Someone found a new Donkey Kong Country 2 cheat code

A new Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy’s Kong Quest cheat code was recently discovered almost 30 years after the platforming classic debuted on the Super Nintendo (h/t Time Extension).

The cheat involves a series of button presses — Right+Y, Left+A, Up+B, Down+X — that allows the player to exit any level at any time and return to the overworld map, even if they haven’t completed the stage yet.

Amateur programmer Alex “H4v0c21” Corley was the first to publicly document these details when they shared their discovery in the DKC Atlas Discord server on November 4. While a handful of fellow romhackers claimed previous knowledge of the cheat, it was new to the majority of those who responded to Corley’s informal poll in the niche Donkey Kong Country community.

“I was casually scrolling through some disassembled code […] when I saw code that essentially did nothing but loop and waste CPU time,” Corley told Polygon via email. “This is especially eye catching in the case of [Donkey Kong Country 2 developer] Rareware because their code is for the most part extremely optimized. Whenever they do something like that it usually means they’re up to something interesting.”

Further inspection revealed the suspect code was tied to a character-swapping sound effect used on Donkey Kong Country 2’s secret cheat menu to indicate a successful entry. Corley then noticed an array of data against which controller inputs were being checked and decoded it, which led them to the aforementioned button combinations.

“Naturally, my next idea was to actually test this on the cheat menu,” Corley said. “I tried it and my disappointment was immeasurable when it didn’t work. As a last resort, I opened a SNES emulator where I could see the memory being accessed. 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.”

Only one question remains: Why does this exist? Corley and fellow romhackers p4plus2 and BlueImp, the latter of which helped circulate the discovery online, believe the cheat is a leftover shortcut the folks at Rareware used in the case of “sticky softlocking scenarios” during development. Those familiar with the Donkey Kong Country 2 code have found similar hints of excised vestigial data in the past, but it’s rare to find a fully functional debug feature in a game’s retail release.

Almost immediately after BlueImp shared the cheat in a Discord server for Donkey Kong Country speedrunning, experts began to theorize how it could be used to finish Donkey Kong Country 2 faster. Many have since noted its potential usefulness for correcting mistakes that would normally require dying on purpose and losing a life, but it may take a little time before we see speedrunners implement the strategy at high levels.

If nothing else, Corley’s discovery is yet another testament to the legacy of Donkey Kong Country 2. Who of us could have imagined, blowing in the cartridge and popping it into our Super Nintendos as kids, that someone would be digging through its code three decades later and finding these kinds of secrets? It takes a special game to garner that level of dedication, and we should all be thrilled folks like Corley are documenting these findings for everyone else to enjoy.