Get Chitcode

The Konami Code (up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A, Start) was and still is used in several games made by Konami. The first time was in the NES game Gradius, where it gave your ship every powerup available. Another was Contra, where it gave you 30 lives.

Sometimes, cheat codes are purposefully included in games by the first-party developers who created them. Other times, they're inserted through third-party software after a game's been produced. Moreover, it isn't always intentional. Gamers have discovered unintended “codes” by exploiting bugs in a game's software.

What is the most famous cheat code/exploit in gaming history? Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A, (Select), Start. Konami used that so often, it became known as the “Konami code.”

Some modern titles all have cheat codes in some capacity, which give the player an upper hand. The ethics of using them are debatable, but as long as they don't interfere with someone else's enjoyment of the game, then it shouldn't be the worst thing in the world to use them.

What gamers call "cheat codes" are usually commands created intentionally by the game creators for testing purposes during production. There's no reason to remove them once the game is done, so when its released people will dig around "under the hood" as it were to find them.

Early cheat codes weren't really cheat codes at all—they were developer tools. In the early years of the gaming industry, developers baked cheat codes into games as a way to jump from level to level while beta-testing, Dustin Hansen, author of Game On!, told Popular Mechanics.

Cheat codes are usually activated by typing secret passwords or pressing controller buttons in a certain sequence. Less common activation methods include entering certain high score names, holding keys or buttons while dying, picking up items in a particular order and otherwise performing unintuitive actions.