HOT TOPIC
DIRTY CHEATS
If you’re not cheating, you’re not trying
DARRAN JONES
NICK THORPE
TIM EMPEY
Our new Secret Service spread makes its debut in this month’s issue. With that in mind, we thought we’d share our history with a subject that’s rarely discussed in these pages – our experience of using illicit codes, rather than playing games the way they were meant to be played.
NICK
Can you remember the first time you ever used a cheat in a videogame?
TIM
Well not me specifically, but my brother used a paperclip to do something to our Commodore 64 so we could enter some PEEKs and POKEs. I can’t remember what game we did it for or what it did, but he very sternly told me never to do it because it could wreck the computer! So I didn’t.
DARRAN
I can’t remember if it’s the first cheat I ever activated but for some reason the ability to change the blood in Renegade on the Amstrad from blue to red remains forever in my memory. God knows how you activated though.
NICK
Unsurprisingly, mine was the Sonic 1 level select, which my dad learned from a Saturday boy at the family business. I hoped I’d learn the equivalent code for my Master System version, but it doesn’t have one. Did you find yourselves using cheats much when you were younger?