Nick Shaffner's "Cheat-O-Matic"

From Nick Shaffner's .plan file:

Well, earlier this week, several people (65+ I've heard) were using the 'Cheat 'O Matic' utility I wrote to do some serious cheating on Sierra's online game "The Realm". The cheaters in question were able to use Cheat 'O Matic to give themselves a huge amount of negative manna, and indirectly convert it into enormous sums of gold. Anyway apparently this had the effect of decimating the Realm's virtual economy, and Sierra had to shut it down on Tuesday to fix the problem. I had actually warned Sierra about this potential problem shortly after the Realm's initial release (not wanting potentially malicious Cheat 'O Matic users to destroy an otherwise nifty multiplayer game), but the online GM ignored my warning and promptly banned me from the Realm. Well, at least I tried... In any case, soon after Sierra had fixed the bug, I found that Geocities had canned the Cheat 'O Matic site, stating that they reserved the right to boot 'anyone for any reason' - hmmm..... Luckily, George was kind enough to let me use the company web site as Cheat 'O Matic's new home, so look for it up there in a few days.

You can read more about the incident in the Realm's online newspaper here: http://www.public.usit.net/nrspears/news.html (See the 3/3/98 and 3/2/98 entries)

What exactly is "Cheat 'O Matic"? Here's some info from Nick about the program:

Cheat 'O Matic is an extremely easy to use universal cheating program designed to allow you to automatically cheat on any game (or other program) that will run on Windows '95, '98 or 'NT (including DOS, Windows 3.1, Windows '95, Windows '98 and Windows 'NT games) - and do so as the game actually runs! Additionally, Cheat 'O Matic allows you to cheat on programs that don't have cheat codes, or in completely different ways that cheat codes may not exist for, and perhaps the game's programmers never intended.

Cheat 'O Matic is a freeware and automatic cheating program for *any* DOS/Windows game. It runs under Windows 95/98/NT along side your favorite game, and allows you to easily (no hex here) modify ANY value in the game - as the game runs!

You can now download Nick's "Cheat O Matic" program from our downloads page, or direct from this link.

Posted by Joe Siegler on March 9, 1998 at 1:00 PM | Permalink
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