Finally! – Secret Super Punch-Out cheat codes unlock 2 player mode

Long before the UFC’s video game series or the Fight Night boxing games, Nintendo’s Punch-Out was king of the pseudo-realistic combat sports related simulation. The original, for the NES, is still hailed as an all-time great piece of 8-bit gaming. The sequel, Super Punch-Out, may have had superior graphics and animations, but never quite managed to have the same kind of impact.

It’s doubtful that this latest news will change that legacy, but someone out there is still playing the SNES version and they’ve apparently made some fascinating new discoveries. The Twitter account Unlisted Cheats reported earlier this week that they’d unlocked a secret ‘Versus Mode’ where players can choose any one of the game’s 16 opponents to face off against in a one-off bout. And, what’s more important for diehard Super Punch-Out fans, while in that mode, there’s another cheat code that makes it so two people can play against one another.

It’s not terribly surprising that a code like this would exist in the game. These kinds of ‘cheats’ are often necessary development tools for play-testing and debugging the game. No one in the right mind is gonna want to go through the entire story mode just to make sure the final boss’s animations all work right, or even to go through entire fights with characters to make sure that each specific move lines up just the way it should. Tools to pick any fight and to create every character animation would be simple necessities.

But, that doesn’t make them any less cool to dig up at random 28-years after the game’s release.

Big news for all the fans who still have their original SNES out there. Or for the much more likely many more who have an emulated copy they can play around with. There’s even reports of this working on Nintendo Switch versions of the game.