10 Most Famous Video Game Cheat Codes

Before the Action Replay and GameShark, the most popular way to bend the rules in a video game was via cheat codes.

By entering a certain phrase, passcode or sequence of button presses at a specific point in the game, you would suddenly find your playing experience to be very different indeed. More often than not, for the better!

That's not to say the practice of manually entering cheats into a game is totally dead and buried - but as you'd expect, it's the oldest and most elaborate ones that people really remember nowadays.

In its heyday of the late '80s to early 2000s, the humble cheat code was often that crucial lifeline you needed just to see a brutal arcade adventure right through to the end. Seriously, Dark Souls is nothing compared to how hard games like Rayman and Contra were.

And now, it's partly down to cheats like these that such games are so well remembered to this day. You may misplace your GameShark cartridge, but you'll never forget that old code you punched in to get past the level that gave you hell.

The Dark Forces series is some of gaming's best adaptations of the epic Star Wars universe. Starting as a Duke Nukem-esque first person shooter and gradually evolving into a wide-open, force-wielding slash-fest, the classic franchise is as well known for its addictive gameplay as it is for its legendary line of cheat codes.

To access these cheats, you first need to type in the code, 'helpusobi 1' - a reference to A New Hope - into the text bar. After that, the sky's the limit, with literally dozens of codes at your disposal.

There's 'god' for God Mode, of course, and 'give all' will, well...give you it all (weapons, health, ammo, you name it).

From Dark Forces II onward, force powers and lightsaber combat come into play, which adds a whole heap more on the cheat codes front. You can instantly max out your force capacity, learn new saber fighting styles before officially unlocking them...hell, you can even change the colour of your lightsaber!

So, if you fancy force-speeding straight through a level with bright orange lightsaber in one hand and lightning crackling out of the other, by all means go for it.