If it's completely unrelated (like the flight sim in Microsoft Excel, or the special room in the Atari 2600 Adventure cartridge) then it's an Easter Egg, but not a cheat code.Ī few cheat codes have become so well known that you can expect to see homages in modern games. To deter video game magazines from publishing the codes in cheat sections, some British computer games used cheat codes containing profanities.Ī cheat code is a beneficial-in-game Easter Egg. Where cheat systems had access to full alphabetical input, the codes were often based on Development Gags or pop-culture Shout Outs. Even after cartridges were replaced by CD-ROMs as the main video gaming medium, cheat codes remained popular. Since cartridge-based games used fixed memory locations, removing these backdoors after development was problematic (since their removal could lead to new unexpected bugs), so they were often left in for released versions. These are typically backdoors inserted during programming to facilitate testing by the designers. A Cheat Code is a sequence of commands which turns on an undocumented, advantageous feature within a game.
