Creepshow/Cheat Code

Cheat Code
Season 4, Episode 4B
Release date	November 3, 2023
Written by	Claire Carré & Charles Spano
Directed by	Justin Dyck
← 4x04A Meet the Belaskos	4x05A → Something Burrowed, Something Blue
Creepshow — Season Four

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Cheat Code is part of the fourth episode of the fourth season of Creepshow, and the twenty-first episode overall.

Starring: Connor Wong (Dave), Lochlyn Munro (Jeff), Hanna Huffman (Reina), Nikolas Filipovic (Spencer), Kelly Ann Woods (Spencer's Mom), Kyle Strauts (Alien)

Plot Overview

Newly-single father Jeff hopes to bond with his teenage son Dave over his favorite childhood video game, Weird Wednesday. Dave quickly grows addicted to playing the game because of how insanely difficult it is. When he ropes his friends into playing it with him, they learn that Weird Wednesday has a strange and cryptic history, especially because of a hidden cheat code that can suck players inside the game, where they can die for real.

Trivia

The Show

• The ashtray from "Father's Day" can be seen on a memorial table dedicated to Jeff's late wife.

Allusions and References

• Jeff mentions to Dave that all the copies of Weird Wednesday were pulled from the shelves and buried in the desert. This is because the game is an allusion to E.T. for the Atari 2600, which performed so badly that it was cited as the source of the video game crash of 1983 and practically led to Atari's downfall. There have long been urban legends about the unsold copies being dumped in a landfill in Texas, before it was confirmed in 2014.

• The allusion is reinforced by the fact that the game's final boss is an alien with strong psychic powers who Jeff and Dave work together to kill, the father even calling it "E.T." during the battle.

• Jeff himself is named after Jeff Bridges, star of TRON and TRON: Legacy, which also dealt with players being immersed into a digitized world.

• One of the players on Weird Wednesday's scoreboard is named "Lucas", after the character from Mother 3.

• The episode is a clear homage to "The Bishop of Battle" segment from the 1983 film Nightmares, given that a video game wizard attempts to beat an impossible video game that he gets sucked into.

• Dave's goofy friend Spencer is named after the stoner/gamer from Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare, who was also killed after getting put inside a video game.

• Dave being forced to move like a video game character after inputting the cheat code also references Spencer's movements while under Freddy's control.

Goofs

• The game system that Weird Wednesday is played on is clearly an Atari 2600. However, this presents some issues within the episode:

• The graphics look far more modern than what the 2600 is capable of, looking more like an NES game.

• Jeff is able to pause the game at one point, even though there was no such thing for the console.

• The game also possesses a menu screen and a scoreboard, which 2600 games didn't possess.

• The episode also presents the titular cheat code as if it were a password system, but Atari games didn't have such kinds of codes.

• In the closing credits, Kelly Ann Woods's last name is spelled differently from the opening credits as "Wood".