"PANZER," if you hear these six letters your DNA moves, then we are a generation. Friends who have played Vice City know that with one knock of these six letters, you can drive a tank and rampage through the game.
In fact, many games had such cheat codes in those days, such as Warcraft's whosyourdaddy peerless mode, and the "how do you turn this on" small cannon car in the Age of Empires. At that time, these things were social codes, and when I was in elementary school, I hinted at my classmates that it was related to cheat codes, and he definitely followed me away.
However, these memories seem to be almost the same as middle school, in recent years, in addition to the Elder Scrolls, CSGO and other games with consoles, the existence of cheat codes seems to be getting weaker and weaker. What is the reason behind this? Friends please sit, good-looking little brother little sister please sit, today we will nag the game this light topic, talk about the past life of the cheat code.
The origin of the cheat code can be traced all the way back to the era of the red and white machine, and for our generation, it may be more familiar with the little bully learning machine.
On these machines there is a classic sequence of keys, up and down, left and right BA. How classic it is, to this day the era of the red and white machine has long passed, but this string of sequences is still alive and jumping.
Behind the Google Stadia gamepad is engraved this sequence;
Apple Siri will also respond to this classic chant.
Entering this string of instructions on some websites can also trigger Easter eggs.
In the 2012 movie "Invincible Destruction King", the villain opens the security door and enters the game world to modify the source code, using this series of buttons.
This is the earliest and most famous game cheat code in history, the Konami code.
In the beginning, however, it wasn't meant for players to cheat to gain superpowers. This series of instructions was first taken from a classic Bullet Hell series of Konami, "Space Cruiser".
In 1985, the first production of the series was released on arcade. It first introduced the concept of weapon bar, the weapon in the bar is stronger and stronger to the right, the player can use a stronger weapon skill every time he eats an energy point, but after the skill is launched, he has to start from the far left of the weapon bar, so when to launch the skill, this timing is very important, adding a little pain to the original bullet dodging suffering.
In the 1980s, this new experience of suffering in space was popular with players. So with the best sales of the Nintendo FC console, that is, the red and white machine, Konami also began to port the game from arcade to the FC platform, so that players can play at home without going to the game hall.
It may seem simple, but it actually takes a lot of testing to avoid bugs in the game. At that time, he was in charge of testing, and it was a Japanese programmer named Kazuhisa Hashimoto.
Players may like to suffer, but if you let you take suffering as a job, write a few boring pieces of code and then suffer for a while, but also have to go through the level repeatedly, while suffering while observing where there is a problem, it is really unbearable.
So Hashimoto and Ku lingji moved, adding a series of instructions in the game to "up and down, left and right, left and right BA", after triggering, they will immediately get the best weapon props in the game, and the god will start the game, so that he can easily and repeatedly pass the level.
However, unexpectedly, after completing the test, Hashimoto forgot to delete this cheat code, and when it was found, it was too late to modify it, so the first game cheat code in history was born.
After that, in 1988, the cheat code thing became a massive popularity in the game Contra. As a classic side-scrolling shooter, Contra had elements such as aliens and aliens that were very popular at the time, as well as rich weapon mechanics and relatively good picture quality in that era, so it quickly became popular on the FC platform, which can be said to be on a par with Super Mario.
But this game is also very painful, and many of our generation have also experienced it on the little bully.
However, just when everyone was being tortured to death, in 1988, in the then popular game magazine "Nintendo Power", a command that could add thirty lives to the game character was listed, which was "up and down, left and right BA".
So the game cheat code officially came to the public's vision, and its appearance also made Contra one of the games with the most passes on the FC platform.
After that, almost every konami game has a similar or even identical secret skill: on the 89 version of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, enter this command in the title interface, you can add two extra lives; In the Tetris version of Tianzheng, entering this series of instructions after pause can get a long pillar; In Castlevania in '94: Blood Clan, this series of commands can unlock the expert difficulty directly, without having to wait until after the level.
There were more than a hundred games with this secret skill, so players even developed a habit, whether it was Konami's game or not, first came a string of "up and down left and right BA", maybe it would crash.
Later, in the PC era, this secret gameplay also continued, such as PANZER in Sin City at the beginning, and whosyourdaddy in Warcraft, but stop and think about it, these are actually twenty years ago.
There are still games with console secrets today, but are there cheating instructions like "up and down, left and right BA", or PANZER and whosyourdaddy that can make a generation open their mouths? Rarely seen. Why?
Talking about this problem, we have to go back to the origin of the previous cheat code. Earlier we said that the first cheat code in the history of the game was added by Hashimoto and Hisahito in order to facilitate the test of the game, and it was too late to delete it when I thought about it. In the game development environment of that era, this was actually a high probability event, and even if Hashimoto did not make this mistake, sooner or later another programmer would accidentally release a cheat code on another game.
Back then the game to use assembly language for development, not as rich and easy to use development tools as today, when development and testing are carried out on the same set of code, found a problem and want to change a piece of code is much more troublesome than today, so this development accident can even be said to be inevitable.
However, it is interesting to note that in fact, this so-called "accident" did not lead to any bad results, but solved a problem that plagued the game industry at that time. What's going on?
In the 1980s, with the popularity of FC home consoles, more people began to play games at home, rather than going to the game hall to buy game currency and play arcades. As a result, a large number of arcade games began to be ported to home consoles, including the aforementioned "source of all evil" and "space cruiser". At this time, a common phenomenon in the development of science and technology has emerged: technology has changed, but people have not kept up.
At first, the game developers did not carefully consider the difference between the game hall and the family scene, the porting was mainly to simplify the screen and reduce the hardware requirements, but did not make in-depth adjustments in the game mechanics and core gameplay, which led to the common problem of porting the game: it was too difficult.
Before landing on the home console, video games want to sell well, in addition to the design, but also have to be able to help the game hall owners on the arcade to make money, after all, the real money is these shop owners. If the player can play for a day with one coin, the boss will starve to death, and no one will buy the game.
However, after the rise of the home console, the situation has changed, the game no longer needs to consider the problem of helping the game hall owner to make money, and the home machine no longer needs the coin mechanism, but this has led to the direct transplantation of the game is obviously more difficult, the previous coin can continue to live, now not.
Therefore, the "accident" that Hashimoto and Hisahito made at that time was solved in a very simple and direct way. The ported arcade game lost its life-sustaining game currency, but with a cheat code that reduced the difficulty, the game could be played.
And for developers, they can directly use cheat codes to test the game, and after the test, they don't have to bother to delete it. For the game, the cheat code itself is a very discussed topic, and even the game is promoted, so this mechanism gradually became popular during the transition period of the game from arcade to home console.
But the transition period of any technological change, sooner or later, will end, people will keep up, and industry will keep up. As the new generation of game development tools matured, the significance of cheat codes in game testing disappeared. As more and more games are developed entirely for the family scene, the old game mechanics have begun to waver.
Players who play games at home want to immerse themselves in a good story, forget themselves in the virtual world for a few hours, in order to meet this demand, a new generation of games, from the original level gradually shifted to the story mode or even the open world, and no longer use high difficulty to PUA players, many games have launched a low-difficulty story mode that does not test the operation at all.
In this way, cheat codes have little significance in enhancing gameplay, and even start to play counterproductive. Friends who often play games know that the best way to quit a game is to download a modifier, and when you unlock the various equipment you can get in the game, any challenge in the game is solved with a knife or a shot, the game is completely boring.
Therefore, many plot immersion games have canceled the cheat system, in fact, even if there is a game with cheat instructions, many players will not use it, even if it is used to experience it, or to solve the problem of point card level, it will not be used in their own main line saves without restraint. Because the game is bought to immerse itself in it, cheat codes can cause a lot of damage to this immersion.
So here, the cheating mechanism has lost its most fundamental existence in the narrative game where the monster upgrade mechanism is relatively healthy. But is the cheat code really completely gone? Nor is it. There are still some games where the levels and prop mechanics have been deliberately stretched, and the cheating instructions that provide shortcuts and reduce the difficulty have become black and white payment QR codes, changed skins, and will continue to survive in the foreseeable future.