Retro Gaming Hacks

Find and Play Hidden Classics

Discover bonus retro titles hidden in contemporary titles.

You might have retro games in your home and not even know it! For quite a while now, software publishers have been sneaking ports or emulated versions of classic games into their modern titles. While the list in this hack is nowhere near exhaustive, read on to find out what retro treasures might be tucked away in the games sitting innocently on your shelf.

Animal Crossing

In Nintendo’s innovative life-simulation game, you start a new life in a woodland town filled with animal neighbors. As you while away the hours in Animal Crossing you can collect furniture and other things to fill your ingame house with—including NES consoles that play emulated versions of about twenty different games. And if you have a Game Boy Advance and the appropriate link cable, you can download the games to your GBA and play them until you shut the system’s power off.

A memory card included with new copies of Animal Crossing will start you off with two random, common NES games. You’re supposed to find the rest of them by playing the game and waiting for special events in town, trading with friends, and/or buying packs of Animal Crossing e-Reader cards,^[1] hoping to find rare games. But if you want to skip all that, you can use the following passwords to unlock every common game except Tennis and Pinball. To use these passwords, talk to Tom Nook in the town’s general store and select the “Say Code” option:

Balloon Fight ...