9 Of The Best Ever Cheat Codes From Classic Video Games

Doom is fondly remembered by gamers as the first classic shoot ‘em up ever available on PC, but it was also one of the trickiest. Killing aliens wasn’t always the easiest thing, and some levels were damn near impossible without God Mode. The cheat let players strut around with their health permanently at 100%, and made the whole thing a lot more enjoyable.

The tank cheat will be familiar to fans of the Grand Theft Auto series, but some of us took things a step further with the flying tank mode. It was achieved by combining the tank spawn code with the jumping car cheat on the earlier games. Point the gun turret backwards and keep firing and you’d soon be soaring around in your own flying death machine. Endless fun.

It’s pretty pointless as far as cheats go, but exploding Lara Croft was one of the cool quirks discovered in the Tomb Raider games series. If the player performs a number of actions (sidestep Left, Right, Left, step forward, step backwards, turn around three times, jump forward, and roll in the air if you were wondering) and Lara combusts in a huge ball of flame. We just hope it’s not replicated in the upcoming movie…

One of the coolest tricks you could pull in the Age of Empires game was to type in the code BIGDADDY if you were stuck in a tight spot. You’d instantly get a sports car appear on the screen, which was being driven by a guy holding a rocket launcher. It gave you one hell of an advantage, and it remains a favourite of strategy fans everywhere.

The Debug mode in Sonic was huge at the time, not least because it gave gamers the first opportunity ever to mess with the game’s code itself. By playing a load of tracks in the Sound Test menu, people could basically redesign the levels as much as they wanted. It might be pretty commonplace, but the chance to customize the game like this was groundbreaking in its time.

The Konami code is one of the most famous cheats there is, and worked on loads of games. Gaming aficionados everywhere will recognise the sequence ‘Up up down down left right left right BA Start’, which famously worked on the notoriously hard game Contra amongst others.

How do you make a great basketball game better? By making everyone’s head massive, of course. Type in the code, and you’d instantly transform your game into Space Jam, complete with cartoony looks and moved. It made slam dunking 100% more fun.

Talking of big heads, ‘DK Mode’ was also a revelation amongst fans of the N64 classic GoldenEye 007. Unlocked by completing the Runway mission in under five minutes, the code gave everyone huge heads and massive arms – which was a reference to one of the developers who had previously worked on the Donkey Kong games.

Mortal Kombat caused a lot of controversy back in the day, and all traces of blood were actually removed from the game following complaints from parents. However, players quickly worked out the Blood Code, which brought back the claret and meant you could enjoy the game in all its gory glory.