At Gamesradar I found an interesting article about the “History of Cheating in Games”. It may be written a little bit silly, but provides the basic facts of the – how they call it – “cheating industry”. For example:

Early in the history of videogames, cheating was really cheating. It was achieved by loading games into memory and modifying useful values before launching them. These memory hacks were called POKEs, named for the BASIC function used to overwrite memory. (…) The concept of intentionally created cheats also appeared early in the evolution of games, at about the point when cheats became necessary for testing. Without some sort of debug mode or life-extending cheat to make games easier, testing the absurdly difficult games of yore would have been absurdly difficult.

Yes, games were really much harder in the 8-bit era. But cheats survived them. With the rise of the game-pad the A, B, A, B, left, right, left, right – cheats appeared and slowly wandered into gaming culture. The latest offspring of cheats are “pay-per-cheat” in browser games for example, where people can decide to play the game and invest time to get achievements – or to take the short route and pay for a cheat. Well, with the intention of the game-designer of course, in order to monetize the game.

Not exactly a cheat, but its relative: the glitch. Seen on the NES.

Just keep on reading more about the phenomenon at Gamesradar.