We’ve all searched the forums for cheat codes at one point or another, which is something I think every gamer can admit. As soon as they let you plug in that (ridiculously) long code, so that you can unlock a character or get some extra money, we feel like we've become rebels and it's kind of exhilarating. I have plugged in the cheat to get 30,000 bells into the original Animal Crossing game so many times my friend wanted to kill me (it’s WB2&pARAcnOwnU if you wanted to know). But those were put in the game on purpose, as they were meant to be something fun or a little extra help when you’re losing interest. But we all know those people that use bots or codes to cheat the game and it gives them an unfair advantage. Especially when it comes to online MMOs where grinding is part of the game and skipping that is just NOT okay. There’s nothing I like more then when those people get brutally smacked down. Maybe because it calls back to playing as a kid and my neighbor using a cheap shot and my brother taking him down. Justice can be sweet, especially when it comes to cheaters. Sometimes it's society that punishes them and sometimes it’s the game itself.
20 Banjo-Kazooie
Like I said, a lot of video games give you cheat codes on purposes. It’s part of the fun, as they're there to make it easier or spice things up. Then there are the cheats that the game developers didn’t write or are high-test cheats that the developers don’t want you to abuse. This is the case in Banjo-Kazooie and the stakes are your game’s save file. That’s right, if you use more than two “illegal” cheats, Grunty will swoop in and delete your file. That being said, Bottles does come and tell you that you gotta knock it off, so you are warned before Grunty pops up. If it happens, it’s really your own fault.
19 The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt
Part of the difficulty of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is the fact that you’re going to be broke for most of the game. But there is a nice little cheat that lets you get passed that, if you dare to do it. There is a farm of cows and if you kill them all and then meditate, they will respawn; so you can lather, rinse, repeat, until you are flush with (cow) blood money. This kind of broke the game, so the developers put in their own ‘Bovine Defense Force Initiative.’ Which sounds pretty awesome right? Like something out of a spy movie. Basically, if you kill too many of the cows, this massive cow monster will pop up and brutally murder you. Can you say Divine Bovine justice?
18 Tomb Raider 1... But Not 2
In the original Tomb Raider game, there is a cheat that lets you get every weapon in the game and with full ammo. Handy if all you want to do is beat the game quickly and be done with it. Or if you’re like me and crushing everything in your path is your idea of a good time. Cool cheat, but then if you do the same cheat in Tomb Raider 2, it will make Lara explode. Sounds like the game developers were really upset about the first cheat and decided to have some sweet revenge. That or they thought it would be funny to watch the gamers freak out. Anyway, it’s sadistic and I love it.
17 I’ll See You in Court
The police are pressing charges this time for cheating! Nexon’s Sudden Attack is in the middle of this lawsuit and the perpetrators are two seventeen-year-olds and one college freshman. Of course these teens weren’t exactly ‘just’ cheating. They were posting and selling cheats online and making millions (of yen) from them. Nexon decided to contact the police after hearing about this, not knowing that they were minors. In a statement Nexon said, “Nexon's duty is to provide a balanced and fun environment for all players. Having received a large number of complaints and inquiries regarding the cheats, we contacted the police regarding the issue. Once the investigation ensued, the police contacted us for additional information and we cooperated with their investigation.” The lesson? If you want to cheat, make sure you don’t make any money off of it.
16 A Public Apology
H1Z1 is another MMO, but with a zombie twist. It’s a lot of fun until cheating became so rampant the Daybreak Game Company had to ban a whopping 30,000 players. The only way to get unbanned? A public apology. Some players took that to heart and made their own apology videos on YouTube. Here’s one, if you’re feeling a bit masochistic today. The game developers only lifted the ban on about five people out of that 30,000 thanks to the videos. That being said, they wanted to let everyone know they weren’t going to go easy on future cheating, as they only lifted FIVE out of 30,000. This quote from Daybreak president John Smedley is almost poetic in it’s anger:
Makes you wish more developers would be more hard on the ‘cockroaches’ of the gaming community.
15 Player Killer
The developers of Red Dead Redemption were not as sweeping as the guys at Daybreak Game Company when it comes to cheating. But they were pretty clever by making it self-regulating. It leaves it to the other players to put up complaints, including complaints about hacking, and if the player racks up enough complaints, then they get the brand “player killer.” Which makes it really hard to team up with anyone online, which basically just makes everything more difficult. It sounds fair considering their cheating is making things easier for them and harder for everyone else. It’s evening the playing field. Plus you have a permanent ‘wanted’ level, meaning you stick out to other players. It’s pretty devious.
14 League of Legends - Azubu Frost
Major league gaming is obviously taken very seriously by much of the gaming community, which means that cheating is a pretty big offense. But these guys didn’t use any fancy coding or bots to cheat, they did it the old fashioned way. They looked at the other player’s screen (alright they looked at the giant screen depicting the match but still). It really does harken back to those childhood days of, “You’re looking at my screen!” that I remember. They were fined $30,000, so obviously it was a bit more extreme than a ten-year-old looking at the other half of the screen during a Halo game. This was a huge scandal for the gaming team, Azubu Frost, and there’s proof of it all over YouTube.
13 Animal Crossing - Mr. Resetti
Anyone who has played Animal Crossing before knows about that terrible mole, Mr. Resetti. He’s a character that pops up if you turn off your game without saving (or reset, get the name now?). Someone at Nintendo was upset about the fact that if you messed up in any game, all you had to do was quit without saving. Mr. Resetti is the punishment for that. He will literally talk non-stop. The more times you quit, the longer he goes on. It practically becomes a jump-scare when he pops out of the ground in front of your house. The worst is when your DS died and you didn’t notice, but you still have to deal with him. It feels like being framed for murder. “I swear it wasn’t me! I didn’t mean to!” I’m still afraid of him to this day.
12 GTA V
We all know Rockstar has a sick sense of humor, I mean you don’t create games like GTA or Postal without being a bit sadistic. Which is why you don’t want to mess with GTA V Online. There’s a way to glitch your car from single-player mode to online, which obviously gives you an unfair advantage. So what did Rockstar do? Blow you up. That’s right, the game knows that the car isn’t supposed to be there, so it plants a car bomb in it. As soon as you get in, BOOM! It’s pretty funny to see a game like GTA mess with you for cheating. Seems kind of like a low BLOW. See what I did there? Also, they make you wear a dunce cap. I just have to say the crime fits the punishment here.
11 Max Payne 3
Like I said before, Rockstar has some pretty poetic ways of dealing with cheaters. In Max Payne 3, players figured out a way to make themselves invincible with infinite health and adrenaline. What did Rockstar do? They made them play together. And only together. That’s right, there’s a mystical land just for cheaters out there, where you can do as many hacks as you want, but the player next to you might have even more hacks. I wonder how many players yelled, “That’s not fair!” when they saw a cheat they didn’t have. I also wonder how many noticed the intense irony of the situation. Rockstar did let some gamers back into the fold of law-abiding murderers, but if they skirted the rules again, they’d be banned straight up this time; no happy land of no rules for them.
10 Counter Strike: Global Offensive
It’s pretty hard for developers to find every single cheater out there. Sure there’s software and Counter Strike does have some pretty good detection, but they also have a program called “Overwatch.” Overwatch has experienced community members work as ‘investigators,’ where they are in charge of viewing reports and watching the match to see if the allegations are true, and then placing a ban if necessary. Kind of like their own private police force and hey, power to the players!
That being said, there's a pretty funny story about a player being banned mid-game and mid-tournament by the anti-cheat software. Apparently the gamer had bought the cheat from a Ukrainian developer. He didn’t seem too upset about the ban, saying that ‘it’s just a game’ and essentially, ‘no harm, no foul.’ Considering the game has around 11,000 players banned, he’s not exactly alone in his time-out corner.
9 Achievement Hunters
For a while on the Xbox 360, there was a way to hack Gears of War 2 and get every achievement. That’s right every single one. Microsoft found the gamers using this illegal hack and got the best revenge they could. They set the cheaters Gamerscore to zero. Every single achievement they got, by fair means or foul, was erased. To add to that, the players would be unable to regain any achievements they had previously gotten and they'd be labelled as cheaters. It’s a pretty intense one-two punch and everyone will know immediately what you did. I mean, players had a Gamerscore of zero and it says cheater. Personally I don’t even know what my own Gamerscore is, but it’s a big deal for a lot of people. In the end, if you want the credit you have to do the work.
8 Banned for 7,000 Years
Have you ever had a little sibling or cousin try to guess the password on your phone and they come back twenty minutes later with the lock screen, saying that you can try again in like a week because the pin was attempted too many times? I imagine it’s pretty similar to how this player felt when they were playing Monster Hunter 3 and used “modded data to connect online,” according to the screengrab of the message. It continued saying that the player would be banned until December, 12th, 9999. So if they want to pass that account down for future generations, eventually one of their descendants will be able to play the account. That being said, the message says that come year 9999, if they cheat again they will be banned permanently. Seems kind of redundant, like giving someone ten life-sentences in prison, but I suppose they learned their lesson either way.
7 Donkey Kong 64
Nintendo has no time for cheaters and they’ve been doing this for a while, so they know the hacks. I mean I still get terrified whenever I think of Pokemon’s Missingno and the possibility of him corrupting my game. Well if you use any GameShark code in Donkey Kong 64, you’re going to have some serious issues. DK will start glitching out, he’ll have his health dropped to almost zero and it'll make it pretty much impossible to finish the game. If you save, however, hoping that the entire nightmare just goes away, the entire cartridge will be corrupted. That’s right, just like in Pokemon Red and Blue, you will have a hunk of useless plastic that used to contain hours of gameplay on one of your favorite games. The lesson? If you’re going to cheat, either don’t save or know not to catch the glitchy Pokemon. Simple enough, right?
6 Conspiracy to Commit Wire Fraud
Sounds pretty scary, right? Well a jury in Texas found a hacker guilty of this after he used a hack to mine coins in the FIFA games, then sold them to other players. Now, EA makes money off of these FIFA coins because you either need to buy more or play their games to get them. In an indirect way, that’s technically stealing from EA since you are cutting into their profits. The hacker wasn’t too hard to hunt down because they put the income they made from these hacks and ill-gotten games directly into their bank account. It doesn’t take much time or energy to hunt that kind of idiocy down. Maybe he thought EA wouldn’t care? Well they were taken to court and not simply banned like a lot of other hackers on this list, and found guilty. Ouch.
5 Blizzard
The developers of Overwatch are notorious for their hard bans on any person caught cheating. That includes aimbots and the like. No dunce cap, no glitching your game, you're just banned for life. Now a group in Germany decided to take hacking one step further and make money off of it. Most hackers don’t get paid for their work or hobby as the case may be. But Bossland of Germany is a group that actually sells their hacking expertise. Not surprisingly, Blizzard is suing the group, citing copyright infringement and unfair competition. Blizzard has been quoted saying, “Defendants’ sale and distribution of the Bossland Hacks in the United States has caused Blizzard to lose millions or tens of millions of dollars in revenue, and to suffer irreparable damage to its goodwill and reputation.”
4 Konami Code
Now whether or not you think cheating in a one-person game is okay or not, you can see why developers would be angry and want to mess with players who think they can take the easy way out. Normally if you input the Konami Code, you are granted with some amazing bonuses, be it infinite lives or another perk. Back on the SNES, there was a game called Gradius III, a Konami game at that, and if you input the code, your space ship blew up. I guess that’s the easiest way for developers to deal with cheaters, huh? From Tomb Raider to GTA to SNES games, if you're going to cheat? Instant death! Although I have to say it’s a bit more graphic when you see Lara Croft just up and explode compared to a car or spaceship.
3 Guild Wars' Dhuum
Now I’ll get to Guild Wars 2 in a second, but the original Guild Wars had a pretty epic way for dealing with cheaters. Instead of going the classic route and simply exploding the character, Dhuum is sent after them. A spector-like grim reaper character appears out of the green smoke, towering over all the other players. With one sweep of his scythe, the cheater is cut in half. This not only bans them from the game, but it's also a pretty public shaming. No quiet message to an inbox or screen that says something along the lines of ‘banned for cheating.’ Just a giant reaper appearing and dragging you down to hell. Or just banned from the game. Which was probably hell for some people.
2 Slender: The Arrival
I love horror games. I watch them on YouTube or play them myself and scream at practically every jump scare. The reason that you play a horror game is to be scared. So, why would a player use a cheat to take out the scary parts? Beats me. But the developers of Slender: The Arrival figured out the cheating and found a really terrifying way around it. Some players were glitching or hacking the game by going outside of the boundaries where Slenderman couldn't get them. Again, that seems to defeat the purpose of the game, but whatever floats your boat. If you do glitch it and go beyond the barriers of the game, you will fall to your death, but not before Slenderman finds you and says, "Not even a bug in this game will save you from me." If you’re going to break the fourth wall, that’s a solid way to do it.
1 Sweet (Naked) Revenge
MMOs are one of the worst places to cheat. If you cheat there, you cheat everyone, whether it be through crazy upgrades or grinding without putting the hours in. In this case, a player in Guild Wars 2 was using a third party program to give them enhanced speed, as well as the ability to teleport inside structures and claim them, which bypassed the need for other players and siege structures. They tracked down the player, one cleverly named Darkside, and took control of the character. They made him strip off his shirt and wave to a crowd, then made him jump off a high building... before deleting his account. Not only did they make him look extremely stupid but then got rid of him. That’s some pretty good revenge.