10 Video Games That KNEW You'd Try To Cheat

6. Gradius III - The Konami Code Strikes Back

Gradius III ship explosion Konami code
Konami

The Konami Code is one of the most famous cheats of all time. It first rose to prominence in the 1980s, when developer Kazuhisa Hashimoto wanted to make his job of testing the NES port of Gradius (a Konami title) much easier. So, he created the code to give himself a full set of power-ups, allowing him to beat the game with ease.

From there, the code popped up in a whole host of other games - some of them not even associated with Konami - and its popularity meant that developers started to anticipate that their players would try to use it.

And this allowed them to have some fun with the effects of the code.

One of the best examples of this can be found in Gradius III on the SNES, where using it will actually blow up the player's ship. This effect can be bypassed by switching up a few of the inputs, but because the majority of players would obviously not know that, they would go ahead and type in the traditional Konami code, expecting some sort of cool buff... and watch their ship turn into a ball of fire.

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Contributor

Danny has been with WhatCulture for over ten years, and is currently Doctor Who Editor and WhoCulture Channel Manager, overseeing all of WhatCulture's Whoniverse coverage. In 2022, he took charge of WhoCulture and has grown it into the biggest Doctor Who channel on YouTube, and one of the biggest Doctor Who communities on the web full-stop. He has been writing and video editing since his early teens, and first got a taste for content creation after making his own Doctor Who trailers, off the back of a burning obsession with the Matt Smith era of the show. Like many his age, he first got into Doctor Who with the 2005 revival, but has since gone back and fallen in love with the classic years too. If you need someone to recite every Doctor Who episode in order, or to give you a random factoid about the making of Gridlock, Danny is the person to ask!