Super Punch-Out Had a Two-Player Mode

For one reason or another, a lot of the old-school games in the world don’t get enough credit for being as creatively brilliant with their coding/programming skills as they were. The early generations of console and handheld gaming systems had a lot less to work with and had to be rather clever in order to get everything necessary into a game. You might know of some of these tricks, like the controller slot switch in the original Metal Gear Solid or the legendary “up up down down” cheat code that many used to get a lot of bonuses. But did you know that Super Punch-Out had a multiplayer mode?

At the title, hold Y+R, then press A or START. Following screen will appear instead or regular menus. Here you can select any character to fight a free single match. See, even fighters from SPECIAL CIRCUIT are available here. -> pic.twitter.com/Hh7AtPdTcK

— Unlisted Cheats (@new_cheats_news) August 8, 2022

If you didn’t, don’t worry, you weren’t alone. In fact, no one but the developers knew it for 28 years! On Twitter today, the truth was finally revealed. In fact, three different truths about Super Punch-Out were revealed–the developers just used some very clever programming to make sure that no players found these hidden things for decades.

For example, it has been discovered that you could have a free fight with any character in the game without going through the rest of the roster. All a player had to do was press Y+R with the controller as long as it was plugged into the Player 2 slot, and then press the Start button on the Player 1 controller. Sneaky.

Another cheat that was found by this crew was the ability to go and play not as the main character, but as the other characters in the game, complete with using their special moves! One can only imagine why they didn’t want to include this addition more freely, as it would have no doubt been popular with fans.

This brings us to the multiplayer mode. If you want to get there, you need to do a Free Match, have Player 1 pick one of the characters to play, and when the info screen comes up have Player Two hold down B+Y while having Player One hold down the Start Button on their controller. If you do it right, you can control the second character in the free match, and thus have multiplayer in the game.

As you can see, these were really buried. The best part about these cheats being found? You can use them right now, as the game is on the Nintendo Switch Online service.

Source: Twitter