Have you used a trainer back in the day? Did you prefer the “F1 God Mode” or the “NumPad 0: Super Jump”? Let me know in the comments below.

The golden age of trainers is over. Most download links from 2012 are now honeypots. Downloading a random .exe from a dead forum is a fantastic way to install a crypto miner or ransomware. The developers of trainers have largely moved on.

You can’t just join official MW2 multiplayer lobbies anymore. To play online today, most players use Istanbul (previously IW4x) or XLabs (currently offline due to legal issues). Those clients have their own anti-cheat systems. Old trainers won’t work, and they will get you banned instantly.

There’s a specific kind of nostalgia attached to Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (2009). The intervention quickscopes, the harrier jet streaks, and the utter chaos of “Rust” are permanently etched into the minds of a generation of FPS players.

But for the PC community, there was another layer to that memory:

The culture was strange: You had “hack vs. hack” lobbies where the winner was whoever had the more sophisticated trainer, and the rare “legit” lobbies where everyone agreed to play fair. Let’s be honest: The best use case for a trainer was (and is) Spec Ops .