I have a confession to make: I have never played a Grand Theft Auto game without cheating my way through it. I knew the code to unlock every weapon in GTA 3 so well at the time that I’m confident I could input it on muscle memory alone if you put a controller in my hand. I have no clue how the intended progression plays out in any given game. I’ve always had a bazooka within moments of starting a save file.
If that sounds like a gaming sin, know that I’m a product of my generation. Back in the 2000s, when GTA was on a PlayStation 2 hot streak, cheat codes were very much part of the experience. I didn’t know a single person growing up who played through a GTA story as intended. Instead, my teenage pals exclusively played it as a sandbox shooting range. While that means that many kids of the era perhaps missed out on Rockstar’s brand of American satire, those cheats taught us to appreciate the pure craft of an open-world video game that begs to be dissected.
Here’s what a standard GTA session looked like for me back in the early 2000s. A friend and I would sit down at a PS2 and take turns trading off the controller. The goal was to see how long one of us could survive on a killing spree, aiming to achieve a five-star wanted level. It was almost like a competitive roguelike. We’d start each run by entering the All Weapons cheat (R2, R2, L1, R2, Left, Down, Right, Up, Left, Down, Right, Up) and then get to work with a full arsenal. Even as I got old enough to appreciate Rockstar’s storytelling, this was still my introduction to GTA 5 as an adult.
Was it a shallow and childless way to play? Sure, in some ways. Behavior like this is no doubt why GTA became such a point of moral panic in the 2000s. If my mom walked in on me playing, she’d see me exploding waves of cop cars with no goal in mind. It was brainless violence and I couldn’t get enough of it. But the older I’ve gotten, the more I’ve come to accept that as a valid way to experience GTA.
What’s so impressive about Rockstar’s open-world games is how truly alive they feel. It never feels like the world is operating on scripted events and cycles. Drivers have a mind of their own, and will react to chaos accordingly. Vice City is an ant farm. You’re there to run experiments on the city, poking and prodding at the environment to see how everything reacts. Any time I lined up a traffic jam of stolen cars and let a rocket loose into it, it came from a place of genuine curiosity. I wanted to see how the game would handle the situation, because the answer was always exciting.
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In that context, cheat codes became important tools for experimenting in the sandbox. Having all weapons unlocked was a must, but there were plenty of other codes that were necessary in my toolkit. Of course, I needed to spawn a tank every once in a while to see how the cops would deal with it. I couldn’t resist messing with pedestrian behavior, turning them all against one another. And the flying car cheat was a must to really put the physics engine through its paces. Every cheat could reveal something new about how Rockstar creates emergent moments from criss-crossing gameplay systems.
The culture of cheat codes has changed significantly in games since those days. Virtually no modern games have built-in cheats that let you play with the world like Silly Putty. (Dating myself again here.) That’s now reserved for modders and PC players who understand how to mess with the command console in an Elder Scrolls game. Experimentation has fallen to the wayside as developers seem more guarded about letting players break their games. Games are even regularly delayed these days to ensure testers can catch as many bugs as possible, lest an imperfect product be let loose into the world.
But some games are meant to be broken. When I play GTA, I’m there as much as a student as I am a player. I want to study Rockstar’s craft and appreciate how intricate it all is. I wish I could do that in more games. The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom features an astounding combination of systems that practically turn it into an immersive sim, but I don’t always feel like I’m able to push it to its limits. It takes a lot of time to grind out the Zonai parts needed to create the machine-powered kaiju of my dreams. It’s a shame that there’s no way to dial up a code that lets me spawn in as many parts as I want and freely build. There’s so much about that game I want to understand.
By contrast, I know GTA 3 inside and out. I know how NPCs will react to the various degrees of chaos I create for them. I know how to manipulate traffic patterns. I know what lengths the cops will go to try and halt my rampage. And with all of that comes an admiration for the science of game design, something that’s so often closed off to players in tightly controlled environments.
This is all to say, of course, that I hope Rockstar continues its history of cheat codes in GTA 6. When I watched the recent 26-minute look at the game, all I could think about was the tests I wanted to run once I was let loose in the world. The extended trailer shows Jason shooting at a helicopter from the back of a car. Cool, but what would happen if you fired a rocket at it instead? I want to know that answer on day one.