How well do you know classic videogame cheats? See if you can answer these 10 tricky questions
Want to keep testing your knowledge of gaming trivia? We've got loads more PC Gamer quizzes, on everything from healthbars to weird currencies to absurd patch notes.
My first job covering videogames was a mid-2000s internship at a website dedicated to cheat codes, tips, and walkthroughs. My job was to read the user submissions and determine which were genuine cheats or secrets, and which were schoolyard rumors, hoaxes, or insults that had been indiscriminately lobbed at me through an internet form because someone was bored and Twitter didn't exist yet.
As you can guess, I read a lot of "yo momma" jokes and not many legit tips, but I did go looking for corroboration of even outlandish claims, because you never knew. Back then, new games weren't immediately autopsied by dataminers, and their secrets weren't comprehensively catalogued on wikis and YouTube.
All we had were GameFAQs writers, official Prima guides, hearsay, and whatever we could verify directly. Now and then I wrote to publishers to ask if they'd just tell us if there were any cheats in their new game—sometimes they did!
The website I worked for is long gone, and cheat codes aren't nearly as big a thing as they used to be. I miss 'em! So here's a quiz dedicated to classic cheats, console commands, and secrets from the '90s through the 2010s.
Let us know how you did in the comments, and what some of your favorite videogame cheats and secrets are. Good luck!