Trainers

A trainer is a set of cheats patched into a game — infinite lives, infinite energy, no time limit — usually offered from a menu before the game starts. The word belongs to the cracking scene, where a group’s trainer was part of what made its release worth having, but by the end of the 1980s it was also on a commercial cheat cartridge’s feature list and inside at least one commercial game’s own cheat mode.

Fast facts

• Where the word is found: a Datel Action Replay advertisement (1992, “SUPER POWERFUL TRAINER MODE”); Silkworm‘s built-in Amiga cheat (1989, the title screen’s FREEPLAY “replaced by TRAINER”); crackers’ recollections of 1986-90; scene histories of 2005 and 2017.
• Who made them: crackers, as part of a release. The Story of the Amiga in Pixels lists “cracker, trainer-maker, and compact-maker” as Slipstream-UK’s roles for n.o.m.a.d. in 1990.
• The count: Sega Retro records plus signs after a trained game’s name, one per option — “Ms. Astro Chicken++” — and the later “+” plus a number. No period release list is held here to confirm it.

Crackers added them

Retro Gamer’s 2005 history of the demoscene puts trainers at the point where cracking stopped being only about copy protection. Within hours of a release, “crackers began weaving their presence into the games themselves by adding ‘trainers’ to their cracktro, providing players with the option of infinite lives during play, for example, or removing time limits. These trainers made cracked games all the more appealing to young players”. The same piece notes crackers “removing bugs from commercial releases, so as not to have the inherent faults tarnish their hard earned reputations”, and describes the competition shifting “from the pedestrian act of piracy to the extravagance of the cracktro”.

Trainer-making was a named job in a group. The Story of the Amiga in Pixels records that “In 1990, n.o.m.a.d., previously the main cracker, trainer-maker, and compact-maker for Slipstream-UK joined Scoopex”.

A cracker on why

Zippy, of the Atari ST groups Medway Boys and Cynix, told Codetapper that “By about ’86 or so I’d done a fair bit of hacking on the BBC myself (mostly tape to disk hacks, trainers and menus)”. His account of cracking Cadaver in October 1990 gives the trainer a second purpose beyond the player’s: the game checked Rob Northen’s Copylock separately on each level, so “I also had to make a trainer (cheat mode) to allow for proper testing of all levels”. A game that could be “fully tested in a few hours by adding an infinite lives trainer” was a game that would be cracked “within a few days or weeks”. The trainer was how the cracker proved the crack.

The count

Sega Retro’s description of the scene convention: the trainer “loaded first, asking the player if he/she wished to cheat”, and “trained games were marked with one or more plus signs after them, one for each option in the trainer, for example: ‘the Mega Krew presents: Ms. Astro Chicken++’”. The later form, a single “+” and a number, is the one this entry’s subtitle uses. That is a community wiki’s account; no cracktro or release list in the library shows the mark itself.

The word outside the scene

By 1989 the word had a commercial life. The One’s Silkworm guide, June 1989, describes the Amiga version’s built-in cheat: enter SUMITA on the high-score table and “the word FREEPLAY will have been replaced by TRAINER. Infinite lives are now yours.” Datel’s Action Replay Mk III, advertised in Amiga Format in April 1992, sold a “SUPER POWERFUL TRAINER MODE - now with DEEP trainer” that “allows you to generate more or even infinite lives, fuel, ammo”, next to a slow-motion mode and a freeze-and-restart — the cartridge doing for a buyer what a cracker did for a release.

See also

• Crack Intros
• Cracking Scene
• Action Replay
• Copy protection
• Skid Row
• Scoopex