One area of competitive games that has not lost ground due to the online poker explosion is video games. And about as long as video games have been around, so has cheating at video games. The first video games cheat codes were put in place for play testing purposes. Playtesters had to rigorously test the mechanics of a game and introduced cheat codes to make this process easier. An early cheat code can be found in the video game "Manic Miner," where typing the phone number of the developer, Matthew Smith, enables the cheat mode. From there, early video cheating was largely exploited by technology-orientated players due to the difficulty of early cheats. However, a cheat industry quickly emerged as gaming systems evolved, through the packaging and selling of cheating as a product. Cheat-enablers such as cheat books, game guides, cheat cartridges helped form a cheat industry and cemented cheating as part of gaming culture.
So what is the relationship of this video games cheating culture to the burgeoning poker cheat culture? Is there one? You bet, there is indeed one, and it is as clear as any Internet link from one site to another. As cyber-technology has dramatically increased this past decade in unbounded "exponentiality," many who came of age as video games cheaters then matured into online poker cheaters, and, I might add, the inverse of that it not true. Those cheats who evolved in the online poker cheating age do not generally crossover to become video games cheats...it's not as profitable!
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