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I remember how VtM: Bloodlines went as much as write entire voice acted lines for tutorial NPC making fun of you if you cheated in character creation.

That was, mind you, in game released prematurely with ton of bugs. They found time for that.

How I know that ? I didn't cheat knowingly. I just used the editor, couldn't make up my mind and I was going between the steps once or twice. I thought I forgot to spend some skill points, turned out when you went back to the skills screen, the ones you picked stayed but the game gave you new set of points to spend

They found the time for cheater heckling but not to make their character creator work right ;)

by photios5 hours ago|

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> With the WozMon you could even find the locations in memory

Never heard of WozMon before. I was a happy Game Wizard user :D

https://web.archive.org/web/19970119194137/http://www.gwiz.c...

by t3r2 hours ago|

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Wow, thanks for the fascinating bit of history! Sharing memory addresses through computer magazines sounds like a paper-based BBS, haha. I guess I'm just a Cheat Engine kid, though

by daniel_rh10 hours ago|

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Yes! I remember finding out which integer was the money in my Sim City save. And I remember when I figured out the build order list for Star Trek: Armada 2 and fixed the Borg AI to be so formidable that we'd have to play the First Contact sound track at full blast to even have a chance of winning against 3 Borg players.

by EmX_300010 hours ago|

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By later times it seems this was tougher, I remember trying it with Ultima IX and utterly failing to locate a single relevant memory location after a solid week.

by daniel_rh10 hours ago|

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Ya especially with DRM or multiplayer lockdown measures.

But there is still a revolution where most game files are JSON or plain text (like that build list from Star Trek Armada 2).

by EmX_30007 hours ago|

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Dwarf Fortress is like this too, in fact much of the game can be modded from such files. I like that, but I do understand the frustrations of the developer who not only saw their games cracked but also trained back in the day. It presaged what was to come heh.

by asdff4 hours ago|

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The arms race honestly was so foolish. The era being discussed especially being pre achievements, pre internet in a lot of ways as we know it. So what if someone cheats in a ps2 game. Doesn’t hurt anyone.

And then you have to figure the devs realize you can do this and reverse engineer the entire game anyhow. Why even obfuscate it is the real question. Makes their workflow a little more awkward potentially and doesn’t do the intended thing.

I blame the nontechnical C suite. They don’t understand what I just wrote. So to them, this instead makes perfect sense. Lock it down, never mind why or if the lock works, just lock it and tell me its done. Command comes from upon high and so marches the industry and the hackers after them.