Did you know that Sonic the Hedgehog 2 has sold 6 million copies worldwide as of 2006? It’s impressive that a game made in 1992 would continue to sell over ten years later; most videogames only enjoy retail success in the fortnight honeymoon after launch. While classic film and music have an opportunity to sell and sell, arising in part from their enduring popularity, games must make the most of a precarious and limited shelf life. Maybe, because we only play most of our games once, and finish even fewer, the rationale for committing long term retail space to classic games isn’t there. Perhaps it’s true, they literally don’t make them like they used to; relatively cheaply, and for a dedicated consumer base. Sonic the Hedgehog (1991) had established a huge fan following for the SEGA franchise, and its sequel raised the bar in all areas of design, quite different from the cynical contemporary cash-ins and third-party licensing that now dog the career of SEGAs erstwhile mascot.

Imagine games before Second Life, Facebook, Twitter and Chinese gold-farming. If we quantum leap back to 1992, it isn’t an exaggeration to suggest that games culture was radically different. Of course, games consoles weren’t as powerful as they are now, but in 1992 games culture was different for the simple reason that the Internet hadn’t yet arrived in everyday culture. Nothing had yet connected, extended, thinned and overexposed games culture in all areas. Games culture was dense, idiosyncratic, lo-res, and ours, but chances are, with 6 million units sold, that it was everyone else’s too. Games had arrived in people’s homes, but games culture (the knot of today’s chain-retail for videogames, TV and print campaigns, and communities) weren’t joining up the essential pervasiveness of gaming. Gamers everywhere, just not so connected up.

The marketing of ‘retro’ as the preserve of the hardcore and the initiated geeks glosses over the widespread popularity of games consoles circa 1990. One of the easy marketing wins of each generation of consoles is claimed when the previous generation is cast and re-presented as being subcultural, niche and tailored to a dedicated audience by developers and publishers. Each future generation defines itself against the entrenched values of the former. As such we look at games culture as though through a distorting lens, believing positive changes to be much more recent than they actually are. These factors make well researched and written gaming histories a must for future generations.

In short, videogames have always been popular: it’s the way gamers have been connected that has consistently changed, sometimes radically. And because the ways in which gamers connect and relate to one another, so games design has had to reflect the values infusing each of these changes.

So as an example, let’s think about cheating, and ask the question – why does cheating matter? Do you know the level select cheat for Sonic the Hedgehog? Press up, down, left, right, then hold button A and press Start, all during the title sequence. Maybe it’s presumptuous of me to think it, but if you were a gamer, you were the kind of person that had the SEGA console and a copy of Sonic, you played it avidly, and crucially, you knew the cheat code. A big part of games culture is evidencing, to the friends wearing a steady butt-mark into your living room carpet, that you had new games, could play knew games, and could hold your own in the knowledge economy of cheating.

In the period since the advent of the internet, it has become very clear that games culture is significantly shaped by the cultural capital ‘knowing about games’ generates between individuals and groups. An incredible global infrastructure of websites, forums, blogs and other formats have proliferated in the chatter of newly connected gamer cultures. The cheat code anticipated this desire for conversation, and many (perhaps most) of the gaming magazines of the 1990s contained a centrefold spread, pull out section, or letters page that captured the collaborative input of gamers, rather than ‘expert’ journalist or developer sourced codes. Through cheats, players vied for an opportunity to penetrate through the surface of the gameworld, to claim leadership and advantage, and wrestle control of the game from the orthodoxies of standard play.

Here in the UK, magazine-format shows like Gamesmaster (1992 – 1998), which provided information about games culture, also went to great lengths to present to audiences the importance and centrality of the cheat code. Cheat as hot topic, event, hack. Kids from around the country would ‘ask’ the Gamesmaster (played by TV astronomer Patrick Moore) information about a certain problem, and he would deliver the goods, in nervy, quirky fashion. There is a connection between the popular culture of cheating in videogames and the way in which hacking (computer infiltration) has been broadly represented. Devices built for gaming consoles that enabled you to cheat, such as the Action Replay technologies developed by Datel, were carefully marketed to promote their capacity to ‘hack’ in the vein of science fiction imagery relating ideas of cyberspace and virtual worlds.

The player using the cheat code or device such as an Action Replay (which are still in production to date for contemporary consoles) doesn’t need to have any advanced knowledge of computer language or electronics to achieve their goal of ‘cheating’; the intervention they make is anticipated by the maker of the played game. As such cheating is bound up with the range of services or functions a game provides already. The way in which cheats feel as though they function ‘outside’, or on top of, the game originates from the primary sense players have for ‘normal play’ – play free from manipulation.

While the hacker needs to possess advanced knowledge of the operational world of computing, the cheater need only relate a commercially available code to the relevant game. Cheating could be considered a kind of ‘soft programming’ in that it doesn’t penetrate the code of the game at a fundamental level and replace it. Rather, it functions as an expression of what is already deliberately put there, or as an emergent effect of intentionally written elements.

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s hacking was represented in many different ways in popular culture. Movies such as Sneakers (1992) Lawnmower Man (1992) Hackers (1995) and The Net (1995) created a veneer of cool around the activity of hacking, forever connecting teenage resistance and computer culture together. The stories and imagery of games changed throughout the 80s and 1990s to reflect these cyberpunk roots as together they grew increasingly mainstream. The stock function of saving at computer terminals, instant messaging and player status drew of the rich imagery of William Gibson and Neal Stephenson, sequenced through Hollywood heroics and comic book skeins. Just as the ‘crucial hack’ acts as the denouement to the cyber-thrillers of film, literature and TV, the cheat in game creates a sudden shift of power and perspective.

In Sonic and its sequel, you could cheat to select level. You could also, by adding a C button press, expand the level select to enter into a ‘debug mode’. From there, you could press the B button in play and transform into a cycle of game assets connected to that level. With the press of the C button you could put those assets into the environment. In the top left hand corner, the score changes to reflect your XY positional coordinates within the level space. By turning from the eponymous Hedgehog into an asset, you could whizz around the level at heightened speed, taking yourself out of the action and dynamically changing your relationship to the level and game.

Suddenly, the story of Sonic unfurls and the design and fabrication of the space is revealed. You can put assets into the world, more and more enemies, extra platforms, rings and switches. This sort of cheat activity highlights the elegance with which the original level is made. It also gives you obvious play advantages, in the form of rings and translocation. Cheating of this kind, and perhaps cheating generally, shifts our attention to the make-up of the game design, because it unbalances and distorts the standard experience.

Getting ‘behind the screen’ to access the design underpins the common allegory of most hacker narratives; the emperor has no clothes (though the delusion may be delightful). The Matrix trilogy and its associated media provides one of the most popular connections between gaming and hacking. It suggests that being a good gamer should necessarily connect to the desire to look through the smoky mirror of effects to the mechanisms underneath. One of the taglines for Datel’s Action Replay devices is ‘You’ve Bought the Game … Now Play Like a Pro!’ Are they alluding to the ‘pro’ being a professional player, or game designer? In either case, cheating is represented as a means to get serious, step up and progress. The choice, of whether to cheat or not, is mirrored in the primary decision at the core of the matrix movie – red pill or blue? One restores the balanced illusion; the other permanently breaks through to the chaotic machine.

Cheating is hacking for the masses. It is one of many opportunities to ‘soft programme’ our technologies and culture without heavy reliance on advanced knowledge. Cheating creates an opportunity to play with design, think about it, and tinker around. By effectively unbalancing a game, we can move behind the screen to consider games through their limits. If you put too many assets on screen with the Sonic debug mode, the system would freeze and crash. In this it taught young players an important truth about games; that they aren’t infinite systems, but rather careful gestures reliant on an economy of elements. Cheats of the kind seen in Sonic fostered a generation of gamers to be both critical and respectful of what games are. Knowing that the level is one configuration among many comes from a point of view only afforded through cheating.

Nowadays the net and its community (and the integration of cheating into game form) has given people more of a sense of what games are, and players will always cheat for the sake of advantage. Tacitly through, through offering the means to cheat, designers open up new ways of thinking about game design, and foster an appreciation of their craft.