That’s super cool! I loved the original Ecco on the genesis. Beat it several times. I miss when games had real cheats/debug modes. It’s part of the reason I hot in to programming and development in the first place. I feel like kids these days don’t get this experience anymore.
This sort of thing seems to have really fallen off after the Grand Theft Auto "Hot Coffee" scandal. Having hidden stuff in a game went from being a fun thing to a potential liability.
I think the other big thing that killed in game cheats and debug screens was Xbox and Steam Achievements/PlayStation Trophies. Some of the "value" in such tokens of game completion are the "skill checks" it takes to complete them. If a game provides cheats inside of it, it either needs to disable those Achievement systems, or it loses the ability to unlock them, and that's platform enforced by Xbox/Steam/PlayStation. So it's easier for most games to just not include cheats so they don't have to worry about accidentally violating platform terms on Xbox/Steam/PlayStation should players discover and "abuse" the cheat systems.
Similarly PC games with mod support often have to disable Achievement systems as soon as any mod is installed just in case the mod happens to offer cheats. Which also seems to have impacted mod culture to some extent with entire classes of gamers not installing mods ever to make sure that they still win Achievements.
It's an interesting social dynamic and I think one of the clearest lines in the sand for when cheat codes disappeared, especially in genres like the FPS where "God Mode" and "noclip" codes were genre staples until Achievements. (Because DOOM offered them, every FPS offered them. Until they stopped.)
PC games don't have to do this. Steam doesn't have a policy that achievements must prevent cheating. This is entirely a developer choice.
The main reason cheats have disappeared from mainstream games is because many of them prefer to sell them to you as micro-transactions, item pack DLCs, etc.
Steam has the weakest enforced terms of all the three that I mentioned, but it does have terms in its contract with developers for how Achievements are supposed to unlock.
But most "triple A" games don't just release under Steam's weaker terms, they also want Xbox and PlayStation certification, which have been strongly enforced.
I don't know how common it is, but Control (PS4 era) has an extensive cheat system accessible from the options menu, and Saros (PS5 era) has a wide variety of settings to make the game more or less difficult.
Yeah I remember when Hot Coffee happened I was working at a studio owned by THQ and a message came down from the executive level basically warning us not to put in anything hidden like that. All secrets had to be disclosed and known by the executive team. Something like that anyway.
1. I think it's more about microtransactions than Hot Coffee. Why put cheats for free if you can monetize them.
2. Cheats don't make sense in the age of abundance of games. Previously you'd have 3 games on your PC and you'd try to extract as much fun out of them as possible, so you'd just dick around and do silly stuff, and cheats were helpful in that. Now most gamers literally have a backlog of games, there's no time for that style of gameplay. You're done with the campaign, next game.
3. "Fun" has always been a liability, it's just that previously companies saw that as cost of doing business while nowadays all risks need to be avoided. Doing borderline illegal marketing campaigns was actually normal for many companies. When Burnout 2 was being released in 2002, Acclaim wanted to reimburse speeding tickets in the UK. Think about it for a second.
4. Children playing a literal gang member simulator with all types of violent crimes built in? Business as usual. Penis into vagina? That's a step too far you monster! I never really understood this moral panic about sex. In Europe GTA games are labeled 18+ so Hot Coffee scandal was contained to last pages of video game magazines.
I wanted to love this game and it's beautiful animations and art styles and music. But I think I never got past the actual first level.
I remember already having a lot of trouble triggering the storm and then just got confused in the first level with the big crystals and the maze. It got me really frustrated.
The fun ones are the studios who are really good at stubbing debug stuff out. Guitar Hero II for PS2 was released in November 2006. it took 14 and a half years before someone stumbled on a prototype GH80s disc that just happened to be a debug-enabled build of the game, that also just happened to contain a debug-enabled executable for GH2 sitting in the root of the disc (which kind of makes sense, GH80s was a slightly modified and bugfixed version of GH2, so earlier versions of GH80s were probably built as GH2 discs before the executable was finalized). But there are certain key routines in GH2 that are completely stubbed out in the retail builds, such as the routines to read USB keyboard input, or display the actual debug traces. They're present by name, and the rest of the code will call them when needed, but then they just return without doing anything (and thus if a true exception was thrown the game will then halt in retail versions where the debug version would print a data and code stack trace before halting). Harmonix did this continuously throughout Rock Band development as well, even as far as stubbing out routines only needed on a single platform unless the build is for that platform (Rock Band 3 on PS3 makes use of the hdd1: cache, but all code for that is completely stubbed out with return-only funcs in the 360 build). We wouldn't have any knowledge of Rock Band 3 debug if it weren't for a dev Wii we found with five builds of RB3 (including a slightly post-final build, but all debug-enabled).
But then they were sloppy enough to use the 360-based audio encryption path (which had an extra step versus the PS3) on later non-360 consoles and include the needed HvKeys to decrypt the keymask in cleartext, even though they could have successfully decrypted every single audio file that wasn't RB1 on-disc or early DLC by using the PS3 path and not revealing those keys. I don't care about public discussion of this at this point because there are a dozen tools that can decrypt every single Rock Band audio file ever created (and even audio for games that aren't RB but used "mogg" format which is just multichannel Ogg Vorbis with a Harmonix-specific header with security values and an OggMap to aid in seeking). There's even one tool that can decrypt audio that uses the "red" keys which have never been seen to be used publicly. Game dev is fun.
If you've ever heard of Guitar Hero II Deluxe, that debug ELF made that possible. Also if you've played it, you're welcome.
A built-in no-cd patch, neat :-)
Similarly PC games with mod support often have to disable Achievement systems as soon as any mod is installed just in case the mod happens to offer cheats. Which also seems to have impacted mod culture to some extent with entire classes of gamers not installing mods ever to make sure that they still win Achievements.
It's an interesting social dynamic and I think one of the clearest lines in the sand for when cheat codes disappeared, especially in genres like the FPS where "God Mode" and "noclip" codes were genre staples until Achievements. (Because DOOM offered them, every FPS offered them. Until they stopped.)
The main reason cheats have disappeared from mainstream games is because many of them prefer to sell them to you as micro-transactions, item pack DLCs, etc.
But most "triple A" games don't just release under Steam's weaker terms, they also want Xbox and PlayStation certification, which have been strongly enforced.
2. Cheats don't make sense in the age of abundance of games. Previously you'd have 3 games on your PC and you'd try to extract as much fun out of them as possible, so you'd just dick around and do silly stuff, and cheats were helpful in that. Now most gamers literally have a backlog of games, there's no time for that style of gameplay. You're done with the campaign, next game.
3. "Fun" has always been a liability, it's just that previously companies saw that as cost of doing business while nowadays all risks need to be avoided. Doing borderline illegal marketing campaigns was actually normal for many companies. When Burnout 2 was being released in 2002, Acclaim wanted to reimburse speeding tickets in the UK. Think about it for a second.
4. Children playing a literal gang member simulator with all types of violent crimes built in? Business as usual. Penis into vagina? That's a step too far you monster! I never really understood this moral panic about sex. In Europe GTA games are labeled 18+ so Hot Coffee scandal was contained to last pages of video game magazines.
I wanted to love this game and it's beautiful animations and art styles and music. But I think I never got past the actual first level.
I remember already having a lot of trouble triggering the storm and then just got confused in the first level with the big crystals and the maze. It got me really frustrated.
But then they were sloppy enough to use the 360-based audio encryption path (which had an extra step versus the PS3) on later non-360 consoles and include the needed HvKeys to decrypt the keymask in cleartext, even though they could have successfully decrypted every single audio file that wasn't RB1 on-disc or early DLC by using the PS3 path and not revealing those keys. I don't care about public discussion of this at this point because there are a dozen tools that can decrypt every single Rock Band audio file ever created (and even audio for games that aren't RB but used "mogg" format which is just multichannel Ogg Vorbis with a Harmonix-specific header with security values and an OggMap to aid in seeking). There's even one tool that can decrypt audio that uses the "red" keys which have never been seen to be used publicly. Game dev is fun.
If you've ever heard of Guitar Hero II Deluxe, that debug ELF made that possible. Also if you've played it, you're welcome.
I mean, who reverse engineers the “About” dialog on an application!?!? That’s the last place I would have ever looked!