For 29 years, classic SNES platformer Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy’s Kong Quest has held a secret – a hidden cheat code that had never previously been revealed to the world. But now, it’s finally gone public.
Donkey Kong Country 2 lets you quickly exit any level you’ve previously completed by pausing and then hitting the select button. It’s a handy way to get back to the world map, but it only works on completed levels.
The newly discovered code lets you exit any level, even incomplete ones, by pausing and hitting right + Y, left + A, up + B, and down + X in that order. A sound will play and you’ll suddenly find yourself back on the world map. I’ve double-checked that it works on my original SNES cart, and if you want an easy way to try for yourself, it also works with the version of DKC2 included in Nintendo Switch Online’s library of SNES classics.
The code was discovered by Alex ‘H4v0c21’ Corley, who tells Polygon that he was “casually scrolling through some disassembled code […] when I saw code that essentially did nothing but loop and waste CPU time.” Corley thought that was an odd issue to find in developer Rare’s “extremely optimized” code. This eventually led him to decode the button inputs, and tried using them at the in-game cheat menu to no result.
“As a last resort, I opened a SNES emulator where I could see the memory being accessed,” Corley explained. I played around in the game and noticed it was being accessed when the game was paused. So I did the unthinkable and tried to enter a cheat whilst paused, and the rest is history.”
Apparently a handful of other romhackers have run across this cheat in the past, but word of its existence never escaped those small circles. Certainly, you wouldn’t find it on GameFAQs or even more in-depth repositories of obscure classic game info like The Cutting Room Floor prior to Corley’s discovery. It’s no surprise that somebody managed to uncover this secret – it’s only surprising that it’s taken this long to finally spread across the internet.
The best SNES games of all time hold up in a big way.