Nintendo have long been the masters of secrets and easter eggs buried so deep in their games that it takes fans years to discover them. There was the ‘Impossible Coin’ in Super Mario 64 that took 18 years to unearth, then there was the ability to play as Master Hand in Super Smash Bros Melee. But just the other day, Super Punch-Out!! for SNES must have broken some kind of record, when a secret two-player mode was discovered in the game 28 years on from its release.
The cheat was discovered by Unlisted Cheats, and is enabled through a combination of button presses on the controllers in ports 1 and 2, lets the second player take control of any of the game’s 16 colourful opponents. The presentation of the mode suggests that rather than being some secret game feature that the developers scrapped, it was more likely used for internal testing so that devs could quickly test out the different opponents from a menu showing all of them.
The mode actually works very well too, even if the player controlling the AI opponent makes the game seriously brutal on the poor person controlling Little Mac. Being AI, the opponents are balanced in such a way that they can take and dish out way more damage than the player character.
The whole thing has got me thinking about Invasion modes in games – the ones where another player can seize control of enemies or monsters on a given level, or in this case the opponent that the player is fighting against. You could argue that fighting games like Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat were some of the first games to have these kinds of systems in place, always allowing for ‘A New Challenger’ to pull you away from a fight against AI, but they were a bit different due to the fact that they distracted you from the single-player campaign. Same goes for games like Dark Souls and Elden Ring, where invasions are intense and disruptive – essentially a punishment for you having the audacity to summon players to your aid.
I’m talking more about games where the invasions are asymmetrical – so seizing control of an opponent in Super Punch-Out!! would qualify. It’s a wonderful concept that – so long as it’s strictly optional – can really spice up a single-player game, throwing in a small but possibly impactful rogue element and adding a bit of spice. Imagine, say, taking control of enemy AI grunts in Streets of Rage 4, complete with their super-limited movements and move sets, or of the monsters in a first-person shooter. It’s a feature that feels ready-made for the online era of games, and while we’ve seen glimmers of it here and there, it’s hardly been utilised enough.
DOOM Eternal, for example, was going to feature an Invasion Mode where online players could’ve taken control of Pinkie Demons, Mancubuses, and other friendly faces from hell. Unfortunately, this was cancelled in the wake of the pandemic and replaced with a far more conservative option in the form of a Horde Mode. Judging by Steam player counts around the time of the Horde Mode’s release in October 2021, it didn’t have much of an impact on the game’s popularity (do any of DOOM’s multiplayer modes?), so perhaps an Invasion Mode that more neatly integrated into the game’s single-player campaign – the game’s bread-and-butter – would’ve been worth a shot?
At the risk of sounding like too much of a Resident Evil 6 defender (though admittedly I don’t think it’s as bad as everyone says it was), that game was actually really good in the way of multiplayer options. One of these was ‘Agent Hunt,’ which threw you into a random player’s (or a friend’s) game as one of the monsters they happened to be fighting at that time. It was impressive stuff, with a total of over 20 playable creatures you could control throughout the game. Their moves were restricted to what those creatures could actually do, but you’d be amazed at how much damage one of those zombie bird-things or a Gnezdo – an insect swarm, essentially – could dish out. Being a relatively lowly monster, the invader couldn’t soak up a ton of damage, but upon death they could then take control of another creature in the scene and keep retrying until they either killed their target or that sequence in the game ended.
Compared to the more intense invasion mechanics of FromSoft games, or even Deathloop, this kind of approach to invasions is, well, a little less invasive; it flows more naturally with whatever the invadee is up to in their single-player game, and for the invader it’s a means of causing some mischief, while often not granting them enough power to completely derail a game. That means that if you do manage to take down the invaded player – like I did recently when I whipped Leon to death with one of those tentacle-head zombies, it feels incredible.
Looking at this long-lost cheat in Super Punch-Out!! makes me wonder whether the idea of invasion mechanics perhaps spawned originally from developers taking control of AI characters in games to test out their mechanics, then realising that it can make for a hell of a lot of fun. Clearly however, the idea of player-controlled AI has existed for decades, yet not many devs have added it into their games despite its potential.
If you’re interested in the Punch-Out cheat and own a Switch, then you’re in luck, as it’s been confirmed to work on the Switch Online version of Super Punch-Out too. So grab a friend, and get stuck in!
