Under the microscope: Command & Conquer (Saturn)

Collecting Easter eggs in the Saturn port of Command & Conquer

In this edition, we’re covering the Saturn version of Command & Conquer. This 1996 port of the influential PC game has some secrets hiding in its game data:

• A couple of special messages from developers Greg Hjelstrom and Jonathan Lanier.

• A batch of cheat codes that don’t seem to have been documented before, including ones that let you skip missions, show debug info, and construct special items.

Details are below!

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The new cheats

First, the Easter eggs. Select Load Game from the main menu and enter one of these strings as your password:

• GREG

• JONATHAN

These display special messages from the developers. Greg Hjelstrom’s thanks his friends and several members of his family. Jonathan Lanier’s thank his family, co-workers, friends, colleagues at Sega, and “the wizard who knows answers to all things.”

Left: The GREG credits. Right: The JONATHAN credits.

It’s well-known that you can view the game’s staff credits by using the special password WHOAMI. But there’s another way to access them:

• Start a new game.

• Enter this sequence during gameplay: Up, Right, Down, Left, Up, Right, Down, Left, Up, Right, Down, Left, Z.

• Select Abort Mission from the pause menu.

• When you return to the title screen and select New Game, the credits will roll instead.

Strange!

Left: Selecting New Game after entering the cheat. Right: The staff credits.

This cheat code will get you to the staff credits a third way. During gameplay, enter this sequence: C, Right, A, Z, Y, Right, Up, Left, Z.

You’ll see a MISSION ACCOMPLISHED banner if you got it right. The final FMV will play, followed by the credits.

All missions accomplished

There’s a way to skip past a single mission, too. Enter this sequence during gameplay: A, A, A, A, A, Left, Down, Right, Up, B, B, B, B, B.

The same MISSION ACCOMPLISHED banner will appear, followed by the post-mission stats screen.

The after action report

To see the game’s build date and version number, enter this sequence during gameplay: Left, Right, Left, Right, Left, Right, Left, Right, Z.

Built on 1996-10-28, a Monday.

The “New game shows credits” code above was weird, but there’s an even weirder one. Enter this sequence during gameplay: Up, Down, A, B, C, C, B, A, Down, A, X.

Now, for one time only, the game will reject any valid password you put in. After rejecting one, it will return to behaving normally. I have no idea why you would want this - if you want to test password rejection logic, couldn’t you just enter an invalid password?

Left: The password display screen. Right: Entering that same password.

The final new code is more comprehensible. Enter this sequence during gameplay: A, B, A, C, A, Down, A, B, Right, A, X, Y, Z, Z, Y.

This allows you to build a Tiberium Refinery and Tiberium Silo in missions that don’t usually allow them.

Tiberium Refinery: $2000

The game recognizes one more code, but nothing changes after you enter it: Up, Down, X, Y, Z, X, Y, Z, Up, Down. I wonder what it was meant to do?

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Technical details

Command & Conquer stores the special passwords in plaintext, so they’re easy to identify when looking at a memory snapshot. When you enter them into the Load Game screen, the game uses a standard strcmp check to see if they match your input.

Here’s a snippet from Ghidra’s decompilation (with variable labels added by me):

cmp_result = strcmp_06083838(user_passcode, "GREG");
if (cmp_result == 0) {
  return_value = 8;

This logic is in the function at 0600ac2c, which also checks that “reject one valid password” code’s effect:

if (reject_password_effect_0608aa04 == 0) {
    load_result = load_from_password_06006128(user_passcode, &game_state);
    /* ... */
}
else {
  reject_password_effect_0608aa04 = 0;
}

You can see that it does this check once and then resets the code effect.

The button sequence codes are stored in an array of structs that starts at 0608a8e8 in memory. Each one consists of:

• 4 bytes: A counter that increments as you enter the sequence and resets if you get a button wrong.

• 16 bytes: An array of single bytes that represent the code’s buttons. 0=Up, 1=Right, 2=Down, 3=Left, 4=A, 5=B, 6=C, 7=X, 8=Y, 9=Z.

• 4 bytes: A value that goes from 0 to 1 after the code is entered.

I wrote this script to extract the codes from the game data. Here are all of them, together at last:

The full set of codes

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Outro

User tomsons26 on the Command & Conquer subreddit’s Discord server already figured out the cheat codes for the PlayStation version. They are mostly the same, but there are a few differences:

• Easter egg credits are triggered by the names SG (Simon Golding) and JC (Jason Curtice).

• There’s a bonus mission triggered by the name PATSUX.

• The PlayStation doesn’t have the “New game shows credits,” “Maximum tech level,” “Allow Tiberium refinery,” or “Bio-Research Laboratory” effects.

The script linked above will print out the button codes for both the PlayStation and Saturn. There’s no need to go diving into the game data for the PC version of Command & Conquer - the source was published in 2025!

Thanks for reading. I’ll be back with more retro game reverse engineering delights this week.