KEY POINTS:
SAN FRANCISCO - Anyone who believes that cheaters never win, obviously isn't a video game fan.
Cheating is often the key to success for video gamers like 1UP.com Editor-in-Chief Sam Kennedy, who is bringing cheat code swapping sites out of the dark ages so gamers can get more bang for their gaming buck.
"The one thing that's universal across games is that at some point everyone has gotten stuck," said Kennedy, although he acknowledges that today's gamers use cheat sites for more than just getting unstuck.
"If you're spending $60 on a game, you want to get your money's worth. Games are massive worlds these days and there's not just one pass through them," said Kennedy, who led the launch late last year of MyCheats.com, a new site from Ziff Davis Game Group.
While cheating can get you blackballed in competitive video game play, solo cheating is widely practiced - even if not always admitted.
This has given rise to dozens of dedicated websites, including GameSpot's GameFAQs.com, CheatPlanet.com, CheatCodes.com, CheatCC.com and the cheat sections at IGN.com and GameSpy.com.
Kennedy said that some popular sites catering to the cheat code trade seem as dated as your father's Atari 2600, with reams of text documents that are hard to navigate.
"Nothing has changed in the cheats space, until now," said Kennedy, who incorporated the latest in Web-based information trading tools into MyCheats.com.
Think of it as a mash-up of social sites like MySpace.com and user-created content sites like Wikipedia.org, Craigslist.org and Digg.com.
"Gamers really do like to share their passion and their knowledge," said Kennedy, who noted that gamers are also early technology adopters who embraced blogging long before it hit mainstream popularity.
MyCheats.com invites users to submit and edit content for the site's cheat database and its "super" strategy guides. They will also have the opportunity to rate content, the best of which will be given prominent placement on the site.
Cheat codes are special series of button punches that let developers test game code and jump past certain levels. Game makers have started leaving the codes in games and releasing them over time directly to gamers or through websites, magazines or book publishers.
Sometimes the cheat codes are unintentional bugs discovered by players that give a boost to gameplay. Others are "Easter eggs" that are intentionally put into the game for players to find.
Among other things, the codes might allow a character to regain full health, to start a level with a menacing weapon or to acquire in-game cash. Game companies like Electronic Arts and Ubisoft have long used the codes to reignite interest in a game that has been out for several months and are increasingly using the codes for marketing campaigns on milk cartons and elsewhere.
University of North Florida student Jonathan Jakes-Schauer said cheat sites go against his principles, unless he's missing something obvious or he is replaying a game and wants to squeeze every ounce of entertainment out of it.
"Figuring out how to do things is a part of the fun," he said, admitting he has "compromised his principles just a bit" while playing Square Enix's popular role-playing game "Kingdom Hearts."
- REUTERS
