Cheat code roundup: NHL 97 & NBA Action 98 (Saturn, PlayStation)
Visual Concepts Easter eggs, revealed
In this edition:
Before they joined Sega in 1999, Visual Concepts produced two sports games for Saturn and PlayStation.
Those two games, NHL 97 and NBA Action 98 / NBA Fastbreak 98, both have a batch of unreported cheat codes.
One of the NHL 97 codes is a cool video Eastern egg — has it gone unseen for 28 years?
One of the NBA Action 98 codes enables a Visual Concepts team.
Below are details about codes and how I found them!
NHL 97
Everybody knows this cheat code: start an Exhibition game. When you get a chance to enter a player name, put in NETHOCKEY. When the game starts, all players will be nets. Strange!
I think nobody knows this one: name yourself MASKMOVIE in Exhibition mode, but cancel before you start the game. Start a new season instead. You’ll see a movie showing a hockey mask that turns into the NHL 97 logo that ends with Coming Soon. …Weird?
Another one like that: name yourself VC as above, then win the Playoffs. Instead of the Stanley Cup video, you’ll see one advertising Visual Concepts — the developer.
Last one: name yourself VCRACING as above, then go to Game Setup > Presentation credits while holding L+R (L1+R1 on PlayStation). You’ll get a video of a Visual Concepts branded car at a Petaluma Speedway car racing event. I wonder who was driving this car?
Here’s the video:
Technical details: the NETHOCKEY cheat name is used as an argument to the function at 0601846c (NTSC-U Saturn version) That function has three other callers, and you can just read the strings out of their argument list.
NBA Action 98
This game is called NBA Fastbreak 98 on PlayStation. The code for this game seems very similar to the code for NHL 97. If you turn on Name Entry under Game Options, you can unlock some Easter Eggs.
Start an Exhibition match and put in VCTEAM for your name, but don’t actually submit it. Instead, press B / Triangle to back out and go back to the team selection screen. A new Insomniacs team will be available:
The Insomniacs consist of developers from Visual Concepts. You can see the full list under Player Menu > Player Profiles:
There are more special names! VEA POLY makes the players look like paper cutouts:
STRETCHED makes the players, well, stretched:
MICRO makes them tiny:
PRACTICE gets rid of the stands:
Technical details: I put in a distinctive player name and then searched the RAM for it. Then I checked references to the address that held it (002ceea0 on Saturn NTSC-U) and found the comparisons like in NHL 97.
There’s another effect that doesn’t seem to be accessible with a cheat code: setting 0609834b to 01 (Saturn NTSC-U) activates a frame rate counter:
Outro
For another look at some Visual Concepts games, see my article on the Dreamcast NFL 2K games. For more even more cheat code discoveries, see my archive.
Tell me in the comments which other games I should be examining!
Pretty cool!