My game cheat story starts way, way back, playing Wizardry on the Apple II. In this game, you go through a dungeon, killing monsters and collecting treasure and experience. Fun, but slow going. So I found out where in memory these values are stored and started manipulating them, giving myself tons of experience and new treasures.

Everything went fine until I put in an invalid treasure value which apparently caused some random memory locations to be modified, corrupting the game. Unfortunately, game state was written back to the same floppy disk that holds the game itself, rendering the game unplayable.

Fortunately, I could borrow a second floppy drive, borrow an uncorrupted copy of the game, and repair the game with a disk-to-disk copy. Unfortunately, I plugged in the disk drive connector crooked, sending -12 volts into a chip on the controller board that didn't want -12 volts. The result was a "pop" and a disk controller that no longer worked. Needless to say, my father wasn't happy.

Finding the problem was easy - it was the chip with a square hole blown out of it where the silicon had vaporized. Unfortunately getting a replacement chip wasn't easy when you live in the middle of nowhere. So I built a replacement circuit on a solderless breadboard and wired it into the controller board, and everything worked fine until I could get the proper replacement chip.

TL;DR: cheat at games and you will be punished