Someone discovered cheat codes in Gran Turismo PSP, 14 years too late

polygon.com:

Here’s some heartwarming, if also slightly frustrating, proof that secrets and mysteries can last longer than five minutes in video games, even in the internet age. Cheat codes have just been discovered in the Gran Turismo game for PlayStation Portable — 14 years after it came out. Quick! To GameFAQs!

User pez2k posted their discovery to the Gran Turismo subreddit and the GTPlanet boards on Tuesday. The two cheat codes unlock all cars in the game and award the player 99 million credits. The codes have been verified to work on both the European and North American versions of the game.

pez2k said they discovered the cheats when digging through the game’s code out of curiosity. “I happened to spot two lists of buttons in one of the main scripts, then it took a couple of attempts to confirm exactly which buttons needed to be held, then another to verify that they did what the code suggested,” pez2k said. “It’s the same way that they found the GT4 cheat codes, and all of the GT5 and GT6 debug commands.”

Gran Turismo for PSP was announced alongside the console in 2004, but developer Polyphony Digital typically took its sweet time to make it, eventually releasing it five years later in October 2009. Gran Turismo’s trademark realism is there in the visuals and physics— based on Gran Turismo 4’s excellent handling model — but the game is curiously unstructured and absent of a proper career mode.

Gran Turismo PSP’s track and car lists are impressive for a portable game of the time, though, and it works best as a kind of pick-up-and-play GT sandbox — in which case, the cheat codes should come in useful (if anyone out there is still playing it).

To unlock all cars, you’ll need to hold down Start, Select, and R, and enter this