You might even know a few of them after all these years. If you ever played Doom, then IDDQD and IDKFA should be burned permanently into your brain. While invulnerability and instant access to the game's entire arsenal of weapons have the potential to suck all of the fun out of any demon-slaying adventure, the developers trusted us to use these codes responsibly, whether that meant using them only in dire circumstances, only after completing the game without them, or never at all. Some players, I'm sure, preferred instead to use them all the time, but that was okay as long as they had fun doing it.
It wasn't very long ago that the inclusion of cheat codes was the norm, but at some point, they gradually disappeared. Although I have nothing but anecdotal evidence to back it up, it seems to me that cheat codes faded out of common existence around the same time that "achievements" became ubiquitous and downloadable content (DLC) became the industry's choice method of squeezing more money out of their customers. There isn't necessarily a causal relationship here, but the disappearance of built-in cheats does seem to coincide with a more general transformation in the way games are made and marketed.
There were cheat codes in the 2005 horror/shooter game F.E.A.R. — one of my favorite games of the past ten years, although I don't like to admit it, since the plot went from mediocre to insufferably bad after the first installment. The same cheats worked in both expansion packs, Extraction Point and Perseus Mandate, released in 2006 and 2007, respectively. But the first true sequel, the 2009 game F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin, was devoid of cheat codes. Want to be invincible? Too bad.
Instead of cheats, the game had a few dozen achievements to unlock (which, like most achievements, don't really give you anything except a little "congratulations" for performing various in-game tasks which usually aren't very challenging). This, along with the inexplicable removal of several useful features (like dedicated multiplayer servers and the ability to lean around corners) as well as the implementation of digital rights management (which is arguably far more intrusive than a simple product key and disc check), makes the transition from F.E.A.R. to F.E.A.R. 2 somewhat representative, in my eyes, of how video games have changed as a whole.
While achievements are by no means a logical replacement for cheat codes, they have filled the spaces formerly occupied by cheats on websites like GameFAQs. Look up any recent game and go to the "cheats" tab, and you'll likely see a list of trophies, achievements, or other unlockables instead. The page will likely tell you how to unlock each one, but this is information which can usually be accessed in-game. It doesn't make a whole lot of sense to list achievements on a cheat site, but achievements must have seemed like a logical replacement for the cheat codes that disappeared around the time that these non-functional "unlockables" emerged.
Of course, cheat codes and unlockables are not mutually exclusive features; many games have had both, and some games (like the Nintendo 64 shooters GoldenEye 007 and Perfect Dark) combined the two concepts by including cheats that had to be earned, not simply looked up and punched in. However, the trend in modern games is to forgo cheats entirely in favor of unlockables, which are more often achievements than anything useful. If a game does have achievements, cheats are usually absent, and vice versa.
I won't say this is because cheating makes the achievements too easy to get — after all, if the developers want to preserve some kind of competitiveness or genuine challenge in achievement hunting, they can just program their games to lock achievements if cheats are activated, as is done in Half-Life 2 — but developers who put achievements in their games likely care a bit too much about controlling the player's experience. They care about "challenging" and "rewarding" the player (which is unfortunate because the gameplay is rarely challenging and victory is rarely rewarding). They don't care nearly enough about letting the player have fun in his or her own way.
But I can't lay all the blame on developers. They're not alone in their belief that cheats can ruin a game, even though the player is free to decide not to use them. A lot of self-proclaimed "hardcore gamers" share this sentiment. I do not.
The fact is that cheats aren't always about gaining an advantage or winning a game with minimal effort. When cheat codes were commonplace, it wasn't unusual for developers to include cheats that had little or no effect on a game's difficulty. These cheats existed either for laughs (see "Paintball Mode" in GoldenEye 007 and Perfect Dark) or to alter the rules of the game in fun ways that didn't necessarily benefit the player (like the reduced gravity cheat in Vigilante 8), not because we needed them to win. Even when they did have an obvious effect on difficulty, cheats in single-player games were used primarily for screwing around rather than getting to the end of the game as quickly as possible. For players with an ounce of restraint and self-control, cheats add replay value rather than subtract it.
Unfortunately, cheats are unlikely to make a big comeback. Today's developers don't seem to have any interest in hiding secrets in their games, and if they think of anything that adds extra value to their product, they'll most often try to sell it to you on the side. Usually, this means offering "additional" features (such as levels, items, and playable characters) as DLC with a price tag, even when these things are already available at the time of the game's launch and could have been included in the game itself. Occasionally, however, a developer actually has the balls to try to charge you for cheats, whether they're sold as DLC (such as the "Invincible Pack" for Saints Row: The Third) or as unique codes that unlock features already included in the game's files (as in Clive Barker's Jericho and some other games published by Codemasters).
From the back cover of the Clive Barker's Jericho manual. I have no idea if the hotline still works (nor do I want to try it), but it seems that the web page doesn't even exist anymore. The small print at the bottom of the page [not pictured] clarifies that codes obtained via the hotline would cost only what they charged for the call, but that getting codes online would require a "small" payment by credit card or PayPal.
This is pretty horrifying, but the success of the microtransaction business model applied to video games — most prominently to "free-to-play" massively multiplayer online games — has shown that a staggering number of people are essentially willing to pay to win. Since it works for multiplayer, it's not so crazy to think people might be willing to pay extra to gain an advantage in a single-player game as well.
I still think selling cheats is insanely dumb, but people are still going to buy them, just like they'll blindly pay for everything else the publishers take out of the finished product at the last minute and set aside as "DLC" for the purpose of grabbing more cash. (Imagine buying a movie ticket only to find out that the last ten minutes of the film will cost you an extra $3.95. Now imagine all of the people who don't boycott that movie. My point is that day-one DLC is evil and consumers are stupid.)
Since the current attitude of big video game publishers is that anything non-essential should be sold off as "extra" content, cheats might regain some real popularity in the form of DLC, but it seems unlikely. Cheat codes clearly went out of style for unrelated reasons, perhaps for the same reasons that we haven't already seen every major developer jumping at the chance to make some extra money by selling invincibility and extra ammo. Perhaps the most obvious problem with cheat codes is that most video games have gotten so easy that developers think we don't need cheats at all. Again, however, I should point out that it's not about need; it's about fun.
Personally, I'd like it if things would go back to the way they were before. Oh, sure, everyone feels that way, especially the nostalgic, aging video game enthusiasts such as myself, but I have no desire to hold the industry back. I realize that most of the changes made by the industry in recent years were, successfully or not, made for the sake of progress. But cheat codes only have the potential to make a game better — never worse — and the fact that they've almost completely been taken away can only be seen as a step backward.
