I'm not telling you to wreck a good relationship or risk expulsion from school, but under the right circumstances cheating can feel so damn good. By 'under the right circumstances' I mean 'when playing video games' because my wife reads this stuff and there's no need to cause her any further anxiety that my ferocious good looks are dropping panties left and right. While there's something to be said for plugging in a Game Shark or Pro Action Replay, the type of cheat code I'm looking at in this article is built into the game, not accessed via secondary hardware. So I spent a few solid hours playing with myself [note: reword this before pressing 'POST'] and here are the results. Codes made this list for unlocking things you wouldn't normally get during play, fundamentally changing how the game worked, or broadening the scope of what we experienced as gamers. Things like holding down A+B and pressing Start to continue in Super Mario Bros., or entering 'ZELDA' as your name in The Legend of Zelda to access the second quest are useful, but hardly life-changing. Also: no glitches -- if it wound up in the game because of a coding mistake, it might be fun, hilarious, or cool, but it doesn't count. The following codes, on the other hand, rewrote the gaming rule books. I'm offering them in no particular order, but you can fight over which one was best (or why I'm a turd wrangler for leaving out your favorite) in the comments. Speaking of fighting...
Mortal Kombat, if you believed the reports of frightened media outlets and Connecticut Congressmen, was poised to usher in an apocalypse where hostile youths would suddenly beat one another to death for no good reason. Was Mortal Kombat violent? What part of that two-word title is unclear? Did it use that gore to set itself apart from it's biggest rival, Street Fighter II? You bet your forcibly-extracted spine it did! To kids in the arcade, Mortal Kombat was just the next obvious evolution in a genre suffused with violence from the start: you're already uppercutting the other guy into the clouds, so why not drop him into a spike-filled pit on the way down? That there would be a home version was obvious; how that home version would pan out was where things took a turn for the tricky. Video game ratings didn't exist except in the loosest sense, like iD Software publishing Wolfenstein 3D with a voluntary rating of PC-13 for 'Profound Carnage', which was more joke than load-bearing warning label. Things came to a head when Nintendo and Sega promised home versions of Mortal Kombat would be sanitized from the slaughter depicted in the arcade original.
...one company was willing to break that promise, and in doing so single-handedly changed the entire home video game industry.
Nintendo president Hiroshi Yamauchi was serious about the company's commitment to keeping excessively violent games out of the living room. Sega on the other hand made that promise with fingers crossed behind its back. Oh sure, the Genesis version shipped in a 'look, parents: no blood!' mode just like its Super NES counterpart, and if you didn't know any better you'd put up with the same sweat and altered finishing moves. There was one minor-but-significant difference in Sega's version: the Code ('Kode'?) Screen.
This appeared every time you turned on the game. The screen mentions 'ethics' and 'honor', but don't you get the sense that wall of text is messing with your head? That was kind of the point. Plug in the cheat code from above before the screen faded and things got interesting:
Huh...those letters just turned red. What else might be red and found in Mortal Kombat, I wonder?
While the screen teases the possibility of some kind of secret code hidden in the game, Probe Studios who developed Mortal Kombat for the Genesis made damn sure it was the worst-kept secret in video gaming history. Didn't matter which magazine you picked up off the newsstand...with the exception of Nintendo Power, the cheat code section of every 'zine from EGM to Video Games and Computer Entertainment leaked the blood code before the game reached stores. The result was a fatality of a completely different kind. The Genesis Mortal Kombat outsold the Super Nintendo version at a rate of three-to-one, a victory so flawless that Nintendo abandoned their censorship policy for the release of Mortal Kombat II, fearing a repeat of the ass-kicking it suffered the first time around. It takes one badass cheat code to force a company the size of Nintendo to go back on its word, but that's exactly what happened on September 13th, 1993 thanks to seven little letters based on the title of a prog rock album.
You can't discuss Mortal Kombat without bringing up Doom, since they've both been blamed for everything from the 1999 Columbine High School shooting to an increase in "hitting, hurting, and thumping" on school playgrounds. We can debate whether or not violent video games contribute to a more violent society until the cows come home, but there's no denying Doom pushed buttons society would have preferred be left alone. Building on the framework of their earlier Wolfenstein 3D, iD Software created a world more realistic and immersive than any previously seen on screens connected to DOS-based PCs. Once they had this world, they populated it with more mutilated bodies, glaze-eyed husks, and inverted pentagrams than a Rob Zombie concert. People, not shockingly, took notice. Doom is the story of a lone marine tasked with cleaning up the aftermath of a shit-storm he had no hand in creating, meaning our nameless protagonist carries the rank of Lance Corporal (that's basically all you guys do every day from what I've read. Semper Fi!).
...it introduced a generation of gamers to 'Degreelessness Mode' and how fun it could be, by turning this:
...into this:
Look, not even John Romero can explain what the hell "degreelessness mode on" meant. It was a nonsense message thrown on the screen to show the cheat code had been entered properly, even though the only people that word should matter to are flunking out of college. It sounds infinitely more intelligent and refined than what we plebeian masses started calling it ("God Mode") though, so I guess there's that.
Doom didn't invent the invincibility cheat, but it was the first game to make it so darn simple to activate that even spreadsheet-making keyboard jockeys of the business world could figure it out. Before Doom, making your character an unkillable badass usually required hacking the game's code--computer magazines often published lists of POKEs or other machine language commands for popular titles that would perform this function. Wolfenstein 3D simplified this by requiring players to add the ' -goobers' parameter when executing from DOS, then hitting Tab + G while in-game. Doom just took the next logical step, which was to let players make themselves immortal with the press of five simple keys while right in the thick of the action, and gamers with nothing better to do have been dick-punching Cyberdemons ever since.
Street Fighter II: The World Warrior was a monstrous arcade hit, so it wasn't a matter of 'if' as much as 'when' Capcom would bring it home. With eight different fighters to choose from, each requiring a different mindset to use effectively (not to mention a different move set to memorize), there was something for everyone...unless both of you wanted to play as the same character. When that happened, the result could be a real-life brawl instead of a virtual one, ending friendships, breaking glasses, and hurling insults guaranteed to get your ass grounded for the next two weeks if you don't quiet the hell down while mom is trying to sleep! (Your mileage on that last one may vary).
...it allowed players to finally settle the age-old question of who would win in a fight between Chun-Li and Chun-Li. Prior to Street Fighter II's release, nobody thought about same-character match-ups because that's just silly and something that couldn't happen in the real world. After all, when was the last time you saw Bruce Lee fight Bruce Lee, or Jean-Claude Van Damme fight--shit, never mind.
Players who input this sequence as the Capcom logo faded in during the start-up screen could do just that, pitting characters against one another in a mirror match to prove once and for all who had the fastest Hadouken in the living room. It didn't quite make up for the inability to play as the four boss characters, but Capcom brought this code back for Street Fighter II Turbo, where entering it on the second controller unlocks Mega Turbo Mode(!), allowing for fights even faster and more frantic than the highest speed level available during normal play. Damn near every fighting game since Street Fighter II has permitted same-character selection during a player-vs.-player contest, but this cheat code laid the ground work for such an important fighting game evolution.
North American gamers put this cheat to its most famous purpose to see the end of Contra, a game so Nintendo Hard it should have been illegal to sell to minors without a prescription, but it first found life in Gradius. Lore has it Kazuhisa Hashimoto, the man in charge of porting the arcade original to the Famicom, found the game too difficult to finish on his own. Since he literally had access to the source code, he did what any hard-pressed programmer forced to debug a difficult game did: coded this button sequence to supply him with a laser, missiles, a force field, and two option helpers if he input it while the game was paused. Hit start again and voila, he was ready to ruin the day of anyone opposing his little Vic Viper spaceship. When the programmers at Konami needed help to overcome Red Falcon's alien hordes, they turned to this code, which gives you 30 lives to start with, and another 30 every time you continue. That's 120 total lives for the lone rangers among you, or 240 lives if you brought along a friend, plenty for even the lamest kid on the block to reach the ending and hear that rocking credits track.
...there's no faster way to identify yourself as a permanent fixture of gaming pop culture than to reference this artifact from thirty years ago.
The Konami Code isn't just a series of button presses on a controller, it's a life hack in and of itself. You can find it printed on t-shirts. People tattoo it on their bodies. It does funky things on certain websites when you enter it. Even games and products made by people other than Konami have used this code (or minor variations to account for differences in button labels) to activate hidden options, show statistics, or just irritate the player. Some examples include:
So if you find yourself with a few hours to kill and nothing better to do, try it on some of your favorite games and see if anything neat happens.
Oh, hello there Lara Croft! How's it going? Nice of you to stop by the office. What's that? No, no, I'm a married man. I couldn't possibly--
WHOA! That's one hell of a birthday suit you brought, but mine isn't until October! Now put your clothes back on before my wife comes in here and gets the wrong idea about there being some kind of nude code in your earlier Tomb Raider titles!
Despite what's staring me in the face here, that's an absurd notion, isn't it? I mean, the box says it's got a rating of 'T' by the ESRB, and no nudity descriptor. Surely Core Design isn't foolish enough to hide something like that in the game, then not tell anyone about it! Surely gamers are smarter than that, right?
I said, "RIGHT?"
...despite not existing, it consumed the lives of untold numbers of people, launched a world-wide obsession, and resulted in skyrocketing the sales of an already best-selling title. Fox Mulder's desire to believe had nothing on these guys, and he had hands-on experience with the stuff he investigated.
Of course we're talking about the fabled Nude Code for the original Tomb Raider. Well, actually, the first Tomb Raider didn't have one, but the sequel did. Or maybe it was only for the PC version of the first two games, but the PlayStation got it with Tomb Raider III? Hell if I know, but one thing's for sure: horny, desperate nerds all over the world wanted to know what Lara looked like under that aqua lycra top and those short, short shorts. Even though programmers have torn through the game's source code and come up empty-handed, there are still those who, to this day, believe there's some way to part Lara from her wardrobe. Why did this rumor gain such traction, and how did it manage to last for so long? For fuck's sake, the game came out twenty-one goddamn years ago as of this coming October, and the rumor still circulates. How does such a thing persist? Well, let's chalk it up to one part 'wishful thinking', one part 'digital artists with a lot of free time', and one part 'desire to screw with people who truly deserve it'.
First, the wishful thinking bit. It's well known Lara acquired her top-heavy assets via a mistake made by 3D modeler Toby Gard when he was making some adjustments and 'accidentally' inflated her chest by 150%. A passing higher-up saw the error, told him not to fix it, and that was the character who would sell a million copies of the game. Lara's proportions might have been unrealistic, but there's no denying the allure of that packaging when it came to the 18-34 year old male demographics. It didn't hurt that Eidos's own marketing department was busy flooding magazines and the internet with official images of Lara that looked...well, kind of like this:
Lara teases at the end of the first game's tutorial level that she'd "better take off these wet clothes" as the screen fades to black, so it's not like Core wasn't dropping salacious hints on everyone who installed the game or anything...
As for 'digital artists with a lot of free time', it didn't take long for a fan site dedicated to depicting Lara in various degrees of undress to spring up. Dubbed "Nude Raider" (because of course it was), this site featured digital alterations of official artwork, and flew under the radar for months before one US gaming magazine published the URL in a sidebar and all hell broke loose. This spurred Eidos to legal action, a lawsuit which resulted in them taking ownership of the domain, and thousands of oversexed perverts flocking to alt.games.tombraider and alt.fan.lara-croft in search of the fabled nude code and those naughty, naughty pictures they'd read about in the pages of PC Gamer. This in turn leads to our third point, which neatly closes the triangle.
The newsgroups, which were mostly low-key and quiet with only a couple dozen regular posters, all of a sudden found their space flooded with hundreds of internet newbies and demented man-children demanding the nude code, and refusing to listen when the regulars calmly explained there was no such thing. When these new arrivals wouldn't take no for an answer, regular members constructed a variety of nearly-impossible or ridiculously time-consuming steps as ways of keeping the losers busy. ("Well, first have you have to beat the game twice in a row without saving or taking any damage. Then it gets kind of difficult...") That worked about as well as you can imagine. Core even built a gag into the second game to address the Nude Raider debacle...
...but to the hardcore devotees of the Cult Dedicated to Getting Video Game Characters Naked, this was nothing more than another cock-tease which brought a fresh round of idiots crawling out of the woodwork claiming that actually, no, they really hadn't see enough. Eventually the whole thing was resolved to everyone's satisfaction. I don't have time to get into it now, but you know what they say about keeping a fool in suspense, right?
Hey, don't worry about it! I'll tell you tomorrow.
(This piece was originally written by me for Retro Gaming Magazine, and has been edited for republication on Steemit. You can read the original here).
