Debug Room

aka: Debug Mode

A Debug Room is a location, menu or mode with options the programmers would have used for testing the game. It's usually not supposed to be accessed by the player; as such, it will either require a complicated code/password or be inaccessible without the help of a GameShark or the like. Often contains a Warp Zone.

Not to be confused with Developer's Room, which is a kind of Easter Egg and doesn't have exploits included.

While many roguelikes call this "wizard mode", Wizard Mode is an unrelated pinball-game trope.

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Examples:

• The Flash version of Bejeweled has a debug mode that can be activated where you may press different keys on the keyboard for different effects, like change a jewel to a different one, skip levels, and so on.
• Betrayal at Krondor has a key combination to summon a magic chest that can heal the party, give money/whetstones/healing items/etc. and provide quest items for the current chapter. The passwords to open the chest differ for each chapter. If you fail to open it, one of your characters calls cheating shameful. When you're done with it, a character says something along the lines of "we shouldn't cheat too much".
• The original Japanese release of Bloody Roar 3 left in a debug mode that allowed players to deform player models and environments like a proto-Garry's Mod. Sadly, some people abused it to create somewhat pornographic images, and the feature was then pulled from the US version and all subsequent re-releases.
• Breath of Fire has the Dr. Warp debugging tool, which can be accessed by ROM hacking and allows you to warp to any location, including several Dummied Out areas.
• Cultist Simulator has a hidden control panel which allows you to add or remove any card in the game (all features of the game are cards) and to halt ongoing processes. In particular, this allows you to stop the automatic draws from the Season deck which can cause regular resource penalties.
• Castlevania III: Dracula's Curse, contained in the game is a hidden level select where you may choose a stage, which part of the stage and which screen of the stage, as well as the character that you start with (or none). Interestingly, you can choose any value between 00 and FF and invalid stages (above 0E) can be selected. This will commonly result in crashes, but there are also glitch levels as well. Commonly you'll fall to your death, it's recommended to switch to Alucard and transform in order to explore the stage. Also, if you enter a level this way, the first 100 points you get will give you an extra life.
• In Choro Q, plenty of the games in the series have unused debug modes that can be accessed through cheat devices. In HG 2, one exists with many features like being able to access any minigame, race on any track either by yourself or with other racers or just going anywhere you want easily. Interestingly, using the debug menu to enter the ski jump minigame will allow you to take your flight wing there as the the people running the event typically take that item off (imagine a ski jumping minigame based on distance, but if a player can fly, then the flight would be very long).
• Clive Barker's Undying features two testing levels "playground" and "smoketest" (only accessible using the game cheats), featuring, among other things, objects left out of normal gameplay and tiles with labels that tell what type of ground you're stepping on.
• Colossal Cave, which ran on timesharing computers had "Wizard Mode" that if you wanted to use it, had to be typed as the first command given to the game. You then had to give the password and solve a computation to prove you are a Wizard. In Wizard Mode, you could shut down the game into single player mode, set the hours the game is allowed to be played (to keep people from running it when a lot of people want to use the computer, like during daytime hours of finals week on a university or college computer) or to set holidays when anyone could play with no restrictions (like Thanksgiving or Christmas).
• Earlier versions of Curses had an extra room called "Graham's Lair" which allowed the developer rapid access to various areas of the game. Once the debug verbs were unlocked, 'xtravel' would take the player there.
• Devil May Cry 4 contains a debug mode in the PC version which can directly be accessed in certain international versions or by using a modified .exe file. The debug mode allows for numerous options, including invincibility, allowing Dante to be played on Nero's levels, infinite jumps, max mission rankings, one hit kills, etc.
• The Japanese version of Digimon World had a left-over debug menu accessible in-game at the start of a new playthrough. It contained miscellaneous items in large quantities, including Digivolution items for Digimon that were Dummied Out. This menu was made inaccessible in international versions, however.
• In the "Developer Mode" of the 2012 Updated Re-release of Divinity II: The Dragon Knight Saga, the debug mode is easily accessible right from the word "go", to the point of being one of the much-touted features of the Developer's Cut.
• The Object Testing Arena in Dwarf Fortress is a debug room that's accessible right from the in-game menu. It allows the player to spawn arbitrary objects and creatures to test how they interact, which is useful for developing a Game Mod.
• EarthBound has a fairly elaborate debug menu. This menu contains, among other things, a Kirby sprite from Kirby's Dream Course as the menu cursor - an artifact left by a HAL Laboratory programmer, perhaps, considering how EarthBound and Dream Course were developed at around the same time. Although another more well-known debug menu exists as well - one intended to be used during the game, similar to Super Mario RPG. This menu is also reachable via one of the options from the former... and is significantly trickier to figure out, since it remains untranslated from Japanese despite the lack of a Japanese font. Only a few words are recognizable as compressed, garbled English - "SUND" for Sound, "TRP-T" for Teleport, and "GtZStTI" for Goods Edit, for example.
  • Mother 3 has a debug menu that's somewhat notable for the fact that, unlike most examples on this page, it's in the form of a literal debug room. This plain beige and white room features a variety of NPCs from throughout the game that, when talked to, can provide various options such as choosing which part of which chapter to start at, configuring the player's party and level, viewing pre-battle screen transitions, and filling the player's inventory with nuts. The player can also fight the Firefly mid-boss, with this room being the only place where they can see its Dummied Out back sprite in action; losing to the Firefly or choosing a chapter/event to play is the only direct method of exiting this room.
• else Heart.Break() has a debug room hidden in Sebastian's house at the very beginning. It's accessible via matrix travel from a computer in the backroom of the first hotel, and contains multiple useful objects and doorways to other test rooms. Unlike a typical debug room, it doesn't contain exploits, but once you understand the game's in-character programming language enough to fully access it you can probably already create any exploit you want.
• Earthworm Jim 1 and 2 have this, and the latter also has a Sound Test.
• Both Ecco the Dolphin games have debug menus accessible by pausing Ecco mid-turn and pressing a button sequence.
• The Elder Scrolls
  • Morrowind has several separate debug rooms accessible through the console. Some of them are also named after specific developers. ("Todd Test", "Mark's Vampire Test Cell", etc.)
  • Oblivion has a whole series of them, accessible from a central hall. Including screwing around with some weird people designed to test the AI, you can stock up on some useful (and some useless) equipment, including some that were dummied out.
  • Really, would it be a Bethesda game if Skyrim were any different? Players have, amongst other things, the ability to reach M'aiq the Liar at any point, or reach a dev testing room with every item in the game, with nothing but a three-letter console command and a destination.
• Fallout games:
  • Same engine, same developers, same test cells: the developers' rooms in Fallout 3 contain all items, a crapload of respawning mines, lots of locked safes and hackable computers, and a random guy with a gun. It's impossible to reach in normal gameplay; the only way to get in or out is via the console or plugins.
  • Fallout 76, built on the same engine by same developers, also has a dev room with all of the items. However, as Fallout 76 is a multiplayer game, the dev room has been the target of cheaters and glitch exploiters since launch. It was possible for a cheater to reach the Dev Room, grab all the best gear in the game, get out, then dominate any other player they came across. Bethesda has created various countermeasures to try to stop this, including emailing the cheaters and asking them how they got in.
• Final Fantasy games:
  • Final Fantasy Tactics has debug menu items that, among other things, allow you to pit two teams of your characters against each other on any map in the game. It requires a Game Shark to access. This was eventually fixed up and released as a multiplayer mode in the PSP rerelease.
  • Final Fantasy VII had a debug room that let you fight against pyramid-like test enemies, max out Materia, and the like. It also had several strange Easter Egg features such as changing your overworld model into a giant Aerith and a section of the floor that complains when you walk on it. Fun fact: one of the NPCs (said giant Aerith) can send you to different places in the game world. When asked to be sent "to Hades", she replies that you're already there.
  • A prototype of Final Fantasy X was accidentally leaked to the Internet in 2008. It is a prototype of the English translation with debug features enabled. Needless to say, it has a ton of features, such has allowing you to have Seymour in your party (although he can't level up), fight any enemy you want in the game. Heck, you can even control the enemies! Final Boss too easy? Control him yourself!
  • Similar to the above, when Final Fantasy XV: Windows Edition was made available to purchase on Steam... the debug features were still in the game, and it was subsequently patched later to remove them. However, Steam keeps the previous patches in its database and by using a simple tool, players can redownload the beta with the debug features still there. Like X, it has a wide range of features such as spawning and refighting bosses from the main story and even summoning up to 20 of them at once! Have fun!
    • Unfortunately, because it only works if you have v1.24 (or Build 1138403, to be more specific), it doesn't have the collaborations ^note (those being a Terra Battle 2 collaboration sidequest for v1.26 and a Final Fantasy XIV collaboration sidequest for v1.27) or Episode Ardyn as it came with v1.29.
• A really weird one in Golden Sun. It has all the main characters in the game standing in an empty void arranged into a grid, each one with a different function (giving items, sound effects, etc.) Naturally, they don't have their usual characterization but respond in a stilted mechanically precise way. The effect's rather eerie, to say the least.
• The Hobbit (1982): In two locations (one in the Misty Mountains, one near the Lonely Mountain) there's an exit you can't take, because "This room is too full for you to enter". They both lead to the same location, a shortcut that would have allowed the original developers to bypass Mirkwood. The room was blocked off by placing a stone in it so large and heavy that the game engine couldn't handle anything else being in the same location.
• Every Humongous Entertainment game released after Putt-Putt Saves the Zoo has a debug room that can be enabled by adding an INI option into the hegames.ini file. They let you go to any room in the game, pick up any item, and even change up the paths. Some of the games even let you put the game in "fast mode" or execute a script at any time.
• Text adventures written using the Inform system can be compiled with a set of debugging commands such as 'purloin' (which moves any object in the game into the player's possession) or 'gonear' (which moves the player to where the specified object is). Some games were released with the debugging commands still active, making them much easier to solve than the author had intended.
• Using the Konami Code in the computer game Insaniquarium after you win grants you access to a "sandbox mode" where you can add anything you want.
• Accessible only through a level select mode, Jurassic Park: Trespasser has a debug level that has several strange objects, most of the game's firearms, a domino-inspired physics test and a button that spawns a raptor, presumably for weapons testing purposes.
• Rooms 0007 and 00A8 in Kirby's Adventure.
• Keineged an nor: You can access debug mode which shows locations of objects and other things by clicking start on the title screen and immediately holding the right mouse button.
• Learn To Fly 2: You can modify the .SWF file of the game to run what's called a "sponsor mode". You get options to view cutscenes, start the game in any mode, or start the game with $25000 (Story or Classic).
• Learn To Fly 3: This was patched out in later versions, but a code existed that you could enter by clicking Extras and clicking Redeem Code and enter the code enableTestMenuK8DH76G5DGh3GH5g3bB5Gh4. Once you are in the shop, you can then press F2 to open a menu where you may adjust your money, your bonus points, your "rare points" (fish), unlock all the items, click a button to beat the game and unlock most medals. There are also options that say SP 1, SP 2 and SP 3, but those don't appear to have a known purpose.
• All of the 3D Zelda games have debug modes that can be enabled via cheat codes, but only The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker and The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time have actual rooms (the latter from a debug ROM.) The most notable one in The Wind Waker is like a playground, and is best known for having a gigantic tower that dwarfs anything seen in the game and takes upwards of 15 minutes to climb.
• Leisure Suit Larry 2: Looking for Love (in Several Wrong Places): You can access an extensive debug mode if you use 555-0724 as the number at the beginning, letting you get all the items, visit all rooms, check position, and more. The list of available commands is accessible when you type in "Help". The game thinks you're Al Lowe during this.
• Lenna's Inception has an in-universe example. At the start of the game, the entrance to Lenna's school gets blocked by glitches. The only way to reach the Golden Ending is for Lenna to find the debug menu and use it to warp into the school directly.
• The game of The Lion King (1994) had one accessible with a button sequence from the title screen.
• Nearly all Mortal Kombat games had a debug menu.
• Word of the Elder Powers says Nexus Clash has one of these squirreled away somewhere for testing mechanics as part of the series' Perpetual Beta. The alpha map for the latest iteration is a more publicly accessible version since the development process has become more openly discussed with time.
• The original GBA/Nintendo DS releases of Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Rescue Team have a debug room that is basically the finished game's Hub World with unfinished textures, few details, and unusable placeholder buildings in place of the real ones. Several sprites of characters that are normally found in the finished area are clustered around the left side of the map, near where the player would enter the area from their home in the finished game, and talking to three of them will allow one to jump to each part of the game's main story or test some animations. Talking to a couple of them will result in errors, crash the game, or simply do nothing, likely because their debug functions were cut prior to release. A more complete look can be found on the TCRF Wiki.
• Second Life had two hidden menus, Develop and God, one used for debugging and the other by game administrators. Because of the game's focus on user created content, many of the options in the Develop menu were actually very useful to content builders and so later versions of the client renamed it the "Advanced" menu and added a simple preference option to display it rather than requiring a hidden key combination. The God menu was no use to any user without administrative access to the server but with the open sourcing of the client it was renamed "Admin" and an option was added to the Advanced menu to make it visible to any user, even though none of its options would be usable.
• In Shadow Hearts: Covenant it's possible to access Debug Island with one of the two known patch codes (either after the intro cutscenes or by entering a location on the World Map immediately after entering the screen, without moving the cursor). After gaining access to it player can enter a huge menu in Japanese with lots of subsections and options. It's extremely easy to crash the game though (and the Sea of Woods area seems to be wiped from the game, even though it's still listed in the warp menu and you can unlock some of the other Director's Cut features).
• A secret cheat code in SimCity 2000 gave the player access to the Debug menu, which included options for everything from millions of dollars of free money to new and terrible disasters.
• The Sims 2: boolProp testingCheatsEnabled true. It allows you, among other things, to kill Sims, make them pregnant with their own Opposite-Sex Clone, or reveal their autonomous gender preference.
• Zap Dramatic's Sir Basil Pike Public School has a debug menu allowing one to skip around the storyline and alter their Persuasion Power at will.
• Sonic the Hedgehog
  • The first Sonic the Hedgehog, Sonic the Hedgehog 2, and both parts of Sonic 3 & Knuckles all have debug modes which can be accessed by the player. In Sonic 2, it's done simply by playing the right sequence of sounds in the Sound Test (spelling out the game's release date, one digit at a time, in year-month-day order.) The debug mode in each lets Sonic turn into a variety of items (moved around with the d-pad), and place them onto the level. In Sonic 3, you could also use the item-turning feature to reach Knuckles' paths as Sonic and vice-versa.
  • Sonic Adventure 2 contains an actual debug room, accessible through hacking, or via a glitch. This glitch is even easier to perform in the HD re-release, to the point where it can easily be done accidentally, which is how it was first discovered. The glitch was fixed in the PC version, though the level itself is still there and can be accessed by hacking.
  • The PC version of Sonic the Hedgehog CD allowed you to access its debug mode by adding a single line of text to one of the game's data files.
• Star Wars video games:
  • Knights of the Old Republic has the "Galaxy Droid", which can only be accessed through a glitch at a specific point in the game (after completing the third required story mission). The Galaxy Droid allows instant access to every map of the game, including levels which have been rendered inaccessible, and skips loading screens, cinematic sequences, and the minigame that occasionally appears when traveling between planets.
  • The Super Star Wars SNES series has a robust debug feature which offers, amongst other things, invulnerability, infinite thermal detonators, stage select and the ability to choose who you want to play as (Up to and including all forms of Leia in Super Return of the Jedi).
  • The Nintendo 64 game Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire had a very comprehensive debug mode that allows the player to control almost everything in the game down to minute details. It was accessed by pressing almost every button on the controller and then holding the joystick halfway alternating left and right until a confirmation sound is heard. Most gamers had to use their nose, chin, feet, or another gamer in order to enter this code.
• The adult Bara Genre game Strange Flesh allows you to access this after getting all three endings, where you get to see all the animations and interactions with enemies.
• Styx: Shards of Darkness: Each level has a hidden debug room with all of that level's objectives and Event Flags.
• Super Mario Bros.:
  • The original Super Mario Bros. 3 has a debug mode in the form of the Game Genie Code KKKZSPIU. Pressing Select allows you to cycle through all of the plumber's various forms at will. Press either face button and Select for the Kuribo's Shoe, though it's usually just a jumble of pixels. It also grants you one of every item and a level warp ability. In addition, the power cycle could be twisted into the ultimate Game-Breaker by turning into a statue as Tanooki Mario, and cycling before the statue time limit ran out, giving you permanent statue status in any form OTHER THAN Tanooki. Due to a programming oversight, Super Mario All-Stars may give you access to this at random when you turn on the console. All-Stars itself has its own separate debug mode that can be accessed with various cheat codes.
  • Super Mario Maker levels often have "dev exits" or "dev stars," shortcuts or powerups hidden in deliberately counterintuitive locations. The designer uses it to bypass the level so they can upload a difficult stage without going to the trouble of beating it (the game requires you to beat a stage before uploading it, to prove that it's not impossible). Levels using this contentious trick are often given away by a seemingly impossible world-record time, set by a player who found the shortcut (either by accident or by examining the level in the editor before replaying it).
  • Super Mario RPG has a debug room with limited functionality: it's speculated that most of its features were ripped out of the game before release. It also acts similarly to the Chris Houlihan room in The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, in that the player is sent there if the game runs into faulty map data, but otherwise it can only be accessed by patch codes.
• The GBA entries to the Super Robot Wars franchise had a debug mode that could only be accessed through codes. They usually included a test stage where the hero and villain units fought, an attack viewer and a sprite viewer. Super Robot Wars Judgment's Debug mode ended up revealing an attack for the Justice Gundam that the unit didn't have in the original (a self-destruct attack that was given to Boss Borot instead).
• Super Smash Bros. Melee had a particularly awesome debug menu. Some of the features included changing your appearance to options normally not available, spawning any item you desire, accessing a huge test level, a more complete Sound Test, the ability to play as a wireframe, the sandbag, Giga Bowser, and Master or Crazy Hand. Be careful though, there is one feature on the debug menu that tests memory card features, which will allow you to wipe your memory card clean or delete Smash Bros. save data. Nonetheless, the debug mode made the game even more fun than it was already, especially in combination with other Action Replay codes (i.e. Super/Poison Mushrooms having stacking, permanent effects or always having bunny ears). To boot, you could use debug view modes, such as showing the names of currently playing character animation, showing character hitboxes (even going so far as to differentiate invincibility frames, the attack hit ranges, grabbable objects, and the regular hitboxes with different colors, which looks awesome). Fun times were had indeed.
• Tales of Destiny also had its own debug room, which was weird in the fact that it was more or less completely translated and legible on its own: the main reason to visit it isn't to screw around with your stats and whatnot, but to talk to Cless and watch him randomly make South Park quotes while pretending to be Cartman's evil twin.
• The very first Tenchu game also had a comprehensive debug mode that's accessed via a complicated button press code: unlike all other codes in the game which are changed between different versions of the game, the debug mode is the same for all versions of the game. Using it allows you to do a great many things, including but not limited to:
  • Add as many items into your inventory as you want and make all of them infinite.
  • Add, delete, change the patrol routes of and set the AI of enemies and save and load them to the memory card, although it's not known how well the latter works.
  • Become any character in the level and replace AI with the second controller. This can lead to hilarity such as confusing VS matches, ninjas that run like dogs and enemies (including animals) using ninja items.
  • Ninjas losing the lower half of their torsos or becoming just floating swords.
  • Unfortunately, none of the later games left the debug mode intact, and what was hyped to be the debug mode in Tenchu 3 just ended up being an enemy control cheat that didn't even work that well.
• Tokimeki Memorial on the SNES has two: one is a "cultural festival simulator" accessed by using a specific code on the name select screen (or entering the Game Genie code 7E007C03) and the other is a "minigame mode" accessed by entering the Game Genie code 7E007C07. Using a specific button combination here would allow you to check each background and see each character's ending.
• The debug room in Ultima VII: The Black Gate, which contains a cache of plot-relevant items and teleports to plot-relevant locations in the game world, can be accessed by a player who uses a large number of crates to make a staircase, climb up onto the ceiling of a certain building in Trinsic, the starting town, and crawl down the chimney. Its sequel, Serpent Isle, had a similar debug room, containing every item in the game once again, but the really fun devroom featured a lot of posters and statues of Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders, as well as various nude dancers.
• Wario Land: Super Mario Land 3 has two debug modes. The first one can be accessed in-game by pausing and pressing select 16 times, and allows the player to modify the current amount of lives and coins as well as change the remaining time in the level and Wario's current form. The second one requires cheats to access, and lets the player warp to any level in the game, move Wario freely around the level, and even warp to the game's ending.
• World of Warcraft vanilla had "GM Island" that was the default spawn point of every in game GM, to allow them to check if they're invisible before teleporting themselves to check on claims of botting or glitches. There's a boat and a shack. it exists in its own instance, and is now only accessible to the GMs (A player can only find their way there if they hack the game, or are sent there into a small prison cell which is rumored to be a "time out" corner).

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