Older games had stuff like passwords or the konami code, but i dont see how those button combos could be figured out by one player. Im guessing some official strategy guides had them but if the game didnt have one or didnt include them, did they just spread word-of-mouth from that kids uncle who actually does work at nintendo?
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Zelda II: The Adventures of Link is literally unbeatable without the information provided in Nintendo Power unless the player has the completely random or brute force inspiration to walk to a completely deserted section of a town and cast a spell that is not connected to the location in any way. It raises a door from the desert floor and inside it Link finds a cross that lets him view invisible enemies.
Devs would give them to magazines. Magazine would make a front cover with an artwork of your game and bait headline about the never released before cheat codes, and devs get cheap advertising that way.
While they’re sometimes easter eggs, often cheats are introduced to help test the game (’cause tester has better things to do than play tens of hours to check a feature in late game, to be rechecked for 56 intermediate versions of the game) and they don’t bother to remove them.
Sometimes they also get found during the arms race between devs and hackers to make free copies.
A couple of times a month my family would go to Borders bookstore to browse books that we weren’t going to buy. I would take a pen and a paper and go find some video game magazines and sit at a table and write down all the codes that I could. I also did this at Toys R Us a couple of times but it was difficult because they didn’t have tables to sit at so I would have to take the magazine to the bathroom and sit on the toilet and write the codes.
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