Driver Cheat Codes & Secrets

Cheat Menu Codes

Driver stores all toggleable cheats in the Extras section of the main menu. Select Cheats to reach the entry screen, then use the D-pad to navigate the on-screen letter grid. Press X to confirm each character and Start when the full code is entered. Cheats persist to your memory card save and can be toggled individually after unlocking.

Stacking cheats: IMMUNITY and NODAMAGE can both be active simultaneously for fully consequence-free driving. Enabling ALLCITIES or ALLFILMS does not retroactively count missions as completed for campaign progression purposes — Undercover story completion is tracked independently.

The Ramps Garage Tutorial

One of Driver’s most notorious obstacles isn’t a mission — it’s the mandatory Ramps Garage tutorial, which completely gates the main game. Tanner must demonstrate a series of driving maneuvers to a hidden scoring judge. Failing to score high enough blocks all progress. There is no way to skip this sequence through the normal menu.

Optimal execution order:

• Burnout first. Floor the throttle while holding the handbrake to spin the rear wheels. The recognition window is generous. Bank the easy score here before harder maneuvers.
• 360 spin: Build to moderate speed, then simultaneously cut the wheel hard and tap the handbrake. Do not full-brake — partial handbrake input completes the rotation cleanly without stalling momentum.
• Handbrake 180: Moderate forward speed, yank the handbrake, steer sharply. Release the handbrake the instant the rear slides around fully or you’ll overshoot.
• Reverse 180: Get moving in reverse at a decent pace, then cut hard. Counter-intuitive but consistent once the input rhythm clicks.
• Figure 8: Drive deliberate medium-speed loops — the garage is larger than it first appears. Avoid clipping pillars on the tight interior corners.
• Slalom: Keep speed low and methodical. The cone detection boxes are forgiving; you do not need to thread them tightly.
• Parallel Park: Approach the marked bay slowly in reverse. The success detection zone is wide — you don’t need a perfect center alignment, just inside the boundary.

Geometry exploit: In the PS1 version, driving slowly along the left pillar row during the parallel park segment occasionally allows the car to slip into a passing position due to loose collision geometry. This is angle-dependent and inconsistent, but it’s reproducible with patience if you’re stuck on that specific maneuver.

City Unlocks in Getaway Mode

Without cheats, the four free-roam cities unlock through Undercover story progression:

The ALLCITIES cheat bypasses the entire unlock chain for free-roam purposes. You still need to complete story missions in each city for full Undercover campaign completion and rank.

Director Mode and Film Secrets

Driver’s Director mode is a fully functional replay editor that unlocks incrementally as you complete missions. It allows custom camera placement, angle cuts, and cinematic replay construction — a feature that was genuinely unusual for a 1999 PS1 title.

• The attract sequence looping on the main menu title screen is itself Director-mode footage captured by the Reflections developers, using the same camera toolkit available to players.
• Replays are captured automatically after every mission session; footage is not lost if you don’t manually save immediately.
• Activating ALLFILMS populates the film library with Reflections’ internal footage for missions you haven’t reached yet. This functions as a full late-game spoiler.
• Director mode’s free camera can be positioned underground or inside geometry, revealing the simplified collision meshes used for PS1-era performance optimization — a popular discovery among players who explored the mode thoroughly.

Police Felony and Wanted Level Exploits

Driver’s felony system is persistent across a session but can be actively manipulated rather than just outlasted.

Garage reset exploit: Driving into any marked garage (the building icon on the in-game map) instantly drops the felony meter to zero, even during active pursuit. Police AI loses target lock the moment the garage loading trigger fires. On Undercover missions where a city garage is physically accessible mid-objective, this completely resets the police response clock. Some Miami missions are specifically designed around garages in ways that make this trivially repeatable.

Elevation break: Police AI in all four cities struggles to track players across significant elevation changes. San Francisco’s steep hills are the most extreme example — cutting down a sharp grade and immediately turning causes pursuing units to overshoot along their last-known vector. Los Angeles freeway interchanges and New York parking structures create similar AI path-breaks. The cops continue in a straight line projection rather than recalculating, allowing a loop-back and disappear.

Alley funneling: Narrow side streets in Miami and New York cause police cars to queue single-file behind the leading unit. If the lead car can’t close distance — particularly when the player threads a gap that patrol cars are slightly too wide to navigate at speed — the trailing units stack and abandon pursuit. This is most reliable in the older district geometry in Miami’s south end.

Survival and Pursuit Mode Techniques

Survival mode’s police escalation is wave-based, and a few mechanics are not explained in the game text:

• Police spawn volume scales with the felony meter reading when each wave initiates. Keeping meter pressure low through early evasion suppresses wave size throughout the run, not just in the current wave.
• Civilian traffic density increases over time in later waves. Dense traffic queues function as inadvertent roadblocks for police AI, not just for the player. Funneling cop cars into civilian pile-ups at intersections is a legitimate and repeatable survival extension strategy.
• In Pursuit mode, the target vehicle’s AI uses a fixed routing path per city. Learning the route — rather than chasing reactively — allows you to cut ahead and force collisions rather than following from behind.

Beneficial Glitches and Exploits

Retry as a clean slate: When you fail an Undercover mission and select Retry, the felony meter fully resets to your pre-mission baseline. Using Retry rather than attempting to salvage a messy run with high police attention is almost always the correct choice — you lose no meaningful progress and restart in clean condition.

Instant reverse velocity spike: On PS1 hardware, tapping the brake and accelerate inputs simultaneously for a single frame generates a brief velocity overshoot in reverse that slightly exceeds the car’s normal maximum reverse speed. The window is extremely tight, but it’s consistent and useful in Driving Games time-challenge events where reverse-to-marker speed matters.

Cop spawn camping in Getaway (Miami): The waterfront district in Miami contains a fixed police patrol spawn point near the port area. Police units that spawn here follow a short looping route before joining general traffic. Staying in the immediate vicinity causes the spawn point to cycle rapidly, which can be used to study patrol behavior patterns or, combined with the garage reset exploit, to test felony escalation thresholds without committing to a full pursuit sequence.

Easter Eggs and Hidden Details

The opening diner cutscene — where Tanner listens to criminals discuss the job at a diner booth — was deliberately designed to push PS1 cinematic presentation beyond what players expected in 1999. The scene is unskippable on standard hardware and contains no hidden inputs, but it set a production benchmark that Reflections pointed to repeatedly in post-release interviews about the game’s design intent.

Mission briefing text: Several Undercover mission briefing screens contain street-name and character callsign details that reward slow reading. The mission dialogue in New York in particular references real borough geography with enough accuracy that it’s clear the writing was researched rather than invented.

Garage geometry variation by city: Each city’s garage interior uses a slightly different collision layout — Miami’s is most open, New York’s is most compressed. This is presumably a reflection of real-world parking structure design research but also means that the column-clip exploit from the tutorial garage behaves differently in each city’s garages during Getaway mode exploration.