Supaplex – first time I cheated in a computer game

Supaplex.

It was somewhere in the mid 90’s, maybe around 1995. My friend Yuval had the game on his 286, running Windows 3.11.

I don’t remember how exactly we got to it, but at some point Yuval opened the folder of the game. I noticed there’s another file there.

I remember being hit with the realization immediately – the game has to save our progress somewhere, it must be in a file.

I asked to open the other file in notepad, being about 10 I didn’t know anything else. The file looked mostly full of spaces, with some gibberish here and there – nothing I could read, but clearly something. Having no clue what I’m seeing, I just typed a bit on the keyboard, saved the file, and exited.

We went into the game, and lo and behold, suddenly some levels, previously locked to us, were now available to play.

On that day I realized something deep about computers and information – it is, therefore it is somewhere.

I didn’t really play the game again after that. It’s not what the creators of the game had in mind, but that was it for me – I had finished the game.