Official, developer-provided cheat codes for Polyphony Digital's seminal Gran Turismo 4 on the PlayStation 2 console have finally been discovered. Though the newer Gran Turismo 7 was favorably reviewed, Gran Turismo 4 is often held up as a golden standard for the franchise, and these cheats may get people to start it back up again. Initially launched in 2004, the game represented the pinnacle of racing technology at the time. Though it's never officially made its way to different platforms, it still enjoyed global fame and recognition, with some fans playing it even today, almost two decades following its release.It may seem strange that players wouldn't discover cheats for a major, mainline entry in a franchise as popular as Gran Turismo, but that's precisely what seems to have happened with GT4. Though some may have suspected that the game would have cheats of some sort, figuring out what they were doesn't seem to have been feasible up until now.According to Twitter user Nenkai, who specializes in Gran Turismo research, modding, and reverse-engineering, GT4 has had cheats all along, it's just that nobody could have figured out them out. With almost 100 million copies of Gran Turismo sold over the years, it goes without saying that the franchise enjoys a massive following, and many of those players may now jump back into GT4 to try Nenkai's newly discovered cheat codes. The only caveat, however, is that Gran Turismo 4 cheats are only accessible on save games older than 365 in-game days.
Specifically, Nenkai has explained that players can input very specific key combinations to do a variety of things, from adding more credits to their account all the way to getting a Gold rating on a given event. Since these codes will only work once the player has a fairly long-lived save, however, it's possible this is part of the reason why GT4's cheats went undiscovered for such a long time.
In fact, it's curious to note that GT4 may be the last mainline Gran Turismo game with a classic cheat code implementation. The next Gran Turismo game is already in development, but Polyphony Digital pivoted the franchise towards a more interconnected, account-based progression system with microtransactions, which would be handily invalidated if players could simply cheat their way to richness.
Whatever the case may be, Nenkai's newly discovered cheat codes may be particularly thrilling to PC players. Even though Gran Turismo 7 isn't coming to PC anytime soon, almost any modern PC will be able to emulate GT4 including the featured cheats, giving PC-bound fans of the franchise a reason to jump back into it.
Gran Turismo 4 is available exclusively on the PS2.