The Konami code, cheats for Sims, glitches for Skyrim, etc. How did these get found out by their gaming communities?
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**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.
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