14 years after Gran Turismo on the PlayStation Portable launched, someone discovered previously undocumented cheat codes in the portable racing game. It’s a good reminder that there are likely thousands of undiscovered secrets, cheats, and Easter eggs lurking in video games.
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Released in 2009 on Sony’s PSP, Gran Turismo (confusingly just named…that) was a big success for the pint-sized console and would end up being one of the best-selling games on the platform. As with the main entries of the franchise found on home console, Gran Turismo on PSP featured a long list of real cars players could buy, drive, and sell while racing around real-world and fictional race tracks. Yet even with millions of copies sold, it seems nobody had ever found these hidden cheat codes buried inside the game’s code.
On November 28, Reddit user pez2k shared two secret cheat codes for the PSP game in the Gran Turismo subreddit. The codes let players unlock all cars in the game and award the player 99 million credits. Since they were discovered, players have verified that both cheats work in either the North American or European ports of GT on PSP.
Both cheat codes are entered at the main menu and are a bit tricky to enter, with some folks joking you’ll need a third hand. If you enter the codes correctly the main menu will reload.
Unlock and add all cars to your collection: Hold Start + Select + R, then press: Up, Right, Left, Left, Square, Up, Right, Right, Up, Triangle, Right, Up
Give yourself 99,000,000 credits: Hold Start + Select + L, then press: Down, Square, Down, Left, Right, Triangle, Right, Square, Up, Down, Up, Down
How these secret cheats in Gran Turismo were found
So how did pez2k discover these 14-year-old hidden cheat codes in a PSP game? They explained in a follow-up reply on Reddit that they were disassembling the game’s scripts using a mod tool developed by another GT fan, Nenkai, out of “pure curiosity.”
“I happened to spot two lists of buttons in one of the main scripts,” pez2k explained. “Then it took a couple of attempts to confirm exactly which buttons needed to be held, then another to verify that they did what the code suggested.”
That explains how these codes were finally found after all these years, but the next question you might have is: Why was someone disassembling Gran Turismo’s PSP scripts? Turns out, it’s part of a project to recreate the script source code for older GT games using a mod tool and then document them in the hopes of making the games more easily moddable.
“It sounded like an interesting challenge, and since nobody had done any GT PSP scripts yet it was an easy place to start without duplicating work already done,” pez2k said. “There was little to no knowledge of how the game scripts worked before [Nenkai’s tool] and they compile to a custom assembly language, so anybody inspecting the game for actual PSP code back near launch wouldn’t have found anything to do with these codes.”
So there we go, some more ancient cheats and secrets have been discovered in a popular game years and years after launch thanks to fans who are working hard to preserve their favorite games and keep them playable for the future. I can’t wait to see what these folks tinkering on classic games and consoles find next!
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