In 1992, you more options. Your friends could tell you for free, you could stumble on them yourself, or you could get them with a magazine or book (which you didn't necessarily have to buy, you could just flip through it at the store and memorize the cheats.)

Don't forget about dialing into the local BBS and trying to find cheats and tricks in text files.

In those days cheating didn't impact other players. This is why pay to win is a bigger problem now.

> you'd call the Sega Hotline on a premium phone number

I remember the ads for that but I've never met a single person who did that. (Or whose parents would be okay with it.) Cheat codes were either shared by word of mouth among friends or in magazines. Or you bought a game genie, but that was more for messing around with a game's mechanics than actual, blatant cheating.

In 2025, the "cheating" has become a business model