Street Fighter 6 has one of the best cheat codes I’ve seen in years

Disclaimer: I’m kinda old. At 40…ish, I’ve been around during some of the key points of the American Arcade rush. I was part of a lot of it thanks to my dad also being into gaming. I was there to play Tron in the arcades. I spent hours at Aladdin’s Castle working on my SoulCalibur II profile. I knew where the notebooks were hidden in the arcades that had all the Mortal Kombat fatalities written in them. I lived, breathed, and once literally slept, in arcades.

One of the most fun bits in arcades was in the 90s when games would start getting goofy if you knew the codes. NBA Jam had big head mode and weird hidden characters like the Beastie Boys and Bill Clinton. Fighting games would have fun hidden characters, some OP, and some just bizarre. Oh, and the joy you’d bring to the crowd around the Mortal Kombat 2 machine when you busted out a Babality and turned your opponent into a little baby.

Sadly, a lot of that is gone now. Going to arcades now is a very different experience. You’ll either find yourself in an arcade filled with nothing but rigged ticket games, or you have to go to a bar where you’ll have to take turns with hipsters who get beer everywhere. And with the inclusion of the internet, secret codes are a lot less secret.

Sometimes, however, you’ll find a situation in which a game developer also fondly remembers this time and does something about it. Such is the case with Street Fighter 6.

Back in June, Street Fighter 6 director Takayuki Nakayama teased people for not finding a secret code hidden within the game and, luckily, it’s finally been found.

Let’s get into it.

If you’ve played Street Fighter 6, you’re more than likely aware of the fact that you can turn on fight commentary. By selecting the commentator (or tators) of your choice you can have what sounds like live commentary on your game. And if you’re old like me and have been in the fighting game scene too long, these commentators are obnoxious noise machines the equivalent of being stuck in a time loop with someone who sees a cow and is saying “cow”. I SEE IT, STEVEN.

Finally, though, you can make the commentary the barnyard chaos it so desperately borders on.

At the face-off screen where your characters get their faces uncomfortably close to the camera, you can tilt your joystick to make faces. Well, much like earlier Mortal Kombats and NBA Jams, this doubles as the cheat code’s time to shine.

If you’re on Playstation go ahead and put in the following on the face-off screen:

• Down, R1, Up, L1, Square, X, Triangle, & Circle

If you’re on Xbox go ahead and put this in instead:

• Down, RB, Up, LB, X, A, Y, B

You’ll hear a weird chime to let you know correctly and then you can live out your most exciting Street Fighter X Animal Farm fanfic!

If the code feels familiar to you, one, you’re as old as me, and second, there’s a reason for that! It’s similar to the code “down, R, up, L, X, A, Y, B” that you had to enter on the Super Nintendo version of Street Fighter II to do a mirror match allowing you to have two of the same character fight each other (yes, this used to be unheard of).

While it’s not the most useful code in the world, being able to break up the monotony of fighting Kens over and over again by using this code. Kicking Ken across the arena is one thing, kicking Ken across the arena as a horse brays wildly however…*chefs kiss*