A history of cheating

Originally made for the Commodore 64 computer around 1986, and later adapted and released for many other game consoles along the years, the Action Replay¹ was a device users would plug into their game console, enabling them access to the console's internal memory, reading and writing through it, as they were playing.

Soon after, other manufacturers would follow and publish their own devices, most famously Game Shark¹ and Game Genie[^1], and gaming magazines would include pages full of codes. With the Internet, the codes were liberated and these three brands became generic terms² online for "cheat code".

Thanks to the tremendous work of emulator developers, many of them began to allow users to access the game console memory to use codes, and, more interestingly,in order to find them. Soon enough, even modded consoles got free softwares implementing similar functionalities.