Cheat Button
| Introduced: 2020 |
| Retired: N/A |
| Shortcut: GBcheat (FFZ) |
| Source: Power Player Super Joy III salesman |
The cheat button specifically refers to the rightmost "B" button on the Power Player Super Joy III bootleg game console where it takes the place of C-Right on the system's knockoff Nintendo 64 controller. Pressing this button while on the title screen of the version of Super Mario Bros. included on the console will advance the starting world by one allowing players to start on any level up to 8-1 if they desire. Nothing is stopping someone from continuing to press the button to advance beyond 8 however which will result in glitchy stages made of invalid level data, most of which cannot be completed because they either crash the game or loop indefinitely due to missing warp pipe destination pointers.
The cheat button is tied to a story known as "The Skillful", a personal experience Draco has told on the various outlets and platforms he's contributed to over the years. The earliest telling of the story dates back to September 2006 on the website RFSHQ. In it Draco recounts visiting the Corpus Christi Trade Center (in Corpus Christi, Texas) while between classes at the nearby university. There he encountered an older Hispanic man selling the Power Player Super Joy III system while having a couple of them on display for people to try out. Draco wasted some time playing Super Mario Bros. and when asked regarding his interest Draco mentioned he already owned one and was just killing time. The seller struck up a conversation with Draco about his favorite games and then asked if he knew about the "cheat button" built into the console to which Draco responded "no". The man then asked for the controller and demonstrated the ability to skip worlds on the title screen of the game. A point consistent with Draco's retelling of the story is how the salesman intentionally stopped at world 8, implying that he knew that was the last one, before going one further to world 9.
Worlds after 8 in Super Mario Bros. do not correspond to legitimate level data and usually render as either an empty stage or a glitchy mess, the most famous of these glitch worlds is the "minus world" which was discovered in the 80's when a specific wall-clip is performed in world 1-2 to enter a warp zone pipe before the game code is able to execute the warp zone's subroutine. The resulting destination is world [blank tile]-1, known as the minus world because the invisible tile taking the place of the world number makes the dash the first character rendered on the screen. The world 9 that the game salesman entered is essentially just like the minus world as it's invalid code being interpreted as level data. Upon entering world 9 the man played a little bit of the stage before handing the controller back to Draco stating that everything after world 8 were secret levels that Nintendo hid in the game. These levels were meant for expert players who, according to the man, possessed "the skillful". This was of course a spat of Engrish considering the Hispanic man's native language was likely Spanish, not English, so he was close enough to being correct where he was understood but still off just enough for it to be funny.
The man's remark of "the skillful" became the quote that defined the story with the supposed cheat button being secondary, however it was the button that wound up being added as an emote in April 2020 because it was easier to convey graphically. The emote is normally used when a cheat or debug menu is accessed in a game being streamed. It is most commonly seen with older and retro games considering the concept of cheats and other modifiers has generally been phased out of contemporary game design.