10 Most Ridiculously Difficult Video Game Cheat Codes
Cheating sure is hard work.
Surely the most unfortunate casualty of contemporary gaming is the death of cheat codes.
Prior to gaming's online revolution, cheats were extremely commonplace, allowing struggling players to get extra lives, skip tricky levels, and even try out some experimental gameplay features.
Anyone born before 1995 likely has a strong, nostalgia fondness for finding cheat codes in gaming magazines and spending entire days tinkering with them.
And while most cheat codes are nothing more complicated than a few button presses, there are those which didn't come quite so easy.
These 10 cheat codes represent some of the most ridiculous, even unfair demands that developers made of players who, let's face it, were probably already struggling to play the game.
To activate these ultra-useful cheats, players had to test every fiber of their gaming mettle with outrageous button-pressing sequences, passwords that ran several-dozen characters long, and instructions so absurdly specific as to be genuinely difficult themselves.
Many of these cheat codes took countless attempts to get right, and that's assuming you even persevered at all - nobody would blame you for giving up...
10. Level Select - Sonic The Hedgehog 3
Accessing Sonic the Hedgehog 3's level select cheat requires players to be at their most nimble-fingered, as while the code itself is extremely simple, the time window for entering it is brutally short.
After the opening Sega logo fades, you've got less than two seconds to enter the following sequence: Up, Up, Down, Down, Up, Up, Up, Up.
It's only eight straight-forward commands, but you've got literally a fraction of a second to perform each button press and complete the sequence in time.
If you do it correctly you'll hear the series' iconic ring chime, though considering that the Mega Drive/Sega Genesis controller wasn't the most precise of peripherals at the best of times, even the most mild deviation from Up or Down would result in the code failing to register.
Kids the world over have wasted hours of their lives trying to get this damn cheat working.