For 28 years, North American owners of Saturn sidescrolling platformer Clockwork Knight 2 have had an entire extra game on their discs and never knew it.
That changed on Christmas Eve last month when Bo Bayles found a cheat code to unlock the first Clockwork Knight game in Clockwork Knight 2.
At CK2’s title screen, pressing up, down, left, up, left, down, right, up, L, R, L, R causes jingle to sound. After pressing the start button, a green “Part 1” box is seen that normally isn’t there in the U.S. version.
On the left is what the menu looks like after inputting the cheat code. On the right is how Clockwork Knight 2’s menu usually looks.
Bo Bayles posted a video to X, formerly Twitter, showing off the code being input.
Well known for digging through the game code for secrets in other Saturn titles like Burning Rangers and Nights into Dreams, Bo Bayles discussed on his blog how he found Clockwork Knight 2’s cheat code in the first place. First he identified which memory addresses were storing controller inputs, then looked for spots in the game’s code using those memory addresses. That led him to finding a section that looks for a particular string of inputs — the cheat code that unlocks Clockwork Knight 1.
For those with an optical drive emulator, an Action Replay cartridge or some other way of playing patched games, Bo Bayles uploaded to SegaXtreme an Xdelta patch that enables CK1 in CK2 without needing to input a code at all.
Anyone who had a Saturn in 1996 and were avid readers of gaming magazines or the Internet back then may not be completely surprised by the existence of CK1 in CK2. It was mentioned by North American mag Game Players in their April 1996 issue — information possibly given to the editors by a Sega press release.
And allegedly, Sega themselves mentioned it — a trailer for Clockwork Knight 2 at the time supposedly was accompanied by a few lines of marketing that read, “Pepperouchau, the wind-up knight, is back again facing down the Bosses and protecting the lovely Chelsea. This time his faithful companion, Ginger, gives him a hand. If you know the code, the entire first game is included.”
The information circulated among the game-playing public to some extent, evidenced by at least two people mentioning it as a rumor on the Sega Usenet bulletin board, which is archived by Google to this day.
The posts above are from Feb. 20 and 21, 1996, the same month CK2 released in North America.
The posts above are from March 5, 1996, although it’s unclear why the first person is speaking as if the game wasn’t out yet.
Despite all those hints, the code never got out until now.
The new revelation seems to confirm that the North American release of Clockwork Knight 2 was based on the Japanese-only “Pepperouchau no Fukubukuro,” which included both games by default without needing to input a cheat code.
The timing would make sense. Clockwork Knight 2 originally hit Japanese stores in late July 1995, while most of North America still hadn’t gotten the first Clockwork Knight amidst the Saturn’s slow rollout there.
Then Clockwork Knight: Pepperouchau no Fukubukuro, a collection of both titles, was sold exclusively in Japan later that year in December, two months before Clockwork Knight 2 would reach North American shelves in February 1996.
Europe, meanwhile, got the first Clockwork Knight in early July 1995 and then its sequel just a few months later in late October — meaning the Fukubukuro collection hadn’t been finished at the time CK2 hit PAL stores. As a result, their copies appear to lack CK1.
It remains unclear why Sega would hide CK1 behind a cheat code in the U.S. version of CK2 when Fukubukuro left it accessible right off the bat. Perhaps to preserve sales of standalone copies of Clockwork Knight 1? But then why leave a cheat code in CK2 at all, and why advertise that cheat code?
We may never know, but regardless, the code is there for you, always true, when you need a special hug, baby.
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