Super Punch-Out!! Hidden Two-Player Mode Discovered 28 Years Later

Yes, thank you very much. I'm gonna do a save state on the SNES mini and NSO app to have the mode on standby.

One of my all-time favourites. Pizza cake!

Oh wow, 2P Punch-Out!! Talk about a dream come true. I wonder how the characters actually handle...

At Disneyland rn, but I will stay up at 2AM trying this out on my SNES anyway!

You really do learn something new everyday surprised with this, good article

Whoa what an awesome find!
Imagine controlling King Hippo - I think it would auto-block everything for you.
Then I wonder if you can just spam the fighters special moves? I may have to try this out. 😁

Tested it today after seeing SummoningSalt share it. Works like a dream and is great fun. What’s especially cool is the stage select screen though, that’s a real game changer.

Why would Nintendo make this mode a secret? Why not include it in the instruction booklet and back of the box? Bizarre!

Well this is quite the find. Very excited to try out.

Wow. This is pretty amazing!!

I'm guessing this was some kind debug mode for the devs??

Well dang, I have a couple of ways to play this game so I’m gonna try this out.

It's amazing that this never got out after all these years. None of the devs or anyone working on this game never let it slip.

Amazing how this never became known. I guess this was never published in like a Nintendo Power magazine or something back in the day then.

Bizarre how they kept this a secret or didn’t just include it as a proper 2 player mode in the game.

Reminds me of those Breath of Fire cheat codes that were discovered in like 2013 or something.

Old old games getting new content discoveries like this is always fascinating - because this content was obviously planned to be part of the game from the beginning, yet none of the players ever got to see it during the course of the game's life.

Some cheat codes become legends, like the famous Contra 30 lives code, or the debug codes in Sonic... yet some are destined to never be seen. ...I wonder how many undiscovered cheat codes of popular games would have become part of the game's culture and community if only the code had been published in a magazine back in the day?

So when do we get a tier list for Super Punch-Out?

Pretty sure this was mentioned in Super Play magazine years back.

but does player 2 get the power up punch?? cant see any indicator on the screen as to how they would know. Perhaps it was just a little trick to spice up the fighting predictability as well as secretly smash friends/world records haha

I had 23 years old in 1994. Very cool game

@RushDawg Most likely it's incomplete, buggy, unplayably bad, or all three.

I haven't "known about this for years", but I'm here saying I have so a bunch of people I don't know think I'm smart.

@papa_frezz Wow! I can't believe I got to read a comment from someone so smart! Sign my comment, please!

Looks like a dev back door so they could easily try out all the characters for testing. Pretty amazing if this stayed undiscovered for so long.

Nice! Though I have it on 3DS…

As someone who absolutely adores Super Punch Out, seeing something as groundbreaking as this discovered for the game makes me so damn happy. You better believe I'll be testing all this out later on!

@akeshwar81 'EA!'

Holdup. Super Punch Out had an easily accessible 2p mode that nobody knew about for nearly 3 decades? This is crazy!

@Fizza You know it!

What is the 2nd player control set up? Same as usual?

I wonder - had this code been widely known around release - this game could have been considered the most legend boxing game of all time. Surpassing it's predecessor by a wide margin even. Possibly even creating a niche going to this day - like fighting games.

To live inside a dream

@Sonos It wouldn't. The multiplayer is so hilariously imbalanced that being 2P is essentially an instant win given two players of similar skill. The 2P punches have the same power that they do as CPU players. The difference is practically insurmountable. I was watching Zallard, a Punch-Out speedrunner, try out the 2P mode against his chat yesterday and he was getting TKO'd in round 1 almost every single game. I never saw him knock down an opponent.

Could've sworn I read about this back in the day in Nintendo Power.
I KNOW they printed a code to access the Japanese naming screen instead of the English one (which is a surprise, given that the Japanese version was released three and a half years later, and as the equivalent of a "digital" game at that).

@Bret Super Punch-Out!! is a single-round game (unless this VS. mode changes that). You have only three minutes to win each match, or else the CPU automatically wins.

This definitely feels like a "Nintendo Power Classifieds" moment 😁

It really works! It's super fun, because you can see how broken the enemies are hahahaha. This reminded me of the cheat codes for Goldeneye, or Rogue Squadron, specifically on that last one, the code that let you play with the Naboo Starfighter, that was kept a secret the movie haven't come out yet when the game was released.

Can't believe Nintendo hid this for so long. Like the Street Fighter Alpha 2 for Super NES Playable Shin Akuma code this is such a blessing to find. Now here's hoping someone would find a way to unlock Krang's Android for play in the Sega Genesis version of TMNT Tournament Fighters.

Never knew that one if my favourite classic games.

"You then select the boxer for player two and have the second player hold down the 'B' and 'Y' buttons on their controller until the match begins."

(suggestion of a different version of this part of this article: You then select the boxer for player two and have the second player hold down the 'B' and 'Y' buttons on the controller for that player until the match begins.)

Very nice. Also makes me wish for a Switch Punch-out game all the more.

I don't get why you would hide such a big option as 2 players.

This must be one of these cheats that never got sent around the magazines back in the day. Usually that was the only way they would get released is if the publishers made them public. There have been many instances where they remained hidden simply because they were never sent out during the launch period of a game and simply forgotten about. I kind of miss the days that games contained cheats or codes that unlocked hidden modes or features and coming across them years later in a magazines that reprinted them giving you a reason to boot a game back up you may have had sitting on your shelf for ages.

@MeloMan just tried it out, its actually a bit weird, p2 get's regular punches of the opponent, but are also able to spam the opponents ultimate, so bear hugger can just give you an absolute beatdown

thought this was common knowledge. Guess its true what the say about time and memory.

@nessisonett Would you say it works like a… Mister Dream?!

@RushDawg

Imo, I think this was a development debugger function that was left in the final game.

@Westlondonmist

For debugging the characters. When you are debugging game behavior you want to control the variables. Chances are this was intended to allow the developers to refine the game’s balance and find any bugs without having to rely on the AI to do certain actions by chance. It allowed them to control the flow so they could take notes.

They probably left it in as both an Easter egg and because it would have been more trouble than it was worth to remove it.

@Murkyelm Lol! That Bear Hugger barge was no joke 😂