fulfilling. Either that, you have to unlock the extra content, which is fine I guess. It just seems like developers have forgotten what fun cheats can give as most of them never really harmed anyone. Nowadays when I think of cheats, all I can think of is entering into the console in PC games to enter a command, no_clip isn’t as fun as typing IDSPISPOPD. And if there are cheats, they’re usually created by coders to grief online players, now that’s just not fun at all.

I know there are a few games out there that do this kind of stuff, but back then they were in like ninety percent of the games and it was great. Not only added fun within the game, there was somewhat, a whole culture revolved around cheating and passing it on. There were cheat book and such, not strategy guides, but actual books with cheat codes in them. And then there were the myths and stuff revolving around cheats.

I pretty sure everyone can remember the cow Level in the first Diablo right? What you don’t? Oh right, because there was no cow level. When the internet was young and a bunch of douchebags started rumors that there was a cow level in the first Diablo, it got so much momentum that the developers decided to actually add the cow level in Diablo II and fun was had by all.

Let’s take it up a notch, how about all the malarkey that revolved around the original Pokémon games? I swear the Down+B (or other variations) thing was telepathically spread. The internet wasn’t so easily accessible and yet somehow every kid on the block knew it. Those were very fun times, all those rumors; I would try every single one of them and guess what? It added so many hours to my gameplay and had fun doing it, like explorers of yore, you don’t know what might happen and what’s beyond the horizon, but you kept doing it. I was always excited to hear the next rumor to get mew or pikablu or whatever.

But there isn’t anything like that anymore, that culture or the actual cheats. I realize there are games out there, somewhere (like sports games), that still use these kinds of cheats and such, and it’s just that it’s just not what it used to be. So developers out there, bring back the big heads, make me on fire all the time, give me a gun that shoots rubber cocks or something. I want to press an absurd combination of buttons to get something to screw around with, not grind to get all that stuff – so bring back the code.