TITLE
How Cheat Codes Vanished from Video Games
AUTHOR
David Craddock
PUBLICATION
Waypoint: Games By Vice
YEAR
2016
ARTICLE TYPE
Article
FROM THE ARTICLE
In September 1993, Dan Amrich raced home from Electronics Boutique and jammed his shiny new Mortal Kombat cartridge into his Sega Genesis. After the SEGA logo flashed on his screen, Amrich’s speakers pumped out heavy percussion as text describing three types of codes—ethical, honorable, and secret—engraved itself across a stony background. The last line caught his attention: Mortal Kombat adheres to many codes, but does it contain one?As a matter of fact, it did, and Amrich was one of a select few who knew about it.
Shortly after he began playing, his friend Carl called to tell him about a code he’d found on Usenet, an online bulletin board. Carl didn’t have a copy of the game, so he asked Amrich to try the code. At first, Amrich thought he was referring to ABACABB, a sequence of button presses in the Genesis version of Mortal Kombat that unlocked all the gory fatalities from the arcade version that had invoked the ire of U.S. politicians. Carl’s find was way better.
“Down, Up, Left, Left, A, Right, Down,” Amrich recited. “DULLARD opened a developer debug menu that let you not only toggle the blood on and off, but several other dev-test things, like making Reptile appear.”
[…]
In June 1997, Amrich landed his dream job as an editor at GamePro, and learned how and why codes like DULLARD came to exist in the first place.
GAMES MENTIONED
Diablo II
Gradius
Mortal Kombat (1992)
PEOPLE MENTIONED
Allen Anderson
Richard Aplin
Dan Amrich
David Brevik
Tristan Donovan
Scott Miller
ALTERNATE LINK
Archived Copy @ Internet Archive