It’s a sad fact that for every game creators have spent hours designing, creating, and perfecting, there will be at least a small group of gamers who will wish to balance the odds in their favour by cheating their way to the top. It’s by no means a new concept, with card counting a common occurrence in games of blackjack and violations of the touch-move rule bringing chess masters to their knees in competitive circles.
But cheating has taken on a whole new meaning and a whole new ease of use with last century's introduction of video games. Like any piece of code, games can be hacked into, and sometimes it’s as simple as inputting some special keystrokes on a particular screen to receive unlimited lives. At other times, hacking can get insanely confusing, with some particularly obsessed players spending hours of their time attempting to con their way into a particular advantage such as walking through walls.
Thankfully, game developers have started to fight back against this kind of hacking, with many games now having entire defense mechanisms against anyone who tries to alter their code. Some will humorously chastise the player; others will shame them in front of their gaming communities — and the most savage among them will even wipe their save-data completely clean. This list will check out titles from all three of these categories, and we recommend you check it out if you’ve ever had any thoughts of hacking at home.
15 GTA: Online Will Publicly Name And Shame You
For a game that’s pretty much exclusively about stealing cars, killing innocent people, and having spending time with "women of the street," GTA: Online can on occasion be pretty tame. The MMO has a dedicated server for “bad sports,” which they’ve described as anyone who disrupts the game by continually quitting missions to maintain their ranking and destroying players personal cars. Being designated as a “bad sport” will limit you to only playing with other bad sports, and it will also equip you with a compulsory “Dunce” hat so everyone knows how awful you are.
On top of that, the game will also punish players who make use of a certain glitch that allows you to buy a car in single-player mode and glitch it into online mode. If you attempt the glitch, the game will allow it for so long but it will plant a bomb inside your prized vehicle to destroy both you and your dream car. Ouch.
14 Donkey Kong 64 Will Make Your Game Unplayable
Gamesharks were all the rage back in the 90s, when hacking your device wasn't so simple as attaching it to an internet connection and downloading some dodgy files onto it. But game developers soon started fighting back against the cheat cartridges, introducing measures to discourage their use.
In Donkey Kong 64, using certain Gameshark codes, such as one that causes infinite health, will cause the game to malfunction entirely. Players will be unable to pick up any item in the game, making getting past certain levels completely impossible. The worst part about this cheat is that it persists even if you deactivate the cheat and reset your machine, so if you’re going to play around with Gameshark codes then make sure you save before using them, so you’re not stuck with an unplayable game. Although being stuck with an unplayable game is something Donkey Kong fans would be quite familiar with.
13 Animal Crossing Will Harass You Into Submission
Animal Crossing is one of those games that you either love or hate, and its stance on hacking exemplifies that perfectly. Full of fuzzy little animals with sassy personalities, the game is essentially a life simulator whose most exciting moments generally come when you catch a rare butterfly or pick some fruit from your garden.
But if you attempt to “cheat” in the game, those fuzzy little animals will turn bitter really, really quick. By now, most players know before trying something crazy to save their game - that way, they can reset it if their exploits don’t work. But if you do that too much in Animal Crossing, a mole named Resetti will barge onto your screen and lecture you about your rudeness. Things get super passive-aggressive when he demands you type out the word “Sorry” before he’ll let you continue with your game. This guy sounds like the most annoying mom ever.
12 Gradius III Breaks Your Spaceship
The Konami code is rarely referenced in video games post-21st century, but back in its 90s heyday, it was hidden away in pretty much every Konami game on the market. The code, which consists of pressing the buttons “Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A,” was a running gag that could be used to garner a variety of helpful advantages. For example, in Castlevania: Harmony of Dissonance, the code gave you the ability to play as a stronger character.
But in other games, Konami included the code just to mess with its players. In Gradius III, a scrolling space-themed Konami-developed game released on the SNES in 1990, entering the code will not gift you with a special prize, but will instead completely destroy your spaceship as soon as you leave the pause screen. What a nasty trick!
11 Ark: Survival Enacts Vigilante Justice
Ark: Survival was the MMO of the Week on Steam for a minute, and was yet another online sandbox game, this time with dinosaurs. The Ark developers have pretty lax rules about how to act on their servers, but this doesn’t stop the players from enacting their own form of justice.
Take the case of Ricky, who constantly trolled his server by making endless racist remarks. A group of players banded together and locked his character in a makeshift prison, serving him a sentence of ten hours of solitude for his crimes. Ricky attempted to commit suicide to escape his judgment, but his captors knocked him unconscious and force-fed him to maintain his high health (yes, you can seriously force someone to eat dinosaur meat in this game). The players got something out of it, using Ricky’s blood for transfusions and his poop for manure, and Ricky learned his lesson once and for all. We love a happy ending.
10 Marvel Vs. Capcom 3 Will Feed You To The Wolves
Marvel Vs. Capcom 3, the Super Smash Bros. of the Avengers and Street Fighter studios, was a pretty unremarkable game from start to finish. It suffered from Office 2000-esque graphics, an uninspired story mode and some pretty basic combat. But one thing it did get right was the online multiplayer function, which allowed players to verse each other from across the world in surprisingly fun fights.
Which is why it was all the more annoying when players started cheating the system to maintain their positive rankings. When facing a loss, certain players would simply disconnect their system from the Internet so that it wouldn’t get recorded and they would look cool on the leaderboard. Thankfully, Capcom kept track of the players who did this too much, and put them on a special server full of others who rage-quit too much. Does anyone ever win a match in this situation?
9 Afterlife Will Use The Force To Destroy You
Afterlife is a bizarre video game which essentially plays out like a religious version of SimCity. The player plays the role of a Demiurge, whose task is to build the cities of Heaven and Hell to reward or punish the citizens of the world. Yes, Hell is meant to be a fully functioning city, and the residents may get annoyed at you if their hot water is turned off.
The game is full of satirical pop culture references about things like Quentin Tarantino, and the allusions don't stop when it comes to hacking. The game will accept a certain amount of cheat codes before turning on you, but if you use too many a suspiciously familiar large round spaceship that for legal reasons definitely can’t be the Death Star will come and start destroying cities. That’s one way to level the playing field.
8 H1Z1 Will Require Your Apology On The Internet For Perpetuity
You may not have heard of H1Z1, the open-world crafting zombie-themed MMO, but it was marred by a pretty weak launch which involved login issues for most players, framerate disruption, and some dreadful AI. Probably because of this dodgy coding, the game was also victim to a bunch of exploits that allowed players to shoot through walls, become invincible and receive unlimited ammo.
Instead of fixing these exploits, the H1Z1 team instead simply banned everyone found to be using them, which amounted to roughly 30 000 people. They further said that they would only consider lifting the bans for players who uploaded a YouTube video of themselves apologizing, presumably to prove their sincerity. Sadly, the three (yes, that’s a serious number) people who did actually upload apologies were rejected by the developers, who even made their own video mocking the excuses they were given. Burn.
7 Guild Wars 2 Will Force You To Commit Suicide
Like many MMOs, Guild Wars 2 has suffered from its fair share of hackers, many of whom reached god-like status by granting themselves the ability to deal impossible amounts of damage and then teleport away to avoid reciprocation.
But unlike other MMOs, Guild Wars 2 chooses to deal with its hackers in a particularly brutal, if completely justified fashion. When the user DarkSide was caught playing god on a video which was later uploaded to YouTube, developers took swift action to take him down. They took over his character while DarkSide sat helplessly watching, and walked it to the top of a high tower. They then stripped the character naked, made it wave to onlookers, and jumped the character to its death. Instead of allowing him to respawn, they also logged DarkSide out and deleted his character permanently, along with those on his side-accounts. Justice was officially served.
6 Slender: The Arrival Will Creep You Out Even More
You may not have played Slender: The Arrival, but you almost definitely heard of it. The game blew up for approximately five minutes online after people on YouTube and Twitch started dramatically reacting to playthroughs of it in which they were almost always terrified by the antagonistic Slenderman of folklore.
And naturally, there were those who found a way to beat the system. Some players figured out that by reaching a certain wall in the game, they could walk outside the boundaries of where Slenderman could appear, thus avoiding him indefinitely. After developers heard about this, they released an update to the game which made anyone who walked through the wall fall to their death. Even worse, players will be faced by Slenderman alongside the message, “Not even a bug in this game will save you from me.” At least it would make for a good reaction video!
5 Pokémon Go Will Drown You In Rattata
Hacking has always been an issue in Pokémon Go, where people will take advantage of the games GPS to trick it into believing they’re walking the globe when they are in fact sitting pretty on their lounge watching Rick and Morty. This is a particularly useful skill to have in a game which requires players to visit every continent if they truly wish to “catch ‘em all.”
At first, Pokémon Go developers would go on sprees to permanently ban players found using these GPS spoofers. But some time last year, they changed their policy and instead kept the hackers around, only to populate their worlds with common Pokémon and remove all rare Pokémon from their games. Imagine hunting around for hours to find that elusive Ditto, only to end up with Rattata after Rattata. Frustration is the best form of punishment.
4 Counter Strike: Global Offensive Will Crowdsource Your Judge And Jury
Counter-Strike: Global Offensive is like any other first person shooter when it comes to the lows that players will stoop to in order to nab that competitive edge. Players will use auto-fire guns, invisibility mods or just plain invincibility hacks to rig their match. In exchange, Valve will slap them with a VAC (Valve Anti-Cheat) ban to keep them off the servers indefinitely.
What’s different about Valve is how they hire their police. Those who hand out VAC bans in CS:GO are known as the “Overwatch,” and they’re an elite group of volunteer players who have access to video footage of matches which they can pour over to determine guilt and innocence. Valve has this down to a fine art, even anonymising player names in the videos to avoid any bias. It’s not only cost-effective, but it increases community spirit as well. Smart.
3 League Of Legends Will Take All Your Money
League of Legends is one of those games that can totally consume a person's life, so it's somewhat understandable (if completely nerdy) that hacking the game would be taken seriously. Back in 2012, during the annual League of Legends World Championship tournament, several teams were accused of looking across the room at their enemy’s minimap, thus gaining an advantage on the competition. Riot Games initially denied the claims, but after looking through the recorded footage, they confirmed that several teams had participated in cheating. Three teams were issued official warnings, and Korean team Azubu Frost was fined $30 000.
Before you worry too much about the Azubu Frost members putting food on the table, keep in mind that their $30 000 fine was actually just 20% of the $150 000 in earnings they’d already made. I’m not sure whether to be jealous or disgusted.
2 Sudden Attack Will Slap You With A Big Fat Lawsuit
It should go without saying that hacking is wrong, and that it takes a hell of a lot of fun out of playing your favourite games. But what you might not have considered is how hacking can be a form of illegal “obstruction of business”, especially when the cheats you’re using are destroying the gaming experience that other players paid good money for.
At least that was the argument made by Japanese gaming company Nexon, who pressed charges against three 17—18-year-old players of their MMO first person shooter Sudden Attack back in 2014. According to Nexon, the players continual cheating was actually losing them money given how many players quit because of it. We sympathize with Nexon, but we think this might be going a little far - wouldn’t it make more sense to just fix the exploits being used?
1 Banjo-Kazooie Will Destroy Your Save Game
One of the earliest examples of game developers fighting back against their hackers, Banjo-Kazooie was pretty savage when it came to cheaters. Some may say this was a little unfair given that developers included several “official” cheat codes to discover and use in the game itself, but it seems that RAR had no time for hackers.
If players connected their cartridge to a third-party hacking device like a Gameshark, the game's main villain would appear onscreen and threaten to erase the save game entirely. If players continued, they would receive two more warnings before the save file was completely eradicated, meaning that some smarter players could trick the system by only inputting two cheat codes at a time. For other players, the threat was often brushed off mistakenly after a similar warning was given by Bottles with no actual intention of deletion. It almost seems a little unfair.