5 Hilariously Elaborate Ways Video Games Punished Cheaters

5 The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening: Stealing Leads to Harassment and Death

The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening featured a mechanic that made it incredibly easy to shoplift. You could walk into item shops, pick up whatever you wanted and run out without paying a single rupee (this same mechanic is featured heavily in real life).

To discourage players from stealing (despite giving them the ability to do so in the first place), the game would first scold you:

Then, your name would suddenly change from "PUSSYHAMMER" to "THIEF":

And finally, you would get shot in the face by a winged penis:

4 Afterlife: The Death Star Blows You Up

Afterlife was a SimCity-type game that put you in charge of building and maintaining heaven and hell, because for some reason LucasArts decided that this was an experience people would exchange money for. Souls enter your afterlife, and you have to construct buildings and roads for them, because apparently ghosts need to fucking drive.

The currency of the game was pennies, and at any time you wanted, you could type in a code to get a million of them. However, if you used the code too often, the Death Star would appear and moon-laser everything into dust:

This is literally the only reason to play this game.

3 Tomb Raider 2: Lara Croft Explodes

If for some reason you bought the first Tomb Raider to actually play the game instead of just to hide the cover underneath your mattress, you could enter a code at any time to instantly receive every weapon.

However, if you entered the same code in Tomb Raider 2: The Breast Sequel Ever, Lara Croft would fly apart like a Barbie doll in a burgeoning serial killer's bedroom, and each piece would burst into a taunting fireball.

Rockstar Games, the maker of Max Payne 3, came up with an interesting way to deal with all the players who hacked and modded the multiplayer mode to give themselves invisibility and unlimited health -- they are only able to play with each other and are not allowed in any other games.

Since the game has been plagued with hacking pretty much since day one, it's a safe bet that by now there are a few never-ending matches populated entirely by players with infinite health -- essentially tiny playgrounds full of kids playing cowboys and Indians, except they all refuse to be Indians and everyone has explosion-proof armor and/or is RoboCop.

1 The Konami Code

As we've mentioned before, the Konami Code is the most famous cheat input in video game history. It first appeared in Gradius and Contra, but has since been in countless other games, because as the Call of Duty and Guitar Hero franchises have proven, gamers love originality.

Once it became so ubiquitous, developers came up with ways to mess with anyone who tried using it. For example, enter the Konami Code in Gradius III and you get all weapons and power-ups -- and then promptly explode.

Using it in Manx TT turns your motorcycle into a sheep (video here).

And putting the code into Ratchet and Clank: Up Your Arsenal dresses one of the main characters in a tutu:

But arguably the best is Silent Hill 3, wherein use of the Konami Code turns one of the characters into a senile Alan Arkin showing up drunk for a Father's Day dinner:

J.F Sargent is a workshop moderator for Cracked and an absolute nobody on Twitter.