DIRTY CHEATS

If you're not cheating, you're not trying

- 

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?

DARRAN

I have to admit, unless the code was a simple series of key strokes like with Renegade, I usually avoided cheats on the Amstrad. Many of them required strings of code that I could never get my head around so I never got to use them. I stayed away from PEEKS and POKES for the same reason. It was all baffling to me.

TIM