The Konami code, cheats for Sims, glitches for Skyrim, etc. How did these get found out by their gaming communities?
In: 242
Answer: You’re asking two different questions, cheat codes are things that are intentionally included in the game and officially released.
Hack and secrets, are found and exploited by reverse engineering the game code, ie by converting the game into the code it was written in before it was shipped, a process called decompiling. This allows the person to read the original code and figure out how the game mechanics work, also sniff around for unused assets that hint to secrets or possibly future mechanics that may get activated in a future DLC.
Glitches and bugs are found usually by brute force.
Any number of ways really.
Glitches are typically found by people just playing the game and finding them by accident and then recreating what they did to find the glitch, or people are deliberately searching for glitches or anything else the game developers may or may not have intended.
Cheats/codes on the other hand were usually unlocked by meeting certain in game requirements, acquired by people who knew someone on the development team, or gaming journalists/reviewers would acquire cheats/codes by asking the developers themselves and then publishing the codes in their magazines.
> The Konami code
There seem to be conflicting accounts about this. Some sources say that one of their staff mentioned it in an interview, while others say that someone had already discoverd it by accident at this point. This cheat code was originally only intended for use while testing the game Gradius and was left in accidentally. Some other cheat codes are left in on purpose, including the Konami code in some later Konami games.
> cheats for Sims
I’m not 100% sure, but I think these were first published in official game guides. A common practice in the 90s/00s was that game publishers would put secrets or very difficult puzzles into games and sell official “strategy guides” that explained these alongside lots of basic information and tips. This died out as more and more people got internet access – nobody wanted to buy books any more just for a few pieces of information that you could easily find on a forum.
> glitches for Skyrim
Bethesda are known for intentionally leaving in a few particularly amusing glitches and publicising them. Others are just found by players, sometimes at random and sometimes by intentionally doing weird stuff to try and find glitches.
Cheat codes can also be found in game files sometimes. For example, suppose a game has a text box into which you can type various responses. If you search for those responses in the game files, you might find that there are some undocumented ones too. This isn’t always possible, as the list of responses might be obfuscated somehow, or for online games it might only exist on a remote server.
Glitches/secrets are usually an “infinite monkeys with a type writer,” situation, where if you just have thousands of players, eventually one of them will do the exact series of events that teleport them through a wall or whatever. Sometimes it’s speed runners looking for a specific glitch using what they know about a game, or players using hints the developers gave them to find a hidden secret.
Cheat codes can be “infinite monkeys,” too, but back in the days were often released by the developers, since old-school cheats were usually there in the first place as a way to debug the game during development (the Konami Code type cheats). Modern cheats though are usually done through memory editing (hex codes and such) and are made by looking at the games binary and writing programs that can modify memory addresses in real time.
**Cheats & hacking**
Developers *often* include cheat *codes* in the game to make it easier to manually test certain parts of the game. Take the Sims for example…if a developer had to play the game normally to unlock late-game items to make sure they worked correctly, it would take hours of play to get to the point of creating a save file they could re-use later. Instead, they can add a command to give themselves unlimited money and “speed run” the early part of the game in minutes.
Many developers will disable the cheat *codes* on production releases, so players can’t use it…but some will leave it enabled. Even if cheat *codes* are disabled, it’s often possible to modify the released game to re-enable cheats.
As to how they’re discovered, that comes down to the developer either releasing them directly, or testers that used them during development leaking the codes, or lastly by people looking at decompiled code to find cheat codes.
Another type of cheat is done through memory manipulation. This is often mixed with “hacking” but is not always the same thing. If you can find how a game stores values (like current health) in memory, you can manipulate that memory to always contain the highest health value. Because the game only knows your current health from that memory location, you can trick it into thinking you always have max health.
Hacking (as generally used by the community) works similarly but isn’t always related to modifying the memory itself. A first person shooter may have a hacker that instantly headshots anyone on the hackers screen. This can be done by making a program that can watch the game in some way to identify the locations of heads on player models and instantly aiming then firing at them. Sometimes this involves reading memory, sometimes it involves modifying game files (a big bright green enemy head can be easily seen by a program monitoring your screen for bright green), etc.
**Secrets**
Secrets are generally included by devs to make the game more fun for the players. They often don’t include overpowered things, short of maybe a couple extra power-ups you might not normally get at that point. Lots of players love finding hidden stuff and exploring, secrets are there to reward those players.
**Glitches and bugs**
Often discovered accidentally, someone may report it and others may be interested in taking advantage of it. So players may spend lots of time trying different things to reproduce a bug/glitch reliably. This can sometimes take **years** of people trying things to find ways to optimize the usage of glitches/bugs. They obviously aren’t intentionally added to a game, just a byproduct of developers not having infinite time and resources to track down every possible bug.
You just conflated about four separate things, so dividing that up:
Glitches are quirks of the game that are not intended by the developers that are later found by people playing it. Some of them found randomly. Some from typical ‘glitch hunting’ methods like trying to do things at the same time as an event trigger, obstructing pathways of intended objects, searching level geometry for seams, things like that. Sometimes finding by just picking at the code itself.
Secrets are placed by developers with intent to be found and people playing find it through normal play and searching the game.
Cheats are placed in the game by developers intentionally and they tell people about it. Like the Konami code and Sims cheats.
Hacks are modifications to the game made later by people playing the game and have little to do with the developer. You don’t ‘find’ them, they get made.
Having found a couple glitches myself, most of it is based on experementing with other glitches. Say you know the game handles walls or doors weirdly, you try other ways of messing with them to see if anything new pops out
It’s 2 ways.
One, global discovery. The army of gamers across the planet, RNG kicks in, eventually someone gets it.
Two, traitors in the mist. Nowhere does it say that Video Game developers don’t reveal their own tricks anonymously to push the Public along.
Back in the day, we had a magazine called Nintendo Power. They would publish cheat codes, game walkthroughs, etc. This was all before the internet, of course. Nintendo Power started publishing during the heyday of the original Nintendo Entertainment System.
You’ve got actually 4 different types of answers here, so I’ll try to provide you some insight on each- although there are definitely refined answers below.
First and most easily explained: Cheat Codes. Yep, perhaps the most famous is the Konami code. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konami_Code](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konami_Code) – used across multiple platforms and paid homage to in a multitude of games, it is a classic ’embedded’ code that the developers, either by themselves or at behest of a tester, put in for use. Maybe a tester just wanted ‘god mode’, maybe a developer just wanted to be able to grab data / different areas and jump around- doesn’t matter. They had a build, the put some special code in and told the game to look for that sequence of events- and then did whatever the programmer wanted. Ultimately these are supposed to be removed- but not all developers do- and I would argue some would leave them there intentionally as a signature to their greatness 🙂 Ultimately they get leaked via demonstration, or someone knows someone who used it, it gets passed along until it’s no longer a secret but common knowledge.
Secrets: Easter Eggs, if you will, are hidden in the tall grass for you to find. Popular for decades since the first games- [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Easter_egg_(media)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Easter_egg_(media)) – you could even go to call them puzzles within puzzles. Go back far enough in history and you’ll find secret meanings in literature, mocking in paintings, etc- but in computer games it is definitely something a developer coded in, on purpose, either for a very observant player or (again) to their homage to their own greatness. While not a fan of the movie “Ready Player One” (preferred the book, and even then…) there are those Easter Eggs hidden by Halloway as a juicy reward. Easter Eggs can be never be discussed if the programmer never discloses them and may be found by reverse engineering the compiled code as well.
Glitches: These tend to be un-intentional side effects of the game engine and the logic put within it. In some sense this is the ‘you can’t walk into a wall’ game logic. So let’s pretend I’m an old school programmer working with a sprite- a simple game representation of your character. I’ve defined your character as 256×128 (taller than wider), and I put a little tiny bounding box around you so you can ‘interact’ with my world. When you get close to something- I’ll say ‘n+3’, then I know you’re ‘close’ to a, say flower, and I want you to be able to touch/talk/smell/grab/stomp/burn/ etc. So when you’re basically within that range of a flower, you get a special set of commands, including ‘ignore walk over’.
Now apply that to a wall- when you get within 3 pixels of the wall, I’m going to ‘bounce you back’ because- dude- you can’t walk thru a wall. But in order to do that I have to do math based on your speed- I mean you can run, right? So it can’t *always* be 1pixel per refresh- so maybe I give you a run speed of 3.
That means if you can time it JUST RIGHT… you can be at the wall and then 3 pixels INTO the wall before my code knows what to do. And if I don’t design my logic correctly, 3 pixels into the wall might trigger the ‘ignore walk over’ code- so you walk right through the wall.
Admittedly this is a very simple explanation – one that I might have made a mistake on in the past, but please know that logic around these are very complicated, require split second timing sometimes… and ultimately are far cooler to explore than other things.
(Extra category at the end)
Lastly… Hacks. Hacks are … special, but not always. Hacks generally require some sort of either bit manipulation or modification of code / memory on the fly. Take for example, Health Points (HP). If I have a character I might define all their attributes and assign HP a certain variable. That is stored in an structure that I can index at any point, and get those details. A hack might be … looking at the code for ‘read’ or check stats on the HP routine and modifying it to always set it to FF (255, or max- but when you typically do that that’s a bad idea because it can also be -1). Which means every time the game engine calls ‘hey is this character alive’ it gets set to max HP, which means you never die.
But SOMEONE needed to modify that games code, or put a piece of code between routines to do that- and that’s a hack. Programmers, pissy they are (Love you guys) will do all sorts of things to try and stop this- but generally if it can be hacked it will, it’s just a matter of boredom. Games have changed since the 1990s to 2000 to 2010 to 2020 and now, so this doesn’t necessarily apply anymore. These are figured out by watching memory, running scenarios, and even (such at the Ultima IV series) figuring out that the game loads the land maps from disk without checking out the disk- so on the floppy games you could literally remove the game disk, insert ANY OTHER DISK, and the game would start loading terrain/maps with random sprites/chest/characters because it was all valid data on the disk- just not the one that the game was thinking of. Pretty cool. I miss being told to put floppies in.
BONUS
So for a long while I programmed MUDS. And MUDS, aka Multi User Dungeons, were Text based and content based, and a well designed MUD could pull in hundreds of ‘areas’ (dungeons) based on what people wrote.
Some code was hard coded into the engines. Some were not. And as it turned out every single MUD had a different way of tracking ‘quest bits’, encoded into a 16 bit string- so you’d have to do all the logic out on graph paper and keep track of which bits got set where, and put that in.
If you knew an area someone else wrote tho- and their quest bits- you could modify your own to… ahhh… bypass theirs… with certain Mobs (Mobile Monsters). Thus you could steal a monster from one area, drag it to another, and it would do certain actions and set certain bits to be from it’s own active area- but on another creator’s content.
Obviously this was nefarious and, given the time period (1990-1999) it would have been hard to catch, since most of these were on dialup modem (who knows what that is).
Just saying.
Game industry is awesome, is amazing to watch, and at times I miss Zork.
Thanks for the opportunity to answer.
Latest Answers