The 10 Wildest Cheats, Secrets and Easter Eggs in Racing Game History

Finally, we come to our last secret — and not unlike GT4’s, this one also remained a mystery until very recently. The Saturn port of Virtua Racing, developed by Time Warner Interactive, has a fascinating backstory. As YouTuber PandaMonium explained in his hourlong retrospective on the game (seriously, it deserves to be every second as long as it is), TWI built its version of Virtua Racing with no access to the arcade original’s code; the dev team had to replicate Sega AM2’s work from scratch, which perhaps explains some of its faults.

Out of PandaMonium’s research, we learned of the existence of a previously-unknown cheat code during the attract-mode sequence that reveals a video viewer. This cheat requires the player to press down 51 times before a series of D-pad inputs. If successful, it leads to a pair of cute stop-motion videos of an office kart race — only without the karts — and one particularly odd computer-generated video of a podium celebration. Part of this code also unlocks a secret F-2000 open-wheel car that can’t be obtained any other way. We need more cryptic gems like these in modern racing games.

Thus concludes this roundup of 10 of the strangest and most surprising cheats and secrets in racing game history. Of course, history is full of many more examples — too many to name in one list alone. So why not head down to the comments and tell us about one of your favorites?