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West One still works with the new version of Wonder Boy: The Dragon's Trap. I was expecting as much, but it was a relief anyway. This most loving of remakes would not have felt entirely legitimate if West One had not worked. But here's something crazy: West111111 still works, too. And this is something I was not expecting. In my childish way, I had assumed that almost nobody else really knew about West111111. I had assumed it was my secret - a thing that I shared with the game itself and with an old friend I had when I was eleven.
West One and West111111 are both codes. More accurately they are WE5T ONE and WE5T 111 111, since the alphabet The Dragon's Trap provides opts for a 5 that doubles as an S. At school - The Dragon's Trap was the great love of my first year of secondary school, which would make this 1990 - my friend Gareth and I had heard rumours about a code for the game's password screen which took you almost to the end of this huge, sprawling adventure. This code was weird, we had heard: there was something not quite right about it. After all, the third Wonder Boy outing is a game in which you rarely play as Wonder Boy himself. The dragon has cursed you and so you play as the various creatures Wonder Boy has been transformed into: a lizard, a mouse, a lion, a hawk, a...um...merman? This code, though, this magical code dropped you into the endgame and gave you a tonne of gold and gear, but it also made you play as Wonder Boy - at least until you found a transformer room. Like I said, the code was weird.
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