Have you ever cheated in a video game?

Well be careful because some game developers don’t look too kindly on cheaters and have been known to punish them in sometimes cruel, but hilarious ways. The more cruel games like Banjo-Kazooie will straight up erase your save file, not before giving you a warning though so that’s kind of them. One of the more light hearted punishments is from a more recent but super popular indie game, Undertale by just calling out the player for being a “dirty hacker” before just ending the conversation.

Punishments for cheaters.

Punishments for cheating are not a recent thing either, one of the first games to punish cheaters was the Zelda series. There is a shop in Link’s Awakening where you can pick up the items without paying. If you can trick the shopkeeper into looking away, you can even sneak out of the building with your stolen goods. However, you’ll be branded a thief. Try to return and the shopkeeper will instantly smite you. This is another example of a more lighthearted and even fun punishment. Some punishments can even be annoying but kind of fun, like Animal Crossing where if you cheat Resetti pops up and talks for nearly three minutes and the more you see him the worse he gets, by the fourth time you encounter him in Animal Crossing: Wild World, he actually makes you type out an apology with the correct punctuation, capitalization, and spelling. If you get it wrong, he makes you repeat it until it’s correct. He's like an English teacher of our collective nightmares.

So the next time you're thinking of cheating, think again you might get a fun and interesting punishment, an annoying punishment or just have your game instantly wiped.