Well I acquired them all legally, you can be sure of that ...

“Red keycard?  Shit, where am I supposed to find that?  I haven’t shot anything in at least 30 seconds and my ctrl finger is getting itchy … bugger it: i-d-k-f-a and I’m on my way!”

I’d reckon anyone old enough to recognise that internal monologue had the exact same discussion with themselves at some point.  Something dawned on me recently that made me think about it again: the relationship between games and cheating has changed a hell of a lot since I first started playing.

Once upon a time it seemed pretty much every game had cheats built into it – all you had to do was find the right keystroke combination, probably from the cheats and codes pages of your favourite gaming magazine.

The thing that really made me start thinking about this was the recent blowup over Starcraft II players being banned from the game for life for using hacks and trainers in the game’s single-player campaign mode and Blizzard’s threats of legal action against some of the people responsible for developing them.

I’ll get back to that later but in the meantime, what’s changed?  At what point did we decide that, actually, we don’t like cheats any more?

(more…)

Last month over at Gamer Limit, editor Josh Quinnett laid out a detailed list of things he’d do for Blizzard to secure himself a StarCraft 2 Beta key.  Among the humdrum promises (firstborn child, finish coding Duke Nukem Forever, etc..), Josh also promised a fair few audacious things, such as giving up drinking on weekdays before noon, and only if he was alone (something I could never do).  Lo and behold, an email drops in a little later from Blizzard:

When we were checking out your site, we noticed one of your writers, Josh Quinnet, posted about the 20 things he would do for a beta key.

So, if you would like to give him a key, we would like photographic evidence of the following:

Josh eating a grapefruit covered with Jif peanut butter while watching Flavor of Love with his StarCraft II tattoo showing [drawn of course...]. Both seasons would be preferred, but I guess we could settle with season 1.

-Blizzard, world leading in calling people out

Well not one to back down from a challenge, or to be denied the opportunity of securing a StarCraft 2 Beta key, Josh went ahead and did just that.  Read the chronicle here.

It certainly ups the ante for any of us poor chumps who have just entered the key lottery normally.  Bravo, young man, bravo!