Finding out about cheat codes at forty was like discovering there’d been a secret entrance to every building I’d ever visited, and nobody bothered to tell me about it. My daughter was the one who introduced me to them, actually – she was playing some old SNES game at my place, punched in this weird sequence of buttons, and suddenly the character had infinite lives. “Dad, you seriously never used cheat codes growing up?” she asked, looking at me like I’d just admitted I’d never seen snow. Well, no. When you don’t have access to games as a kid, you don’t learn about the shortcuts either.
The first code she taught me was for Super Metroid – something that let you start with all the power-ups. I felt like I was being let in on some kind of conspiracy. Here was this whole hidden layer of functionality that the developers had built right into their games, just sitting there waiting for someone to stumble across the right combination of button presses. It was like finding out your toolshed had a secret room behind the back wall that you’d been walking past for twenty years.
Once I started collecting retro games seriously, I had to learn about cheat codes backwards. I’d buy some classic game that everyone said was amazing, struggle through it the “intended” way, then find out later there was a code that would’ve let me skip the parts that made me want to throw the controller through my TV. The water temple in every Zelda game, for instance. Apparently there were ways around some of that frustration, but I discovered them after I’d already suffered through it the hard way.
What struck me most about cheat codes was how they changed the entire relationship between player and game. Modern games – the few I’ve tried – seem designed to keep you playing as long as possible, grinding through content, maybe spending money on shortcuts. But these old cheat codes felt like the developers were saying, “Look, if you just want to mess around and have fun without the challenge, here’s how.” It was honest. No hidden costs, no psychological manipulation, just… options.
I started keeping a notebook too, copying codes from GameFAQs and random forum posts, writing down what worked and what didn’t. My handwriting’s terrible – twenty-five years of construction work’ll do that to your fine motor skills – but I could usually decipher my own scrawl well enough to remember which sequence did what. IDDQD for god mode in Doom became muscle memory pretty quick. Sometimes you just want to run around shooting demons without worrying about dying every thirty seconds.
The social aspect of cheat codes was completely lost on me since I came to them so late. I never had that playground experience of trading secrets with other kids, never felt the thrill of being the one who knew the rare code that nobody else had heard of. But I did get to share them with my daughter, which was its own kind of bonding experience. She’d show me some ridiculous code for Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater that made your character’s head huge, and we’d spend an hour just laughing at how stupid it looked.
Construction work teaches you to appreciate things that are built to last, and cheat codes were built solid. They weren’t some fragile online service that could disappear when a server went down, or some premium feature that required a credit card. They were hardcoded into the game itself – part of the architecture, you might say. Press the right buttons in the right order, and you got the result. Every time. No exceptions. That kind of reliability is something you learn to value when you’ve spent decades dealing with equipment that works when it feels like it.
Some games took cheating to completely ridiculous extremes, and I loved them for it. Grand Theft Auto: Vice City had codes that would spawn tanks, make pedestrians fight each other, change the weather – basically let you turn the entire game world into your personal sandbox. I spent more time messing around with those cheats than I did actually playing the missions. It reminded me of being a kid with a set of blocks, just building things to see what would happen, then knocking them down and starting over.
The decline of cheat codes makes sense from a business perspective, I guess. Why give away content for free when you can sell it as DLC? Why let players skip difficult sections when you can sell them power-ups? I get it. But something was lost in that transition – a kind of trust between the people making games and the people playing them. The old cheat codes felt like a gift, a little extra something thrown in because the developers wanted you to have fun. Modern microtransactions feel like… well, like someone’s got their hand in your wallet.
I’ve tried to explain this to some of the younger guys on my crews who game, but they don’t really get it. To them, cheating means downloading some hack that gives you an unfair advantage in online matches, which isn’t the same thing at all. The old cheat codes weren’t about beating other players – they were about customizing your single-player experience. Want to play the game as intended? Don’t use codes. Want to just goof around? Here’s your toolbox.
There’s something to be said for games that included developer tools as cheat codes. Some of the most interesting codes I found weren’t the obvious ones like infinite ammo or invincibility – they were things like level editors, debug modes, or ways to access content that didn’t make it into the final game. It was like getting a peek behind the scenes, seeing how the whole thing was put together. As someone who builds things for a living, I found that aspect fascinating.
I still fire up old games with cheats enabled sometimes, usually when I’ve had a particularly frustrating day at work and just want to blow off steam without dealing with any real challenge. There’s something therapeutic about playing Doom with god mode and infinite ammo, just running through levels like an unstoppable force of destruction. It’s cathartic in a way that modern games don’t quite manage to replicate.
The thing I regret most about coming to cheat codes late is missing out on the community aspect – the shared language of button sequences that an entire generation of gamers grew up with. The Konami Code, IDDQD, these were cultural touchstones that I had to learn about secondhand. But I suppose that’s true of a lot of things when you discover something decades after everyone else. You get the content, but you miss the context.
My daughter recently found that old notebook where I’d written down cheat codes, and she got a kick out of seeing my terrible handwriting trying to record gaming history I’d missed the first time around. “You know you can just look these up online now, right Dad?” she said. Sure, but there was something satisfying about writing them down, making them physical, having that tangible record of digital secrets. Plus, you never know when the internet might not be available, and you need to remember how to get 30 lives in Contra.
Looking back, cheat codes represented something that’s mostly disappeared from gaming – the idea that the person playing should have control over their experience. Want it harder? Don’t use codes. Want it easier? Here are your options. Want to break the game in entertaining ways? Go nuts. That kind of player agency seems almost quaint now, when so many games are designed to funnel you through specific experiences in specific ways. But for those of us who remember when games came with built-in cheat codes, it’s a reminder of what gaming used to be like when the developers trusted players to figure out their own definition of fun.
Timothy discovered retro gaming at forty and never looked back. A construction foreman by day and collector by night, he writes from a fresh, nostalgia-free angle—exploring classic games with adult curiosity, honest takes, and zero childhood bias.
