General lies[]
- The liar has a relative, such as an uncle or older sibling, who works for a game developer and provides secret information.
- The liar can perform some ridiculous feat through sheer skill, such as performing an absurdly long combo in a fighting game.
- The liar will show you just as soon as they get their game back from their relative, the next time you come over, or when they "feel like it."
- The liar won't show you, because you'll tell everyone how to do it and ruin the secret.
- The liar read about the cheat in a reliable cheat magazine.
- The liar has played at least two sequels beyond the most recent incarnation of the game because "they're further along in Japan".
- The liar got a phone call from a game developer with "secret information" to thank them for their years of buying their games.
- The liar read it on forums and it had pictures to prove it.
- The liar randomly input the code by accident, and that's why he can't remember it.
- "You have to beat the game X number of times to unlock it." Here, x equals 1 time more than you claim to have beaten it.
- The liar saw some older kid put in the codes at an arcade. Then, when they walked away, the liar was able to play while the code was still active.
- ROMs are "legal" for 24 hours after download, through a legal loophole that is never explained anywhere.
- The liar has beaten a puzzle game or older arcade game that actually goes on forever, or gotten past an unbeatable glitched level (e.g. passing level 256 on Pac-Man ).
- The liar has an older sibling, cousin or other friend who lives far away who showed them the code, but they have reason(s) they won't tell you, which are some of the lies listed above (such as, the other person won't tell them, or that they forgot, etc.)
- Something happened to the liar's system while he was playing (water spilled on it, dropped from a high height, power cable pulled, etc) and when he turned the game back on the changes happened.
- The liar can't tell you because he's selling his cheats to companies that make Player's Guides. If he told you, it could ruin his chance to make a fortune in lies, and to keep his giant [ego] alive.
- It just randomly happened to the liar once and he can't re-create it, but it definitely happened.
Reverse lies[]
These occur when someone takes an inaccuracy in a videogame as truth and repeats it; for example, acting as if they're an expert on WW2 weaponry after playing Call of Duty. This often results in rather comical arguments with people who actually do know what they're talking about.
Typical fake unlock methods[]
The usual methods cited by liars are designed to be as hard to repeat as possible, or be so precise that someone trying to use them might convince themselves they just got it wrong rather than it not working at all. Examples:
- Doing something that has no obvious end for long enough, such as running up the endless staircase in Super Mario 64 or running in circles.
- Doing something where success is dependent on outside factors, such as repeatedly achieving double KOs in a fighting game.
- Doing something excessively precise, such as a timing to a particular hundredth of a second.
- Doing something described extremely vaguely, to the point it's not clear if you're doing it right; for example, being told to do something "slowly" or that a hidden door is "there somewhere."
- Touching several invisible triggers which neither indicate where they are or if they're triggered; for example, pushing on unmarked walls in Doom. Some versions of this method will also include further invisible triggers that reset the sequence, creating a non-existent maze.
- Doing something an implausibly high number of times, such as completing a 100-hour RPG 1001 times or killing a million of a particular enemy.
- Entering an incredibly long code in a short time or while trying to actually play the game, such as trying to win a match in a fighting game using a specific set of button and pad movements.
- Doing something that alternates between long pauses and very fast actions, such as doing nothing for two hours and then entering a code in less than ten seconds.
- Swapping your version of the game with the Japanese/European version of the game while paused.
- Pressing an implausible and/or complicated sequence of buttons, such as pressing every button on the controller simultaneously while also holding both control sticks (if any) and the D-pad in the same particular direction, usually up or right.
This is not to say that no such methods have ever been used by game designers to hide genuine secrets, but it should be considered suspicious if a new, secret, never-before-seen code requires such a method.