Oh, my depraved gaming youth
Ok, so back when I was but a wee young Dylan, I (as most young people did) owned a Sony Playstation. I owned a great many games, so at one point, I decided to start keeping them in a CD binder. I have recently started thinking about some of the games of my past so I decided to dig up the old binder and give it a good once-over. As I scanned through, I noticed something that reminded me about how absolutely immature 15 year olds (and, much more interestingly, game developers) can actually be.
(Pre-Warning! Parts of this story contain dirty language. Sorry, it is necessary to tell the story.)
The year was 1998, and I had purchased a game called Machine Hunter, a fairly middle-of-the-road, top-down, shooter. The game itself wasn’t terribly complex, wander through mazes, find keys, rescue hostages, find the exit. The hook of the whole experience was with the titular machines. Throughout your adventure, you come across various machine like enemies, all with new and interesting weapons. As you defeat these enemies, you can take them over and use their weaponry to complete your mission. All in all, pretty fun for the time, but really doesn’t hold up these days.
But you folks don’t want to hear about that analytical sounding nonsense, you wanna hear swears, gosh darn it! Well, all right, I will move on.
As I said, the game is pretty straight forward and anyone armed with a password or two could get through it in about a week, tops. Now, since I was all of 15 years old and I didn’t have much money, I had to replay games several times until I could afford new ones. Since I had done this many times with Machine Hunter already, my friends were, rightly, sick to death of it. This lack of amusement lead us to create what I now like to call the “Guess the Password” game.
This game (as most did at the time) contained a password feature. This particular password containing 10 letters, numbers, symbols or spaces. Now most of the passwords were your typical fare, random smatterings of code to push you to the last level (QQDNIDEAIQ) or, if you needed help there were cheat codes that were sillier, more sensical phrases (2UNLIMITED, for example, will get you unlimited weapon upgrades). As I said before, I had pretty much explored everything that this game had to offer, so my friends and I decided to start trying out random phrases to see if anything stuck.
Naturally, we didn’t expect anything to actually be accepted, but we kept plugging away anyway. We tried every phrase we could imagine, none of which worked and all have been lost to time and poor memory, except one. One of my friend suggested a phrase that made all of us wriggle with immature giggles, the phrase was (sorry, mom) “PUSSY FLAP”. We entered it and laughed as we pressed start. The laughing immediately turned to victorious cheering as the game accepted the filthy phrase!
As it turns out, that particular password will start you in a two player game, both players having full weapon upgrades, on level 11 (The Undercity Sewers), with player in Ro-vac and player two in the Centurian VT-200 (yes, I did have to look up all of these facts).
Someone seriously coded this. This particular phrase actually works to enter you into the game, with, quite frankly, not all that great of a payoff. The full game has 18 levels, so this puts you at just past half of the game with not even that great of equipment. Sure, I said that the weapon upgrades are full, but the fact about those is that they are basically on a limited ammo system. You can only use those a finite amount of times. And in a run and gun kind of game, that tends to be a bit of a deterrent.
However, I digress. The main fact remains that someone, sitting in front of their computer, got so bored working on this project that they decided that they needed to slip in this little bit of anatomy to their password system. As far as I know, no one else has found this (yes, I’ve checked, I don’t suggest you do the same), and I figured I needed to bring it to light. Here you are, universe, the filthiest password I have ever seen. You’re welcome.
Transmission: out.