10 More GENIUS Ways Video Games Fought Cheaters

Late in the original Metal Gear Solid, Solid Snake is captured by Revolver Ocelot and strapped into an electroshock torture rack, as the player is forced to button-mash their way through a series of increasingly difficult sequences intended to test their nimbleness.

If you can't button-mash hard enough to keep Snake's life bar filled until the timer runs out, then you "submit" to the torture, resulting in Meryl's death at the end of the game.

Before the torture starts, though, Ocelot makes a point of telling you, "Don't even think about using auto-fire, or I'll know."

In the quaint, meta-averse gaming era of 1998, it was positively surreal to hear a game's villain break the fourth wall and tell the player that using an unofficial controller with an auto-fire capability - in turn completely trivialising button-mashing - wouldn't work well for them.

And this wasn't merely an empty threat which Hideo Kojima placed in the game to deter cheating: he indeed had the sequence programmed to recognise auto-fire controllers firing above a certain inputs-per-second rate.

If the game recognises an auto-fire controller, it will suddenly kill the player's inputs entirely, and even when the torture timer hits zero, the electrocution continues until Snake dies, triggering a Game Over.

It's a very Hideo Kojima way to get one over on cheaters, that's for sure.