We have now written up 3,337 cheat codes across 495 games. That is enough work to leave a shape behind, and the shape is worth publishing — including the part of it that is about us rather than about games.
Here is every game we have documented, grouped by the decade it was released in.
| Decade | Games | Codes | Codes per game |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1990s | 66 | 384 | 5.8 |
| 2000s | 211 | 1,198 | 5.7 |
| 2010s | 209 | 1,697 | 8.1 |
| 2020s | 8 | 52 | 6.5 |
Two hundred and eleven games from the 2000s. Eight from the 2020s.
What actually changed
The typed cheat code — DNKROZ, IDDQD, rosebud — was a feature developers put in deliberately, often for their own testing, and left in because it cost nothing. Three things took it away.
Games went online. A code that makes you invulnerable is harmless alone and unacceptable against other people. Once a game has any multiplayer component, the cheat menu becomes a liability, and the safest thing to ship is nothing at all.
Achievements arrived. Once progress became something a platform recorded and displayed, a cheat stopped being a private matter. Most games that kept a console now switch achievements off the moment you open it — which is a compromise, and a fair one.
Cheats became a product. The things a cheat code used to do — extra currency, skipping a grind, unlocking early — are frequently sold now. A developer with a storefront has an obvious reason not to give the same thing away in a text box.
Where cheats did survive
They did not vanish. They moved.
The 2010s column is the largest in codes despite having fewer games than the 2000s — 1,697 codes across 209 games, against 1,198 across 211. That is because the games that kept cheating alive are the ones with real developer consoles rather than typed codes: grand strategy, survival, sandbox, city builders. Stellaris, Hearts of Iron IV, Crusader Kings, Cities: Skylines, Factorio, Valheim, Subnautica. A console has dozens of commands where a typed code list had five.
The single largest page on this site is Skyrim, with 25 commands. The largest from the 1990s has five.
The part that is about us
Eight games from the 2020s is a real number and a misleading one if we leave it there.
Our rule for writing a page is that we have to be able to vouch for the exact string. That is much easier for an old game with a documented console than for a recent one, so our own method pushes the count toward older games. Some modern titles almost certainly have cheat systems we have not been confident enough to write up.
The catalogue makes the same point from the other direction: we hold 57,029 indexed game pages, and 495 of them have cheats. Under one per cent. Most of that gap is because most games genuinely have nothing to document — but not all of it.
So the honest version is: cheats did decline sharply, the decline is real and has clear causes, and the specific figure of eight is ours as much as it is the industry's.
What we do about it
Every code here is published as reported working — taken from the game's own documentation and community reports — and upgraded to tested, with the month, only once somebody here has entered it and watched it happen. At the time of writing, 8 of the 3,337 carry that date.
That ratio is not something to be proud of, and we would rather print it than round it up. It is also the only part of this that no one can copy from us: a list of codes can be lifted in an afternoon, and a record of which ones somebody actually ran cannot.
