ABACABB is actually a nod to Genesis, the Phil Collins-fronted British rock band that shares the same name as the Sega system.Ī cheat code can also be useful for your resume. These codes often held personal meaning for their developers as well. And as Pickford mentioned, feature select cheats like Mortal Kombat's ABACABB code served as the game's blood and gore toggle.

Some were left in release versions by accident.'Įnabling developers to effectively jump to any point in the game also saved countless hours of work during testing and debugging, hence the Sonic the Hedgehog level select cheat (hold A, press up, down, left, right, and once the chime sounds, hit start). 'We tended to have fairly simple user interfaces in games back in the 8-bit days – no pages of menu screens where we could add a cheat list – so a cheat code on the front end was often used as an easy way for testers to get to different parts of the game quickly, or try out different features. 'A lot of the time they were put in for testing,' Ste Pickford, one of the developers for Solar Jetman, Plok and Equinox, told Red Bull in 2014. It was added to 1985's Gradius for the NES by the game's developer, Kazuhisa Hashimoto, who found the game to be too difficult during its debugging phase. The Konami Code (up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A, start) is perhaps the most well known cheat code in gaming history.

It's no different in the modern era of online and console gaming - some of the most iconic cheats in videogame history were put there by the person making the game itself. Whether it's rolling weighted dice, counting cards, or hip checking pinball machines, you can bet your bottom dollar that if there's a game of chance, someone's working to work the odds in their favor. For as long as we've played games, there have been players willing to break the rules in order to win.

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