A streamer has revealed a quirky yet baffling design decision by Twitch that hides an extremely useful menu in the Stream Manager dashboard behind a cheat code.
Devin Nash showed his viewers during his December 5 livestream that the Stream Manager dashboard, which contains several separate panels and can become quite cluttered, has a secret menu that can give users the choice of which panels they can view, tidying up their layout to show them only the information they want.
However, this extremely useful sub menu isn’t easily accessible from a toolbar or drop down menu. In Twitch’s “infinite wisdom” – those are Nash’s words, not ours – they decided that the only way to summon the sub menu is to enter the ‘Konami Code’, a well known cheat code that was included in many games made by Konami such as the Gradius or Metal Gear Solid series. By inputting the famous code (UP, UP, DOWN, DOWN, LEFT, RIGHT, LEFT, RIGHT, B, A) the menu will then pop up for users to select or deselect which panels on the dashboard they want to view.
A disbelieving Nash demonstrates this to his viewers, and says in an exasperated tone: “In the infinite wisdom of Twitch’s design decisions, they put the Konami Code behind the only actual useful thing that the creator dashboard has… And I cannot believe it. This is real shit.”
It transpires that Twitch added this new menu a couple of days ago, and had announced on the Twitch subreddit that it would only be accessible using the Konami Code.
“We added an easter egg to the Creator Dashboard / Stream Manager to allow you to add / remove elements on the page,” reads the post from Twitch’s Senior Product Manager. When trying to explain why the menu is hidden behind the code, the post simply says that it is “not ready for prime time yet.”
Enter the Konami Code on the new Creator Dashboard for a secret menu from r/Twitch
However, the post appeared to go relatively unnoticed, and Nash’s revelation came as a surprise to many.
While the classic cheat code was made famous by Konami titles, it also features in dozens of other games from different developers.
For example, in the start menu of Rocket League, entering the code will change the aesthetics of the menu to match that of Supersonic Acrobatic Rocket-Powered Battle-Cars, Psyonix’s 2008 predecessor of the game we have today.
