Under the microscope: Grind Session & Razor Racing (PlayStation)

Shared aesthetics and shared code in turn-of-the-century extreme sports games

In this edition:

• Grind Session, the I-can’t-believe-it’s-not-Tony-Hawk skateboarding game from Shaba games, has some heretofore unpublished cheat codes.

• So does Razor Racing, the 2001 scooter stunt racing game from Vision Scape Interactive.

• But that’s not all they share - they seem to run in the same engine, despite being from different developers.

Details are below!

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Grind Session

Shaba Games was busy in 2000 and 2001. They put out four games in those two years: Grind Session, Razor Freestyle Scooter, Mat Hoffman’s Pro BMX, and Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3.

These games obviously share some DNA - all four are extreme sports games with similar gameplay and punk-influenced soundtracks. They also seem to share some code - I previously covered how the cheat system in Mat Hoffman’s Pro BMX is borrowed from Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater.

How about Grind Session and Razor Freestyle Scooter? I tracked down the cheat handling function in the Dreamcast version of the latter. When the game is paused, the function at 8c08e760 keeps track of the last eight controller button presses. Here’s a cleaned up version of part of Ghidra’s decompilation of that function:

for (int i = 7; i > 0; i--) {
  history_8c0da354[i] = history_8c0da354[i - 1];
}
  history_8c0da354[0] = new_button;

This is a standard FIFO queue - each button press pushes the previous ones forward (and the oldest one out).

After that, there are eight different loops that check the history queue against static arrays of button presses. The first one of these looks like this:

if (
  history_8c0da354[7] == 0x08 &&  /* Right */
  history_8c0da354[6] == 0x02 &&  /* Down */
  history_8c0da354[5] == 0x08 &&  /* Right */
  history_8c0da354[4] == 0x04 &&  /* Left */
  history_8c0da354[3] == 0x08 &&  /* Right */
  history_8c0da354[2] == 0x01 &&  /* Up */
  history_8c0da354[1] == 0x08 &&  /* Right */
  history_8c0da354[0] == 0x08     /* Right */
) {
  matched_cheat = 0x09;
}

This is Razor Freestyle Scooter’s Unlock Everything cheat. You’re meant to pause the game and enter Right, Down, Right, Left, Right, Up, Right, Right.

What do you suppose happens if you put the same code into Grind Session?

Cheaters Never Prosper

That’s right; everything is unlocked! It’s a different game on a different system, but the same code produces the same effect. A look at the game data in Ghidra shows virtually identical logic.

Unlike Razor Freestyle Scooter, Grind Session only checks for five button sequences:

• Everything unlocked: Right, Down, Right, Left, Right, Up, Right, Right.

• Current level max: Down, Up, Right, Right, Triangle, Left, Down.

• Tournament unlocked: Right, Left, Right, Left, Up, Up, Down, Down.

• All tricks enabled: Down, Left, Up, Right, Down, Left, Up, Right.

• Secret character unlocked: Left, Up, Left, Up, Right, Down, Right, Down.

As far as I can tell, only All Tricks Enabled has been published before - the rest are new.

Everything maxed out in Tournament mode

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Razor Racing

You might think that Shaba games made Razor Racing, the 2001 extreme scooter game. But no, it was Vision Scape Interactive.

Even so, it’s got a version of the cheat code handler shown above. Its Everything Unlocked code is Right, Right, Right, Up, Right, Left, Right, Down. Enter it on the pause screen, and…

Cheaters Never Prosper, again.

All characters, scooters, and levels will become available.

The shared connection seems to be Crave Entertainment: it published both Razor Freestyle Scooter and Razor Racing. Apparently they got the source code in the deal!

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Outro

Although it was also published by Crave and is stylistically similar, X-Bladez: Inline Skater (2002) doesn’t use this cheat code system (or, as far as I can tell, any cheat code system). Strange!

For more teardowns of extreme sports games, see my articles on:

• Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2

• Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3

• Mat Hoffman’s Pro BMX

• Dave Mirra Freestyle BMX

Thanks for reading - I’ll be back with more retro game reverse engineering soon.