Super Punch-Out!!‘s Secret Two-Player Mode Has Been Found After 28 Years

Super Punch-Out!!, the 1994 SNES game released as a sequel to the 1987 NES original, is a single-player game. You play as Little Mac, and fight your way through a succession of cartoonish boxing opponents, and every single battle is just you against the computer. Or it was, until now!

While messing around with the game recently, Unlisted Cheats “casually found some new cheats” for Super Punch-Out!!. Using the same two-button combo method as with cheats already known, they found two news ones, the first allowing you to just pick any of the game’s fighters—even the ones from Super Circuit—for a one-off bout:

At the title, hold Y+R, then press A or START. Following screen will appear instead or regular menus. Here you can select any character to fight a free single match. See, even fighters from SPECIAL CIRCUIT are available here. -> pic.twitter.com/Hh7AtPdTcK

— Unlisted Cheats (@new_cheats_news) August 8, 2022

That’s pretty cool, and makes you wonder why that was never an option in the first place (or at least as an unlock after you’ve beaten the game, given it’s in such a workable state). The second cheat discovered, though, is a lot cooler, because it lets someone plug in a second controller and control the opponent:

Sorry! Completely forgot to mention! All combinations must be held on JOYPAD2! Then A or START on JOYPAD1!

— Unlisted Cheats (@new_cheats_news) August 8, 2022

But wait! It gets even better!As IGN Senior Editor Kat Bailey soon found, not only do these cheats work on the version of the game available on Nintendo Switch, but the second player can even pull off the opponent’s special moves:

I got this to work on Nintendo Switch. Amazingly, you can even do the special moves as Player 2. As Bald Bull I did the bull charge by holding Down + B https://t.co/cAfOdqzOkx

— Kat Bailey (@The_Katbot) August 8, 2022

This isn’t the first time a secret has lain dormant inside a classic video game for decades, but I can’t remember the last time the secret was so accessible—the cheats are pretty simple!—while also being so important. This isn’t unlocking a single level, or buffing your stats, this is basically adding an entire new game mode, while also doubling the player count and bringing the boxing game into the multiplayer arena after spending 28 years as a single-player experience.

Note, though, that this isn’t the first time we’ve been able to play a Punch-Out!! game in multiplayer, as the Wii game had a two-player mode. Though that was only against a Little Mac clone, not the game’s roster of weird and wonderful AI characters. And as the name implies, Unlisted Cheats itself is an account dedicated to discovering secrets that nobody seems to know about, often hidden in the game code itself.