Many of us would have used cheat codes at some point in our lives while playing a PC game. I was just wondering how does that work?
Edit: Adding onto this, do trainers work the same way?
In: Technology
They started out as development codes.
Let’s say you are developing a shooting game. You need to test out the Ultra Gun. The Ultra Gun appears in the last level of the game, which requires 6 hours of play. Your boss doesn’t want you wasting 6 hours of your 8 hour shift getting the gun so you can test it. So you code in a button combination that gives you all the guns right away.
Now your boss wants you to test a reported glitch where dying in level 9 causes you to freeze the game. You don’t want to spend an hour getting to level 9, and you don’t want the game to reset after you’ve tested dying 3 times. So you enter the cheat code to warp to level 9 and the code to give you infinite lives so you can die repeatedly in level 9 looking for the glitch.
And so on.
Eventually, gamers started finding these codes left in the game and started using them. Game designers realized that such “cheat codes” were a desirable feature, so they started intentionally including them in games for players to find.
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