10 Video Game Traditions That Are Dead And Buried

Cheat codes implanted into the game made you feel like a sneaky player until, of course, you stumbled upon the existence of cheat cartridges. If you didn’t own one, you'll have strong memories of looking for aforementioned cheat codes and instead finding long strings of digits for cheat cartridges that could do stuff you could only dream about.

Forget giving yourself infinite health and ammo, the real devious power of cheats was tearing the game apart: making it possible to change character models, spawn items or perhaps most infamously walk through walls to leave the confines of the title behind.

These unlicensed pieces of kit went into your console’s cartridge slot or disc tray like any other game but allowed the next title inserted to be blown wide open. There were plenty of them, all with different names, with GameGenie, GameShark and ActionReplay being the most prominent.

With consoles being easier to crack and harder for companies to update once they were out into the world, these cheat cartridges were pretty impossible to stop when they were in circulation. And, to be fair, they didn’t really harm the companies. It’s not like the famous R4 cart for the Nintendo DS which could be filled with ROMs.

These were merely code-breaking cheats and ways for players to turn a game into their own playground.