Cheaters beware!

There is a lot of passion in the gaming community, and often times that boils down to situations where gamers look to get the edge up on their competition. Cheating and hacking has always been a problem in the gaming scene – made especially prevalent in the era of online multiplayer, big money tournaments, and an internet filled to the brim with clout conversations and bragging. If your reputation, or even financial stability, rests on the shoulders of your performance online, more so than how you obtain those victories, you can understand why some resort to shady tactics in order to secure them.

In addition to an extremely competitive community, video games have also always been victim to a high price of entry. These giant pieces of art in the form of video game entertainment sometimes take hundreds of people, thousands of hours to make. At a sub $100 price tag, this is a gigantic steal. Especially if you compare it to other forms of entertainment. I’ve played Rocket League for roughly 1,000 hours and I paid $40 for it. If I were to go to the theatre four times, paying roughly the same, I would only get eight hours of entertainment out of it (a generalized assumption that the films are two hours long each). So when a player gets desperate or is just a plain unfair human being, they might resort to piracy and cheating in order to escape the cost of purchasing software or physical game copies.

The industry often shifts, but one trend remains the same. Many developers do their best to punish, or humiliate people that cheat their way to victory, or steal their entertainment. Here are 10 retro games and 10 modern games that will punish you for cheating.

20 Retro: Banjo-Kazooie

An absolute pleasure to play, this early Nintendo 64 console platformer starred the lovable bear Banjo and his back-pack riding bird pal Kazooie. Originally developed by Rare LTD in the United Kingdom, the game has reached cult-status, and continues to uphold Rare’s legacy. It’s a great adventure and still holds up to this day – currently, the best version is available in Rare’s collection on Xbox One. There are a handful of cheats available to easy your struggles with the collect-a-thon, but should you use them, Rare had an ugly surprise for you.

Using cheats would, at one point in the game, register. Once this happens, your entire save file is deleted from the cartridge.

There is nothing you can do about it anymore. Every collected item is no longer available. It’s gone for good. A savage end to your poisoned efforts, but you understand that you deserve it. But try and do yourself a favor, ignore the third game. The sophomore Banjo title is pretty great, and just more of the same thing that we all loved about the original. But the third is a blasted vehicle-builder that isn’t worth the salt it generated upon its commercial release.

19 Modern: GTA V

Grand Theft Auto V was the first step towards a large online verse for the GTA franchise, and it’s been the games biggest seller. It is the highest grossing media release in the history of the world, and continues to be popular with streamers, and gamers alike. Rockstar’s money-printing machine has old roots, with its original incarnation being a PlayStation and Windows game that was top-down. It quickly evolved, and by the third game in the series, it went to third-person action and the rest is history. Open worlds, endless crime, the future of GTA was set in stone with a few design choices.

GTA Online, the popular expansion for GTAV is based around earning money and purchasing things from cars, to outfits, even player mansions. So of course, being a majority PC audience, there was cheating, like easy cracks to get money. Rockstar decided to not stop these cheaters from playing, but decided to equip their online avatars with Dunce caps that are impossible to remove. Forever labelling the scoundrels as the Dunces that they are. It helps the good guys – errr … the relatively good guys – easily identify the people responsible for harsher rules.

18 Retro: Link’s Awakening

It’s no surprise that after the initial success of The Legend of Zelda franchise, every platform Nintendo had their hands on was going to get one. Making a handheld version of the console game was a tall order at the time, being that the Game Boy and its limited hardware was the only thing available at the time. Link’s Awakening is the definitive mobile Zelda game (that is, until Breath of the Wild came out on the Nintendo Switch) and is a staple of the franchise. The critical and commercial success began as a simple Game Boy port of the console title A Link To The Past and grew into an adventure of its own.

One of the most prominent examples of a game world punishing players for cheating or stealing – if you remove items from any of the shops without paying for it, you will not only lose all privileges needed to shop at the store, but you will forever be branded as a Thief. The game actually replaces your chosen character name with Thief. It’s a title only the shadiest and laziest earn. However, if you’re completely fine never being Link again, embrace that Thief title and forgo the need to pay for arrows. It’s a win-win in that case.

17 Modern: Marvel Vs Capcom 3

The pinnacle cross-section of Capcom franchises and Marvel characters has a huge fandom. The faster-paced slugfest sees a giant roster of both comic book and gaming icons. The fighting game scene is as alive as ever in 2018 and the community is one filled with big names, big egos, and a lot of focus. The biggest difference between fighting game stars and other eSports athletes is that a fighting game player (such as Street Fighter or Marvel vs Capcom) is that you play alone. Your skills and your fame rest on your shoulders alone. Which is why the big names of this genre tend to come with large chips on their shoulders and not enough dip in the world to get rid of them. With that extensive pressure upon you, it’s easy to understand why one might not play by the rules. Constant battles, and leaderboard climbing. Your wins and losses have but a single person responsible for them. You.

So, if your account is ever banned for cheating, you can still play, you will just be limited to playing with other cheaters.

Whether it’s cheating with latency, spamming, or straight up using software for assistance, they will find you. They didn’t want to take away the game from those without the moral compass to play fair.  In a server all for your type of player. So have fun with that.

16 Retro: Heretic

I can remember scrounging up any excuse to play Heretic in my youth. There was an incessant need for more Doom-like games in our household, and this one just seemed far more up my alley. Don’t get it twisted, Doom is still the ideal entry point into the 90s FPS genre. Built on the Doom engine, Heretic was a cult-classic first-person shooter set in a medieval world and played a lot like the ID made space shooter.

If you were a Doom fan, playing Heretic, you may have been curious to see if the essential and universal cheat codes from Doom would work. But you’d be extremely surprised to find out that you, instead, are punished for attempting to use them. Though Heretic has its own cheat codes, if you attempt to input IDDQD (the Doom code for God Mode) you will be killed, and sent back to the main title screen where you would be greeted with a “trying to cheat, eh?” prompt. Use IDKFA (the Doom code for all weapons and ammo) and the player is stripped of all weapons, except for the garbage staff and see the message “Cheater! – You Don’t Deserve Weapons!” And truly, you do not deserve them at this point.

15 Modern: The Witcher 3

CD Projekt Red really blew up the world with their third installment to Geralt of Rivia’s story. The astoundingly enormous fantasy role-playing game is as deep as the Mariana’s Trench and it doesn’t cut corners when it comes to the quality of everything living and breathing within it. The toughest hurdle to overcome early on is finances. Geralt is low on coins and it will be a while (and about 30 hours) before you feel your pockets gaining weight.

Players found a nice farm in an early town where they could end cows, harvest the leather to sell, wait an hour (in-game), and repeat, lining their purses with the funds necessary to succeed with ease. When the developers found out about this, they coded in a nasty beast dubbed “the god of cows” that spawns to hunt you down if you kill too many cows in this particular area. It’s a brutal beast. One that nearly no version of Geralt can beat. If you do, however, get lucky enough to kill it, another will simply spawn to finish you off as easily as the first one could have. It’s an extremely pleasing measure that the developers took to curb the actions of their players. It seems like the creators had just as much fun with this one as the cheaters did.

14 Retro: Star Wars: Dark Forces

The notoriously difficult first-person shooter game set in the Star Wars universe was released on PlayStation and MS-DOS back in 1995 would stand the test of time as one of the most memorable Star Wars experiences to date. Developed by LucasArts, Dark Forces would breed into a full-blown franchise. Cheating, or cheat codes, being a prominent tool for consoles games back in the day were available to players. Most notably, the God Mode cheat.

The player would have to input the code “LAIAMLAME” which is “LucasArts” mixed with the self-shaming exclamation that you are indeed “Lame” for needing an easy way to get through the game.

Have you ever wanted to cheat, only to have to endure the self-inflicted humiliation, knowing that the developers are somewhere, snickering at you? Cheeky remarks from developers towards gamers attempting to find exploits in their hard work is not unheard of. There was the internet classic, Grand Theft Auto III that hid a sign that read “There is no Easter Egg up here” on the top of the bridge, where it was supposed to be impossible to reach. Sometimes, developers just know that their players will try something.

13 Modern: Max Payne 3

Things were easier in the retro era of gaming. Or at least it could be considered easier. When consoles and computers were rarely, if ever, connected to the internet, it was up to clever coding or cd-keys to do the bulk of the work. With modern gaming comes the addition of multiplayer and, inevitably, people doing uncool things in order to gain an advantage online comes into consideration when dealing with moderation. The salty Payne has been through a ton in his infamous career and Max Payne 3 is no different.

Though the single-player experience is a rough and harsh as we expected, it was their included multiplayer mode that caught everyone off-guard. It was absolutely stellar, and brought a huge amount players to the game. But there will always be cheaters wherever online clout and fame is to be had, and the team at Rockstar had a clever idea up their sleeve. Cheat in MP3 online and you can still play the game, but you’ll be locked in a server with other cheaters. Have it your way, just don’t mess it up for the rest of us. The effects of a few bad apples has long since been the most punishing thing in gaming. For those of us who play on the straight and narrow, being restricted or having something taken away because of some baddies online is the worst feeling ever.

12 Retro: Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door

Paper Mario is one of those franchises that just sticks to your rib-cage and clings with all of the muscles a nostalgia army can muster. Hence, its longevity and success over the years and iterations. Thousand-Year Door release to the world in 2004 on the Nintendo GameCube featured a life-like lottery where the player could use a ticket daily and, if their numbers came up in the draw, they’d win. Well, players soon learned that they could consistently repeat this process by duping the console’s clock and retrying. But the Bob-Omb that ran the lottery would catch on and badger the player with questions until they admitted their guilt, eventually claiming that “humans cannot be trusted” before exploding himself. Fade to black.

BUT! Rest easy. Because you’re eventually brought back to life and you are given another chance at living life on the straight and narrow. It’s a terrible life plan, trying to hit it big by cheating the lottery system. Paper Mario is just trying to teach you real life lessons. But if you don’t want a classically pretty, 2-dimensional Mario role playing game to make you feel morally responsible, they just go ahead and cheat your way to a fat bank, or try anyway.

11 Modern: H1Z1

The hottest trend in gaming today – rather, the hottest trend in gaming ever – is the Battle Royale genre. An evolution of the survival and simulation game Arma (and its subsequent mod for a zombie mode), has grown into the most popular genre that gaming has ever seen. H1Z1, the altered version of Arma, helped spawn games like Player Unknown’s BattleGrounds, as well as the 2018 sensation Fortnite, and most recently Radical Heights. It’s officially the biggest genre in gaming and for a very good reason. It’s fun.

H1z1, being the relative godfather of this wave, had a lot of responsibility to set in motion the proper discourse when it came to hackers and cheats.

And that they did. H1Z1 might be the only game ever that has a simple, yet humiliating policy in place. If you’re caught cheating, in any way, you are perma-banned without question. But there is a way to recover your account and get access back. In order for H1Z1 to unban you, you (the player banned) must film and publicize a video on YouTube exposing yourself as a cheater, and personally apologizing to the other players of the game, and the developers. Now that is some cold, hard, internet justice.

10 Retro: Donkey Kong 64

In the days of the early console wars, the Nintendo 64 home console was king for a hot minute. With it, came the infectious addiction to Super Mario 64 – everyone’s go-to 3D platformer. It revolutionized the genre, and brought Mario and Co to the next dimension. It brought along a flood of clones. The ultimate downfall of the Super Mario 64 clone that was Donkey Kong 64 came at the hands of a somewhat poorly optimized game. Was it trying to be the plumber? Or Banjo-Kazooie? It didn’t matter in the end as the 3D platform for the Nintendo 64 remains a small blemish on the DK franchise to some.

Some resorted to cheating their way through the difficult and buggy experience and, for the most part, it’s the best way to enjoy the game. However, if you use cheat codes rather than glitches, the game would actually become unplayable. Not just a poorly made game, Donkey Kong will adjust to your cheating ways and deny you any ability to even pick up a single item. Now we’re not saying this game is playable without this punishment, but it could just very well be the excuse you need to never put the cart in your console again.

9 Modern: eSports Leagues

As professional eSports leagues and organizations continue to grow, attempt to facilitate and cement their legitimacy is of the utmost importance. There is a large uphill battle for this form of entertainment to gain global recognition as a competitive sport. With that comes regulations and standards. The biggest problem facing global recognition is the mess that is the spread of organizations and leagues. Some games have different leagues and structures in different continents, all operating independently.

In 2013, Riot Games – the developers behind arguably the biggest eSport the world over, League of Legends – was faced with a tough decision, as heavyweight team Azubu Frost was accused of cheating during live presentations of league matches. It is never easy to punish a team at the top of the charts. That draws a big crowd and many believe that more should have been done in the case of Azubu Frost, but after investigation, Riot Games fined the team $30,000 for looking at the large display maps intended for spectators, not players. Their advantage was unquestionable and leagues around the world will face tougher decisions as the world of eSports continues to grow. It’s a long road and every sport has had to work extremely hard to gain respect.

8 Retro: SimCity

The evolution of the city-builder has grown out of this world. Quite literally in some cases. But near the start, SimCity ruled the world. Or, helped you create it. Notably, all SimCity or The Sims players will grow tired of the monotonous loop in-game to earn money and the favor of your people. So, there is a well-known system of cheats. There’s an extreme amount of fun to be had breezing through the usually lengthy investment that is the core loop of this game.

The best of the code lot is the Motherload, quite literally.

The cheat grants you 10,000 Simoleons (currency in the Sim games), and if you abuse the cheat too much, the game will grant you with a crippling debt that is insurmountable.

It’s a weight that no player can overcome. In addition to that, the game will also sick a ton of natural disasters on your poor unsuspecting civilization. It’s difficult enough to be the ruler of an entire town, but to have to explain to your constituents that the plague brought upon them was your doing out of sheer laziness and greed, now that’s a hard conversation to have. Regardless of how cold-hearted you are.

7 Modern: Saints Row 2

With the modern era of video games, and home consoles, came a new breed of gamers; the Achievement Hunters. Developers began putting achievements in their games to give players more reason to try and do other things, to try other avenues, or just to replay games again once they’ve completed it the first time. Achievement Hunters – or at least the respectable among them – will rest at nothing until they’ve unlocked each and every one of them. Some of them are notoriously difficult.

Saints Row 2, a “fun and wild” game that takes a lot of inspiration from franchises like Grand Theft Auto) was one of the first games to punish code users, hackers, or cheaters by disabling all achievements in the game if anything abnormal is detected. This became a common trend among most console and PC games, rendering hacked versions or illegally obtained copies completely useless for those with the itch to hunt achievement ranks or Gamerscore. There’s no denying that a lot of fun can be had in these wild open-world games if you add in the flavor town that Is cheat codes. Want a tank? Spawn one. Want unlimited ammo for the day-time traffic? Solved. So perhaps this isn’t the worst thing to give up in order to achieve your dreams of entertainment. Or, just do what most people do, and have two different save files.

6 Retro: Zac Mackraken

The epically pixelated point-and-click adventure games starring Zak McKracken for the Commodore and Windows were some of the best in humor for their time. They truly set the standard for both satire and comical punchlines in gaming. Back in the day of CD keys for proof of ownership, it was more difficult to pirate or cheat for PC games. Smartly, McKracken was a smart noodle and forced players to enter part of their CD key every single time they wanted to travel from one part of the game to another (like North America to Asia for example).

If a player were to try and fudge these numbers and put in an unregistered key, they would travel instead straight to a jail cell where their ability to continue the game is completely halted. There is a benefit to being a rule-breaker in this verse though, and that’s the knowledge that you’ve seen a scene from this game that few others have. In the 21st century, it is more difficult to get this punishment as cd-keys are a long-dissolved thing of the past. There are, however, plenty of people with YouTube videos up displaying what it felt like to be a cool pirate in the 90s.

5 Modern: Quantum Break

Remedy Entertainment – ironically the original developers of the Max Payne series – have had a hard time succeeding lately. In 2016, with the giant promotional backing of Microsoft and Xbox (as they signed an exclusivity deal), they came out of their shell a little bit with a story-focused action game with a quirky time-control gimmick in Quantic Break. Not to be mistaken with the game studio behind Beyond: Two Souls and Heavy Rain, they’re Quantic Dream.

It was a valiant effort by all parties – they even made a television show that was supposed to be affected by the decisions players made in the game that starred the same characters and the same actors.

If your version of Quantic Break is an illegally acquired one, your main character will be forced to wear a pirate patch for the entire game, and your decisions wouldn’t be uploaded to the show.

However, the game didn’t succeed like they wanted to and as plenty of games are expensive at full price, some people resort to breaking the law, and being bad consumers. Pirating software is something the industry has been fighting since the beginning and teams like Remedy do sly things to single-out cheaters or pirates.

4 Retro: Animal Crossing

It’s difficult to for game developers to put meaningful life lessons in their games. It has to be done with extreme caution and precision. Especially if your game has a lean towards young adults or kids. They tend to fill up their desired quota of preaching and lessons from their parents and the last thing they want when they throw in a game to escape into is more lessons.

“There is no reset button on life!” screams the mole who is livid with your inability or blatant disregard towards saving your progress in your Animal Crossing game. It’s tempting to use the easily accessible reset button on your console in order to bring up a previous save, especially as things can go wrong in your town. If you do, however, a Mole Man will literally berate you for not saving. In order to ensure you’re paying attention to his intense message, he will occasionally ask you questions. Answer any of these incorrectly and the lovely angry groundling will restart his entire volumetric lesson from the beginning. Listen carefully. Answer correctly. And for the love of all things leaf tickets, save your game often. It’s a good practice to get into overall.

3 Modern: Guild Wars

In the early days of MMOs (massive multiplayer online games), Guild Wars was in the running for most popular. Both GW and GW2 saw extreme critical and commercial success. The days of World of Warcraft quickly took over and the Guild Wars franchise became the cool off-brand MMO for the fantasy hipsters. It has seen a lot of success over the years. But with great power, comes great responsibility, and developers ArenaNet have always been keen to uphold this role.

Notoriously, if you were to cheat in Guild Wars, your character would be dragged to the middle of a busy town and taken out by a large reaper. The second in the series saw a highlighted humiliation take center stage (for better or worse) in which a world-renowned hacker was caught flaunting. A dev, on a particularly brutal personal mission, gained access to this hackers account, stripped his main toon down to nothing, and then leapt from the tallest building in the busiest hub city. He recorded the whole thing – kind of maniacally – and shared it with the internet. The video, and the developer backing they received, sparked many conversations around whether or not this was the right thing to do.

2 Retro: Earthbound

There is a massive audience for Japanese made games or role-playing games in particular. The difference in cultures and history make for a completely different take on storytelling. It has been a niche fandom in North America for a while now, starting as far back as video games have existed. Mother, or Earthbound as it’s known in North America, is one of the most revered and celebrated stories and adventure RPGs in all of gaming. The story follows a small child and his collected band of adventurers as they attempt to foil the invading monsters and aliens.

Imagine, if you will, cheating your way through the notoriously difficult role-playing game, ingesting one of the most heartfelt and clever stories ever to be written into a video game, only to have your game freeze during the final battle. That’s right, the developers built a failsafe into the final battle that when corrupted data is read, the game freezes. What players learn upon resetting their console is that their game data has been completely wiped from the cartridge. Considering you’ve probably just put it well over 50 hours of your life into the adventure of these cool kids against Gygax and company. That’s a rage-inducing time loss.

1 Modern: Stanley Parable

One of the most critically acclaimed “walking simulators,” the Stanley Parable set the tone for intriguing tales and strong narrative in indie games. You play as Stanley and you are quite literally narrated through the world of monotonous office life. The game gets rather cheeky should you, the player, not do what the narrator is saying out loud, as the man’s voice in your head struggles to keep up with your every move.

The game gets weirder and the narrator gets clingier as you progress, eventually, it gets dark. If you resort to cheating or hacking though, you will be punished in an unbearable way. If the game reads that you’ve changed anything at all, it will teleport you into a “quiet room” which is pretty much just a police interrogation chamber, and the narrator will proceed to verbally lash you about your choices, and the consequences you deserve to suffer for them. Keep in mind, this is un-skippable, and your progress in the game can never be regained.