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Do you recognize any of the above? If so, you may be part of a dying breed. Video games of yore used to be loaded with various hidden functions, known as cheat codes, which allowed the player power and flexibility which is near-unheard of in modern games. Enter the right combinations of buttons at the right time, and you could find your character loaded with all the items the game has to offer, able to walk through walls or invincible. Enter the wrong one and you could find yourself vulnerable to all sorts of digitized nastiness, or in some cases, turned into a chicken. Game designers started programming in cheat codes to allow them to better check over the features of the game during development (like the first code listed, the famous Konami code). As time went on, developers and programmers added codes which didn’t change the game itself, but changed textures, and the visual effects of the game, or just codes which insulted the player. This provided methods for the unsung heroes of the games, the coders, to reach out and interact directly with the people playing their games through hidden features and codes. There were websites and even print magazines devoted to revealing the latest codes for the newest games. Over the past decade however, the cheat code has faded into history.
