It probably wasn't long after Pong machines made their way into local pubs that someone managed to cheat their way to victory. Since video games have been around, they have been synonymous with cheating, especially when it comes to online gaming. Their competitive nature and anonymous player representation allow for a lot of subtle (and not-so-subtle) rule-breaking to go unnoticed.
However, developers have learned how to fight back. Many now take steps beyond the standard security measures put in place to punish players who use pirated versions of their game, or who cheat in online matches. Even trolls who are just out to ruin everyone else's experience aren't safe from retribution. These anti-cheat systems are varied, but their punishments are often severe, and sometimes they're also hilarious.
9 Max Payne 3 - The Server Of The Guilty
Although it was primarily a single-player game, Max Payne 3 also featured a multiplayer mode where players could compete against each other. It was a bit of a surprise hit at the time, and as more and more players were jumping into online play, so too were cheaters. Modded games and aimbots were all too common in matchmaking.
Rockstar responded to this issue with a solution that removed known cheaters from the game while still ensuring their continued business. When a player was caught cheating, instead of being banned, they would be booted to an alternate server, one that was exclusively populated by other cheaters. This gave every cheater a hefty dose of their own medicine and very likely pushed many of them to quit playing of their own accord after spending a few matches in that nightmare.
8 The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt - Giant Cow Monster
Gold is important in The Witcher 3. It's also hard to come by. While most players are happy to earn their incomes by completing quests and hunts, some preferred to take the easy road. These players found an exploit where killing cows and selling their leather could earn them a good chunk of change. Just go to a farm, kill the cows there, have Geralt meditate for an hour until the cows respawn, and then kill them again. Simple.
The developers at CD Projekt Red didn't appreciate this exploit being used to ruin the pace of their game. Their solution? Patch in a high-level giant cow monster - known as the Bovine Defence Force - that would attack players after they killed a certain number of cows in a row. The cow monster is an extremely tough fight, one of the toughest in the game in fact. Soon, the beast became less of a deterrent as cheaters gave up their farming tactic, and evolved into a challenge for high-level players to hunt down and kill.
7 Ark: Survival Evolved - Locked In A Wooden Prison
This doesn't actually involve cheaters, but trolls; people who would rather ruin other players' time than enjoy sharing the game space with them. Trolling comes in many forms, but in Ark: Survival Evolved going around killing other players, taking their items, and destroying their camps is one of the worst things someone can do.
Not only did the developers design a solution to this, they actually explain how to do it in the game's FAQ. With very minimal resources, players can construct a wooden prison cell and lock the troll inside of it. Ark doesn't give players the option of killing themselves and respawning, so as long as the prisoner was kept fed they could be held in that cell indefinitely. 10 in-game hours locked in a tiny cell would make even the most devout troll rethink their choices.
6 Runescape - Bot Island
Runescape is a game that requires a ton of grinding to make progress. Farming for basic items to craft or trade up for better gear was an essential part of the game, and it often took forever. As such, players began building bots to do the farming for them while they left the game running on their PC and went off to do something else.
A solution to this was devised where players caught using bots were automatically sent to a region of the game called "Botany Bay" (a reference to a term once used for Australian penal colonies). These players were trapped on Botany Bay where they were put on trial and automatically convicted by the Botfinder General. After this, the more honest players in the server could vote on an appropriate punishment, with some options being feeding the bot to a giant worm or seeing them blown apart by a ray of divine light.
5 Slender: The Arrival - Nowhere Is Safe
First of all, who cheats in a horror game? The point of the experience is usually not to create an extreme challenge for the player but to establish an intense and foreboding atmosphere. Cheating the game completely ruins that. Anyway, some players discovered a building in Slender: The Arrival that they could climb on top of, allowing them to jump over the borders of the map and skip a large chunk of the game.
Before the game even got a full release, the developers had already plugged in a solution to this bug. If players jumped outside the map, instead of landing they would fall to their deaths instantly. Not only that, but they would be greeted by a vision of Slenderman and a message that reads "Not even a bug in this game will save you from me," followed by an eerie (and kind of painful) screeching sound before the player got to respawn. Sometimes, fear is the best tactic.
4 Gears Of War 2 - Bye Bye Gamerscore
The Gears of War series was hugely popular for Microsoft in the early Xbox days, being one of the few series that could rival the success of Halo. Gears of War 2 launched to massive sales numbers, and player counts quickly skyrocketed. Before long, some of those players found ways to cheat the game.
Specifically, players found a bug that allowed them to effortlessly unlock online achievements, giving them an unfair advantage in PvP matches. Microsoft's punishment was swift and severe. Any player caught cheating would not only have their Gears of War score reset, but they would also have their Xbox Gamerscore reset. Microsoft showed absolutely no mercy here.
3 Animal Crossing - The Resetti Lecture
Animal Crossing games are meant to take a long time. That's the point, they don't provide quick progress to a conclusion, they are intended to be slow and methodical. However, some players don't like that aspect and found a way to undo the choices they made by re-setting their file via exiting the game before it managed to auto-save.
When they returned, they would find a mole named Resetti outside their home. Resetti would then proceed to lecture the player about the unfairness of resetting their game. The more often the player did the reset exploit, the longer Resetti's lectures would be. In Animal Crossing: Wild World, he would even force players to type out a written apology. In the end, Resetti's presence in the franchise made saving time by cheating a futile effort.
2 Crysis Warhead - Chicken Guns
Piracy is a particularly big issue for PC games. While consoles are a much harder device to install pirated software onto, PCs are built for running all kinds of programs, and as such, hackers are able to crack game software and put it up for download with relative ease. Crysis Warhead had a built-in solution for such a problem.
Any player that was detected using a pirated copy of the game would discover that none of the guns they used would shoot bullets. Instead, they shot chickens. A lot of chickens, yes, but nonetheless harmless, non-damaging chickens. This would essentially render the game unplayable, forcing players to either step away or go buy themselves a licensed copy.
1 GTA 5 - Silly Hats And Exploding Cars
Cheats in Grand Theft Auto 5's single-player mode can not only be fun, they can become an integral part of the game. However, when those cheats bleed over into online play, Rockstar has taken a firm and punishing stance against it.
Players caught griefing - killing the same player over and over, or leaving team missions early - will be auto-equipped with a white gnome hat that reads "Dunce." The hat cannot be unequipped, permanently labeling that player for their behavior. Meanwhile, players exploiting a glitch that allows them to transport cars from their single-player save file into online play will find that those cars explode as soon as the player steps inside of them. Rockstar learned from their experience with Max Payne 3, and they made sure that online cheaters in GTA 5 were identified, shamed, and even punished for their actions.