Back in the days when I switched from the Game Gear over to the PC (with MS-DOS 6.22 and Windows 3.11 at the time), I was used to being able to cheat in games easily. Sometimes through codes in a game, but mostly due to the Action Replay Pro I had (an alternative to the Game Genie that was also very popular at the time). So I was pretty happy when I stumbled upon a little tool called “Game Wizard” that works very similarly to the Action Replay Pro, though a bit more advanced.

You’d basically run Game Wizard, then start the game and you’re able to switch to GW and back from anywhere in the game. This would also pause the game as long as you are mucking around with GW. Depending on what you want to cheat in the game, you could do different things: Search for specific values, search for changes in values (higher / lower / equal) which would narrow down the result list each time… after some iterations you’d usually have a specific result that you could add to your cheat list. Those cheats could then be individually switched on/off, modified and saved locally for re-use later on.

Games where I’d usually use GW were for example (business) sims like SimCity, to give me an unlimited budget, so I could just build freely and experiment around more. Less creative examples include X-Com: Terror from the Deep where at times I’d just give my units unlimited time units due to to the game’s difficulty. In general I used GW quite a bit during my DOS gaming days. But everything changed when the fire…. ahem…. cough when Windows came along (or rather, when I started playing more games on Windows). While there IS a version of Game Wizard for Windows, at the time I never got hold of that, instead I entirely stopped using external cheat tools. In retrospect I am not quite sure why, maybe the (for me) less convenient availability made me decide it was too much effort compared to just playing the games the “right” way, maybe I felt games at the time changed enough so I wasn’t so inclined to cheat… in any case this pretty much meant the end to that “chapter” for me.