You may look at recent esport cheat fails on YouTube and say “Pfft… take me back to the simpler days without cheating”. We are sorry to burst your bubble, but gaming hacks can be dated all the way back to MS DOS. Here's a list of some obsolete hacks.
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Cheat books and gaming guides
Back in the days, folks would buy gaming magazines that actually told you ways to beat a certain level of a game. They also came with CDs that had cheat databases.
TenorBack in the days when cartridges were required to play a game, several bored gamers discovered that tilting a cartridge in a certain way could glitch out a game in hilarious ways.
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Cartridge Tilting
hitting Tab to highlight clickable objects
This is totally irrelevant these days because nobody plays flash games, but back in the days if you tapped on Tab, you could actually see the clickable objects in flash games. This was useful, especially in mystery games.
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Freeing up conventional memory
Remember gaming on MS DOS? When your system memory was limited to mere KBs, this was the way of making a game perform better. Think of it as a modern day task manager, except way riskier.
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Game Genie Cartridges
You may know of Codemasters as developers of official WRC and Formula 1 titles, but did you know that back in the 1990s, it made devices that attached to the end of NES cartridges and patched codes of a game to let you hack it? Gives a whole new meaning to Codemasters, right?
Wikimedia/ Kvpetr
Multiface
Given the storage limitations of 80s computers, there was no way to save your progress in games. In comes Multiface, a hardware peripheral that dumped a computer's memory to external storage. This allowed players to save their position by saving a loadable snapshot of the game.
Wikimedia/ Evan-Amos
Action replay
This was a cheating cartridge instead of an add-on accessory. Perks included infinite lives, invulnerability, one hit kills, infinite money… basically you could access god mode with this.