Finding the cheat codes
GAME GTA III / RELEASED 2001 / FORMAT PS5, PS4, PS2
23 GTA III arrived at the dawn of the internet as we know it. While it was possible to find information about games online, Google was primitive, and cheats travelled more often by word of mouth and playground rumour (and the little covermounted books given away with our predecessor mag). The aim wasn’t so much to overcome or circumvent Rockstar’s challenges, but to extend the longevity of a game that had already carried us through long summer school holidays. There was still further entertainment to be wrung from GTA III’s sandbox and systems – they just needed a little tweaking.
‘Cheat’, really, was a misnomer: there was no advantage to turning every car invisible (if anything, it made crossing the road much more dangerous), and exploding all vehicles in the vicinity was often a recipe for instant death. These were just fun modifiers that pushed the faders of Rockstar’s world to extreme levels. We’d marvelled at GTA’s realism, and so it was a treat to see it warped into absurdism. Some of us even spent so long playing the game in fast forward that it never felt quite right again at normal speed, as if we were astronauts returning to Earth.
BLOW HARD
One favourite was the tank cheat that saw heavy armour literally drop, with a thud, from the sky. You could set your wanted level to full, then arm yourself with infinite ammo in anticipation of the coming war. Best of all was the set of codes that randomly armed pedestrians and set their AI to aggressive. Suddenly, Liberty City was in the grip of a proto-Purge, in which sex workers packed flamethrowers and OAPs carried M16s as if they were canes.
There was something special about activating cheats on PS2 in particular: while our cousins on PC were typing in comedy phrases, we were inputting arcane sequences of buttons like they were secret ciphers. We would pass a pad to a friend with a strong capacity for rote learning, and wait for the magic to happen. And, of course, this was forbidden territory – nobody activated the hidden limbpopping gore mode without a quick glance over the shoulder to check there were no parents or guardians in the room.