A trainer is a set of cheats added to a game by someone other than its authors: infinite lives, infinite energy, no time limit. On a cracked release it usually ran before the game, asking the player which cheats to switch on. For a cracking group it was part of the product. A release with a trainer was better than the same crack without one, and groups marked it in the title, so a crack listed as Turrican +6 promised six options.
The cheats themselves were simple. A game keeps its lives count somewhere in memory and subtracts one when the player dies; a trainer finds the instruction that does it and stops it. The craft lay in the finding. Ian Osborne, once of the cartridge maker Datel, described the method its Action Replay automated: freeze the game, die on purpose, freeze again and look for every value that had gone down by one, repeating until only one was left.
A word for practice
In commercial games the word had an older, plainer meaning: a practice mode. Penetrator, Melbourne House’s cavern game for the Spectrum, opened on a menu of “play, train or create”. CRASH thought “the trainer mode is a welcome innovation”: the caverns were complicated, and it was “very useful to be able to acquaint oneself with the layout”, though the reviewer warned it would “take you many many hours of play on the trainer before you get anywhere near proficient”.
Crackers added them
Retro Gamer’s 2005 history of the demoscene puts trainers at the point where cracking groups began competing on more than speed. Within hours of getting hold of a game, it says, “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”. Some went further, “removing bugs from commercial releases, so as not to have the inherent faults tarnish their hard earned reputations”.
Magazines of the time noticed. Reviewing ReadySoft’s Dragon’s Lair in May 1989, the Italian MC Microcomputer mentioned “the diabolical trainer” put together by “various groups of European hackers/crackers”, which carried the player with infinite lives along the whole route from the drawbridge to the princess.
Trainer-making was a 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”. The CSDb database of Commodore 64 releases lists “Trainer” as a credit of its own beside “Crack”, and its catalogue is full of the plus-sign titles: Turrican +6, Turrican II +7, Turrican +9. Sega Retro describes the convention as one plus sign “for each option in the trainer”; later trainers, it adds, wrote a single “+” and a number.
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)”. In his account a trainer was also a tool for the cracker. Cadaver, which he cracked in October 1990, used five of Rob Northen’s Copylock checks, one for each level, each with extra hidden code, and “I also had to make a trainer (cheat mode) to allow for proper testing of all levels”. Protection that only showed itself late in a game was hard to crack because the cracker had to play to the end to test the result. He gives Dungeon Master as the example: the game took months to complete, so its crack took months to test. The same protection on “a simple shooting game that could be fully tested in a few hours by adding an infinite lives trainer” would, he thought, have been cracked “within a few days or weeks”.
The word outside the scene
In 1989 a commercial game used the word in the scene’s sense, for its own cheat. The One‘s Silkworm players’ guide, in June 1989, gave the Amiga version’s built-in cheat: get onto the high-score table and enter SUMITA. “When the title screen returns, the word FREEPLAY will have been replaced by TRAINER. Infinite lives are now yours.” The Atari ST version had a different cheat, entered while the game loaded.
Then it went on sale. Datel’s Action Replay cartridge for the Amiga was advertised in CU Amiga in March 1990 with a “UNIQUE INFINITE LIFE/TRAINER MODE” that “allows you to generate more and even infinite lives, fuel, ammo etc”, “perfect as a trainer mode to get you past that ‘impossible’ level”. By the Mk III, advertised in Amiga Format in April 1992, it had become a “SUPER POWERFUL TRAINER MODE - now with DEEP trainer”. The cartridge froze the running game, so a buyer could do at home what a cracker did for a release.
Sources
- CRASH issue 5, June 1984, p. 109: Penetrator review; the “play, train or create” menu; “the trainer mode is a welcome innovation”.
- “The Scene”, Retro Gamer issue 22 (2005), pp. 96–97: crackers “weaving their presence into the games themselves by adding ‘trainers’ to their cracktro”; bug fixes; the shift from piracy to the cracktro.
- MC Microcomputer (Italy) issue 85, May 1989, p. 156, Playworld: Dragon’s Lair review, “il diabolico trainer messo a punto da vari gruppi di hackers/crackers europei”, with infinite lives.
- Chris Wilkins and Roger M. Kean, The Story of the Amiga in Pixels (Fusion Retro Books, 2017), pp. 84–85: n.o.m.a.d., “cracker, trainer-maker, and compact-maker for Slipstream-UK”.
- CSDb, search for “Turrican +” and release entry for Turrican +6 by Transcom and Twins, with separate “Crack” and “Trainer” credits (database, web, secondary). https://csdb.dk/search/?seinsel=releases&search=turrican+%2B
- Sega Retro, “Trainer” (community wiki, web, secondary): the trainer loading first and asking the player whether to cheat; one plus sign per option; the later “+” and a number. https://segaretro.org/Trainer
- Codetapper, “Zippy” interview (personal site, web, secondary): BBC hacking around 1986; Cadaver’s five Copylock checks in October 1990 and the trainer made for testing; Dungeon Master and the infinite-lives trainer for a shooting game. https://codetapper.com/atari-st/st-interviews/zippy/
- Phil King, “Cheat codes”, Wireframe issue 68, November 2022, p. 60: Ian Osborne on how the Action Replay found infinite lives.
- The One issue 9, June 1989, pp. 60–61: Silkworm players’ guide, “CHEATS NEVER PROSPER”, the ST and Amiga cheats.
- Datel Electronics, Action Replay advertisement, CU Amiga, March 1990: “UNIQUE INFINITE LIFE/TRAINER MODE”.
- Datel Electronics, Action Replay Mk III advertisement, Amiga Format issue 33, April 1992: “SUPER POWERFUL TRAINER MODE - now with DEEP trainer”.