The password is: chetkido is a secret message hidden by the developers in Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus. It only appears when four specific conditions are met and a special debug code is entered.
Conditions[]
The hidden message will only appear under specific conditions. They are as follows:
- Have 100% completion on your save file
- Be in the level "A Perilous Ascent"
- Have exactly 99 coins
- Have exactly 0 lives left
If all four conditions are met, entering the code Down L2 R2 X Down L2 R2 X Left Circle Left will result in a pop-up box with the message appearing in the bottom-left corner of the screen.[1]
Developer Brian Fleming has confirmed on Twitter that these conditions are arbitrary and that the code was only used as a test of checking conditional statements in the game's code, such as checking for a certain game completion percent or the number of lives the player has left.[2]
Implementation[]
Main article: Debug code (Sly 1)
When the game detects that the debug code has been entered, it calls the function active_code_chetkido_password
. This function does the following four checks in an if statement:
- Calculate the current level ID and check if it is equal to 0x400
- Call
check_game_completion
and check if the flag at bit 6 is set
- Check if the coin count in the SaveData struct is equal to 99
- Check if the lives count in the SaveData struct is equal to 0
If all four conditions are met, the conditional block performs the decryption on the "chetkido" string (see below), and then calls the necessary GUI functions to render the popup window in the corner of the screen.[1]
Encryption[]
The string "The password is: " can be found in plain text in the game's memory at offset 0x24a848, but "chetkido" is stored in a separate string that is encrypted with a basic XOR cipher. The encrypted ciphertext is "@KFWHJGL" and can be found in memory at offset 0x2483b8.
When the chetkido debug code is entered, the function that renders the popup text in the corner first decodes the XOR cipher using a cipherkey of 0x23. Since the string uses ASCII encoding, this results in "chetkido", which is joined with the first string to get "The password is: chetkido".[3]
Speculation[]
The developers have said that the password is just an inside joke left by mistake, and not intended to unlock anything. Brian Fleming has explicitly stated that there is "no mystery to unravel".[2]
There is no evidence of a debug menu or anywhere you would be able to enter a password in Sly 1. While this has not stopped the community from speculating possible uses for the password, it is widely accepted that it is nothing more than an unintentional easter egg.