10 Video Game Traditions That Are Dead And Buried

10. Cheat Codes

Whether it’s the Konami Code you know or Grand Theft Auto: Vice City’s health, armour and money cheat; button inputs that hide boons were a part of video games for a long time. In the earlier days, it was the main way for developers to hide things in their game. Be that easter eggs, secrets or just a way for the player to be a big, dirty cheater.

Level selects, infinite lives and who could forget the classic itself: Big Head Mode?

It was an omen of what’s to come when GTA IV changed its cheats from strings of muscle memory button taps to memorising phone numbers. Still, it sometimes feels like GTA is one of the only franchise to still bake-in cheats.

Before the existence of online multiplayer giving games a theoretically unending life, cheats were the ideal way for players to fool around with a game they had mastered and have totally different experiences. For others, it was a way to… well, cheat; to overcome hardships and see the rest of the game before YouTube was the answer.

No, the early days of the gaming internet were held up by pillars like SuperCheats, CheatCC and CheatPlanet. And before that? The magazine free gift of the sacred text that was the cheat-book. Praise be to these collections of codes that brought much joy and infinite ammo carnage.