Cheater, cheater, pumpkin eater. No one likes them. Everyone wants to be them; or at least, the ones that don’t get caught. Cheating and hacking are as old as video games themselves. Whether it’s hacking, exploiting glitches, or using an extraneous amounts of cheat codes, there is just no getting around that fact.

Not all cheating is bad. Speedrunners take advantage of the little missteps and mistakes to help streamline the game. One gamer managed to beat The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time in 18 minutes and 10 seconds by exploiting the multitude of glitches. Some gamers use cheats to make the game harders for themselves. Others use glitches to help their friends. A lot of games have built in cheat codes for the gamers who want to use them. The older games used cheat codes to let advanced players skip early levels. Newer games make accessing the cheats easy by putting them directly into the options menu. Most of these are amusing or entertaining hacks like turning enemies in Rabbids or activating a black and white filter. These cheats are fine. It’s only when gamers step over the line that it becomes a problem.

There isn’t much a normal player can do about a cheater. However, that doesn’t mean the developers don’t have something up their sleeves. Plenty of games will punish you for pirating them, rage quitting, or just being lazy. These games will punish you for cheating and hacking.

15 Dunce Hats And Car Bombs: GTA V

As tempting as it is to hack the game and add those amazing single player cars to the multiplayer game for Grand Theft Auto V, it’s not worth it. Rockstar Games gives cheaters a few chances to change their ways before throwing them into the Bad Sports Lobby. That being said, those chances practically define the GTA series. They’re obnoxious and involve exploding cars. The punishment for the first offense falls into the obnoxious category. Get caught hacking and you’ll be walking around with a dunce cap for a while. If you try to hack a banned car into the online server, you’ll be in for a wild ride. Any single player car in the multiplayer servers will instantly blow up the moment someone enters the car.

14 Crime Doesn’t Pay: The Legend Of Zelda Series

Buying anything in The Legend of Zelda games isn’t as easy as it might seem. Unlike other games where it’s almost impossible to not own a majority stake in the universe, some of the Zelda titles can be a bit sparse when it comes to rupees. Although you can often find rupees in the grass, they tend to be small change. This isn’t helpful when you need to drop 1,000 rupees on some magic armor or a powerful bow. Unfortunately, you don’t really have a choice most of the time. Vendors won’t let you anywhere near their items without payment first. This isn’t the case in Link’s Awakening and Twilight Princess. There is a shop in Link’s Awakening where you can pick up the items without paying. If you can trick the shopkeeper into looking away, you can even sneak out of the building with your stolen goods. However, you’ll be branded a thief. Try to return and the shopkeeper will instantly smite you.

Twilight Princess only offers one little shop where you can steal. It’s a little stall run by an intelligent bird named Trill. He sells potions and lamp oil. You dip a bottle into what you want and set the appropriate amount in a box. Walk out without paying and Trill will repeatedly peck you until you pay.

13 Cow Killer: The Witcher 3

Shortly after The Witcher 3 launched, players found a fantastic exploit. One of the stables has a pair of cows. Players discovered if you killed them and meditated for an hour, the cows would respawn. It allowed you to infinitely farm the helpless bovines and gain a massive amount of loot to sell. The 1.05 update for the game fixed a bunch of glitches and added a gigantic, demonic cow monster. If you attempt to take advantage of the exploit, the game will activate the Bovine Defense Force Initiative and sends Chort after you. Although the name is silly, Chort is anything but. This massive monster has a ton of health and can really dish out damage to any low-level or ill-prepared player.

12 Skip Back To The Beginning: Banjo-Kazooie

The old Rare titles like Banjo-Kazooie and Conker’s Bad Fur Day are some of the best N64 games around. They were also some of the weirdest. Rare games always offer a unique and strange twist to platforming tropes. Even Banjo-Kazooie’s cheat system was off the walls. The system was built into the very fabric of the game. There is a hidden sandcastle in one of the game’s earliest levels: Treasure Trove Cove. You have to drain the water in order to access the castle. However, once inside, it gives the player free access to the games cheats. Cheato and Bottles give you codes. All you have to do is smash the letters on the floor of the sandcastle to enter the codes. You can use any of Cheato’s or Bottles’ codes as many times as you want. However, there are a bunch of other codes you can input into the sandcastle. These codes are considered “illegal.” Each code lets you skip or unlock one of the levels. The first two times you use them, you’ll get a warning. The third time activates Grunty’s Code Vengeance. Grunty erases your game pack. The good news is, the effect doesn’t kick in right away. You can continue to play. It only goes into effect once you save the game, turn off the console, or lose all your lives.

11 They Will Find You: Slender: The Arrival

Finding ways around the murderous, mutilated, monstrosity is the name of any horror game. You need to make it from point A to point B without becoming another red stain on the wall. A lot of gamers try to get around the unholy abominations by way of cheats or completely abandoning the beaten path in favor of the out of bounds zones. Blue Isles Studios went out of their way to make sure that their more mischievous players can’t escape. If you try to glitch out of the play area, you’ll find yourself plummeting into a black pit. This is normal. A lot of game developers will do this. However, Slender: The Arrival takes it one step further. Text appears as you fall. “Not even a bug will save you from me.” After a few seconds, the screen flickers and Slenderman appears in a nasty jump scare of a death screen.

10 The Unending Lecture: Animal Crossing

Resetti is a recurring character throughout the Animal Crossing series. His main job is to remind the player to save their game before turning it off. Because of the nature of the game and how the time works, turning your game off without saving can be beneficial. So, in order to prevent players from cheating, Nintendo added Resetti. This is a true punishment. Resetti is annoying! Seriously. He talks for ages. It takes nearly three minutes to read through his dialogue the first time you encounter him. The more you see him, the worse he gets. The fourth time you encounter him in Animal Crossing: Wild World, he actually makes you type out an apology with the correct punctuation, capitalization, and spelling. If you get it wrong, he makes you repeat it until it’s correct.

9 Public Execution: Guild Wars

Cheaters never prosper — especially not in MMOs. Doing so can get your account banned. That is a ton of time and money thrown down the drain. However, no one will have any sympathy for you. Cheaters are universally hated. Especially by the developers. ArcaneNet took their hatred to the next level. They wanted to make sure that everyone knew the consequences of cheating in Guild Wars. So, rather than quietly bad a player, they send Dhuum. This massive, unkillable version of the Grim Reaper appears from the ground and pulls out a gigantic scythe. It then proceeds to rend the offending player in half, in front of the entire server. This often leads to cheers. As entertaining as Dhuum is, you don’t want it coming after you. Once the execution is complete, the hacker’s account is banned. Talk about adding insult to injury.

8 Jumping The Shark: Donkey Kong 64

GameSharks were the envy of all kids in the 90s, but the bane of video game companies and the unlucky. A GameShark was a cartridge that came with pre-loaded codes. You could also enter codes. With one, you could completely hack any number of games on a multitude of systems. Nothing was sacred. Nothing was safe. GamesSharks were notorious for being somewhat dangerous. Some companies capitalized on this. In an effort to dissuade cheaters, Rare decided to do the most devious thing possible. If you tried to use a GameShark on Donkey Kong 64 it would glitch your game. Donkey Kong would spasm uncontrollably. You couldn’t pick up anything. On top of all that, he’d die in a single hit. If you were unfortunate to save your game in this state, the glitches became permanent.

7 Destruction Or Debt: SimCity

SimCity eventually went on to spin-off a myriad of entries in the wildly popular Sims saga. These simulation games focus on building a utopia instead of creating a barely functioning family. You’re expected to run the city as its mayor. Needless to say, a lot can go wrong. There could be earthquakes or aliens invasions. Yet, no matter what, you need money. This is where the cheats come in. FUND will net you a whopping $10,000. However, use it eight times and a massive earthquake rips your city apart. In SimCity 2000, using the FUND cheat slaps you with a 25% loan. You can try to use CASS instead for a smaller dollar amount, but it also comes with a 15% chance of destroying your city.

6 Death And Destruction: Afterlife

Afterlife is an old LucasArts game that lets you take control of the real estate sector in heaven and hell. Essentially, it’s a more biblical SimCity. It’s your job to create make the two sectors function as efficiently as possible. That’s easier said than done. Like SimCity, you need a boatload of cash. Thankfully, there’s cheats for that. The $@! command nets 10 million pennies. However, you can’t get too greedy with it. Use the cheat more than five times and a Death Star will spawn to completely ruin your day and your cities.

The Death Star isn’t the only unusual thing to pop up in Afterlife. It is riddled with a variety of pop culture references. It’s also one of the few games where war, famine, and other mass deaths are a good thing.

5 Explosive Cheats: Tomb Raider II

The old 1996 Tomb Raider had a couple of cheats that required you to play around with controls. The mechanism was similar to the Konami Code. First you had to make Laura walk forward and then back. After that, you needed to her in a circle three times. The final step required you to jump forward. Doing this sequence would automatically grant you all of the game’s weapons with maximum ammo. It was a really useful, if convoluted, cheat. The command was added Tomb Raider II. However, instead of granting Laura weapons and ammunition, she exploded into several, pixelated pieces. Additionally, each piece exploded again when it hit a wall or the ground. If you wanted to get the ammo and guns, you had to jump backward. Personally, I think an exploding Laura is a lot more fun.

4 Bad Sports Lobby

Cheaters are a fact of online games. There is no way around them. If you have a multiplayer game, someone is going to hack it. These offenses can range anywhere from X-RAY hacking in Minecraft to aimbots in Call of Duty. Most of the time, this leads to players getting their accounts banned. However, a lot of games decided that, rather than ban the accounts, they’d simply let the hackers get a taste of their own methods. If you get caught hacking in games like Max Payne 3, GTA Online, or Dark Souls 2 you’ll be tossed into the servers with other hackers. They are sometimes called bad sports lobbies, cheater servers, or prison servers. Marvel vs. Capcom 3 has the rage quit servers for those who quit a match if it looks like they are going to lose. The only way to get back to the normal servers is to prove that you can play by the rules.

3  Public Apology: H1Z1

Getting banned for cheating is nothing new. There are a couple different kinds of bans. Players can be banned from the main servers, temporarily banned from all servers, or permanently banned from the game. Even so, that doesn’t stop cheaters. Plenty of online games are riddled with hackers. The developers for H1Z1 decided they weren’t going to tolerate the cheaters and banned over 25,000 hackers in a single sweep. The hackers were in an uproar. Many emailed the company, begging to be forgiven. In a rare turn of events, the Daybreak president John Smedley tweeted that the cheaters might be forgiven.  All they needed to do was post a public apology on youtube and then email him a link. While plenty of gamers flocked to youtube, Smedley only accepted the apologies of a handful of gamers that he thought were sincere.

2 Konami Code Vengeance

The Konami Code is the most famous cheat in video game history. It originally appeared in Gradius. The code was meant to be a tool for the developers to help they playtest the game. Once inputted, it gave the player a bunch of powerups. Since then, the code appeared in a variety of places. It isn’t even exclusive to Konami. Other companies used it for their games. Even internet websites like Google now use the code to activate special easter eggs. Although the Konami Code typically offers fabulous prizes or power ups, it doesn’t always. Input the code into Super Monkey Ball Jr. title screen and the title will change to Super Nice Try. If you attempt to use the code in Gradius III, your ship will explode. A version of the code does work with Gradius III. You have to switch the “left” and “right” commands with the R and L buttons.

1 Lawsuits And Fines

Although no one likes cheaters, hacking isn’t actually illegal. At least, not yet. However, that doesn’t stop gaming companies from doing what they can to punish cheaters. If you cheat in Capcom’s Monster Hunter 3, you’ll end up with a temporary ban. The kicker though, is that the ban lasts for 7,000 years. Riot Games went one step further. One of their pro League of Legends team cheated during official matches. Riot Games fined the cheaters $30,000. However, the Korean gaming company Nexon decided to take things even further. Nexon ended up filing criminal charges against Japanese hackers in their game Sun and Attack. The three teenagers were arrested in their home country. Gamers are somewhat divided on the issue. While we all agree that cheating and hacking is wrong, no one is sure if it’s bad enough to get the police involved. Why not just ban them?