8 PS2 Games That Had the Most Ridiculous Cheat Codes — and Why Players Still Miss Them

3 weeks ago 8

Published Feb 19, 2026, 1:40 PM EST

Daniel has been playing games for entirely too many years, with his Steam library currently numbering nearly 750 games and counting. When he's not working or watching anime, he's either playing or thinking about games, constantly on the lookout for fascinating new gameplay styles and stories to experience. Daniel has previously written lists for TheGamer, as well as guides for GamerJournalist, and he currently covers tech topics on SlashGear.

I sincerely miss the age of cheat codes in console games. Whether it was wasting all of my dad’s ink printing off codes from Cheat Code Central or buying those little handbooks from the Scholastic Book Fair, in-game cheat codes not only gave you a quick means of unlocking stuff in weekend Blockbuster rentals, they allowed you to modify a game to the point of gleeful madness. Console games rarely have this kind of functionality anymore, or if they do, it’s just glorified DLC with none of the codebreaking appeal that comes with sussing out passwords or button inputs.

The PlayStation 2 was one of the last consoles whose games regularly offered these kinds of cheat codes, another reason the console still occupies a place of respect in the gaming pantheon. I won’t claim to speak for every single player in the world, newbie or veteran, but I don’t think it would be hyperbolic to say that gaming, as a subculture, lost a little piece of itself when cheat codes were phased out. Just for nostalgia’s sake, let’s fondly recall some PS2 games that could be subjected to insanity by the power of cheats.

We're specifically talking about in-game codes here. No GameShark or Action Replay stuff.

8 NFL Blitz 2003

Developer

Platforms

Release Date

Midway

PS2, GBA, GameCube, Xbox

August 2002

I’m not really much for football, if I’m being completely honest. I don’t mind watching dudes give each other concussions, but that’s kind of all the sport has going for it. What it really needs is modifiers, something that makes the game more spectacular to watch and experience. NFL Blitz 2003 is already a pretty spectacular arcade-style football game, but it could always be a little wackier.

NFL Blitz 2003’s cheat codes run a surprisingly wide gamut from utilitarian to absolutely nonsensical purposes. On the former end, we have various game modifiers like disabling punting and first downs, as well as speeding up player movement and passes. On the other end, we venture into the realm of the strange, such as turning your entire team into monkeys, making their heads and feet gigantic, giving everyone unlimited turbo power, and my personal favorite, “butterfingers mode,” where every player becomes utterly incapable of catching the ball.

Football is a sport rife with opportunity for shenanigans, which is why it lends itself well to more fantastical depictions like Mutant Football League. With NFL Blitz’s cheats, you can swap between regular ol’ football and screwball football whenever you like.

7 Spider-Man (2002)

Everybody’s Web-Slingin’

Anyone who’s even passingly familiar with Spider-Man knows his big motto: with great power, comes great responsibility. He’s the one with the spider powers, so he has to do everything himself. It was what gave the original Sam Raimi movie its big impact moment. Ironically, though, the video game adaptation of that movie gives you ample opportunity to prove ol’ Web-Head wrong.

The majority of cheat codes in this game revolve around replacing Spider-Man’s character model with one of the other available character models. You can play as The Shocker, Green Goblin, one of the assorted street thugs, or even Mary-Jane. For the most part, all of these characters play the same as Spidey, which adds a funny factor of seeing Mary-Jane performing flip kicks and haymakers. The only exception is Goblin, who has his glider to fly around on.

There are also a small handful of modifier cheats, such as the usual big head mode, though there’s also a “Matrix mode,” that puts an exaggerated slowdown effect on every attack Spider-Man performs.

6 Amplitude (2003)

Make My Music Dumber

There’s an almost taboo feeling that comes with using cheat codes in a rhythm game like Amplitude. After all, amongst all genres, rhythm games are very finely-tuned in order to play to the beat; using cheats in such a situation feels like running onto an orchestra stage in oversized clown pants. Still, if there wasn’t entertainment value in the taboo, you wouldn’t be reading this list.

Amplitude’s cheats can be broadly sorted into two categories, gameplay and visuals. The gameplay cheats include various helpers, like automatically giving you power-ups, activating autopilot to play the song for you, and so forth. However, there are also cheats that deliberately make the game harder, such as scrambling the placement of gems or forcing you into a constant slo-mo state.

As for the visual cheats, that’s where things get weirder. You can make the panels completely black or remove them entirely, activate a “drug mode” for a psychedelic experience, and replace all the gems with monkey heads. It’s not even remotely conducive to playing a song particularly well, but it looks funny, and that’s what matters.

5 The Simpsons: Hit & Run

An Average Day in Springfield

Part of the appeal of The Simpsons, as a cartoon sitcom, is that its titular family can get away with all sorts of chaotic nonsense without any lasting consequences, as the status quo almost always resets next week. Surprisingly, this is slightly less true in The Simpsons: Hit & Run, as causing chaos sets the cops after you and slaps you with a fine. Considering this, I say the cosmic scales need to be rebalanced with the power of cheat codes.

Using cheat codes in The Simpsons: Hit & Run, you can grant your current vehicle unprecedented speed, infinite durability, and the power to instantly and utterly destroy any other vehicle it makes contact with. With these cheats combined, you can plow through the streets of Springfield, confident in the knowledge that nothing could ever hope to stop you. It’s the kind of experience Bart would enjoy, I think.

Further cheats grant you the ability to make your car jump by laying on the horn, great for dramatically dodging the police or just catapulting yourself into the nearest solid wall for laughs. For maximum chaos, activate the “drunk drivers” cheat, making every other car on the road swerve off in completely random patterns and directions.

4 Ready 2 Rumble Boxing: Round 2

I Miss Cartoony Boxing Games

Ready 2 Rumble Boxing: Round 2

Am I nuts, or do we just not get boxing games anymore? Like, at all? It’s a shame, because it’s a very game-compatible sport, though in addition to that, it’s also a great excuse for cartoony nonsense, as we see in games like Punch-Out, Facebreakers, and Ready 2 Rumble Boxing. Ready 2 Rumble Boxing: Round 2, in particular, is still an old favorite thanks to its cast of characters and silly cheat codes.

While they can technically be unlocked through regular play, I always used cheats to immediately unlock the game’s guest characters as an appetizer. Said guests include Shaquille O’Neal, Michael Jackson, Bill Clinton, and Hillary Clinton, all of whom fit in weirdly well alongside the game’s primary cast of weirdos.

Ready 2 Rumble Boxing Deserves A Reboot

The most colourful game to step through the ropes deserves a comeback fight.

Once that baseline is established, you can start using the weirder codes to alter the appearance and flow of matches. For instance, if you enable super speed mode, everyone starts moving and punching so fast they barely be controlled, not unlike a Dragon Ball fight. There are also codes to make everyone skinny, make everyone fat, and of course, make their heads huge. Hey, more surface area to punch!

3 LEGO Star Wars

It’s Not LEGO if it’s Not A Little Silly

LEGO Star Wars: The Video Game

Part of the thesis statement of the many LEGO video games is that any existing IP can be made more family-friendly with a bit of self-referential humor and eye-rolling. This was well-exhibited in the very first LEGO Star Wars game despite the lack of voice acting, but if you didn’t find the little plastic people's antics endearing, you could always make things sillier with cheats.

LEGO Star Wars’ cheats, enabled via a password system, are focused mostly on unlocking certain characters and adding a handful of silly modifiers. You could unlock characters like General Grievous or Darth Maul immediately, which made replaying unlocked levels more amusing, as well as get practical effects like a Minikit Detector or invulnerability, but the fun factor comes more from the silly modifiers.

With passwords, you could make everybody’s weapons needlessly oversized, turn blasters into silly, innocuous objects, turn everyone purple, or give everyone a funny handlebar mustache. Honestly, I think the prequel trilogy of Star Wars films would have been improved if everyone had a big, bushy mustache.

2 Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3

Try Skating with Giant Feet

From its earliest days, the Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater games have had their metaphorical tongue planted in their cheek to varying degrees. Skateboarding was a serious sport, of course, but it was mostly kids playing these games, and kids like to do silly nonsense. Goodness knows, I did when I played Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3.

Not unlike with Ready 2 Rumble Boxing, the first cheat most players would use would be the one that unlocks all of the game’s skaters. Sure, you get all the real-life skaters and whatnot, but the real draw was the guest characters like Wolverine and Darth Maul, who came with their own unique tricks. With that done, we can then get into the fun stuff.

One of my favorite pastimes was to enable the infinite grind balance cheat, hop into a circular pool, and just let my skater grind around in circles overnight, just to see how high the number would get come morning. Besides that, you could enable low gravity for extended jumps, giant and tiny modes to resize your skater, and if you really want to make yourself puke, first-person mode.

1 Grand Theft Auto: Vice City

A Classic of Silly Sandboxes

Arguably, the uncontested kings of cheating potential on the PS2 are the Grand Theft Auto games, which offered a massive array of game, world, and player modifiers you could enable at your leisure with button inputs. Just about every GTA game on the console fits the standard of madness we’re looking for, but if I had to pick a favorite, it’d be Vice City.

Vice City had codes for both practical and nonsensical purposes to fit any situation. You could instantly refill your health and armor, raise or wipe your wanted level, or spawn a variety of vehicles both mundane and exotic. You could also swap your player character out for several others, including Lance Vance, Hilary King, and others. That was bush league stuff, though; the real fun to be had was in the pedestrian and vehicle modifiers.

With a quick code, you can immediately make all NPCs in the world hostile, either to you or each other, instantly driving the entire city into a state of mass hysteria. Cars could be made to hover like boats or fly like planes or changed to be completely invisible. You could even enter a code to make every vehicle near your current position immediately go up in flames. Vice City embodies the true joy of video game cheat codes: the power to turn a simulated world into your personal chaotic sandbox.