8 Times Video Game Enemies Went Places They Shouldn't
5. The Debug Cheat - Sonic The Hedgehog 2
“19, 65, 09, 17”: numbers seared into the minds of super-fans of Sonic the Hedgehog 2.
Dropping this combination into the game’s sound test unlocked the level select menu, which is just one of a few codes that kept gamers coming back to the title to play it their own way.
The most bizarre of these was the debug cheat which turned one of Sonic’s many jump buttons into essentially God mode. With the debug, players could scroll through the vast majority of the assets loaded in for that particular stage and then could do whatever they saw fit.
Most of the time that means ploughing 50 rings down onto the zone enabling, in combination with the "all Emeralds" cheat, even the laziest player to transform into Super Sonic without all the faff of the special stages and blitz through every act in seconds.
If you were a bit of a maniac and wanted to construct some kind of wild and weird challenge for yourself though, the options available to you also include spawning any and all badniks. Suddenly you can give Emerald Hill Zone a flying, robo-fish populatation problem or cover Metropolis Zone in grasshopper robots and exploding starfish.
Almost like a precursor to Mario Maker, Sonic the Hedgehog 2 let us make even the most simple part of any stage a hellscape of badniks and spikes.