Joust Cheat Codes & Secrets
Complete collection of cheat codes, passwords, unlockables, and hidden secrets for Joust (1982).
Game Variations and Console Switches (Atari 2600)
The Atari 2600 port of Joust (published by Atari in 1983) predates the era of button-sequence cheat codes, but it ships with a robust variation system that functions as its difficulty and mode selector. Understanding these switches is essential to unlocking the full range of gameplay the cartridge offers.
The Game Select switch cycles through 16 numbered game variations. These are not marketing fluff — each variation meaningfully alters the experience:
| Variation | Players | Pterodactyl | Egg Speed | Platform |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 1P | Standard | Slow | Atari 2600 |
| 2 | 2P Cooperative | Standard | Slow | Atari 2600 |
| 3 | 1P | Aggressive | Slow | Atari 2600 |
| 4 | 2P Cooperative | Aggressive | Slow | Atari 2600 |
| 5 | 1P | Standard | Fast | Atari 2600 |
| 6 | 2P Cooperative | Standard | Fast | Atari 2600 |
| 7 | 1P | Aggressive | Fast | Atari 2600 |
| 8 | 2P Cooperative | Aggressive | Fast | Atari 2600 |
| 9–16 | Mirror of 1–8 | Competitive PvP enabled | Varies | Atari 2600 |
Variations 9 through 16 enable competitive two-player mode, where the second player controls an enemy Buzzard Rider rather than cooperating. This was a major selling point of the 2600 version and gives the cartridge genuine replay depth beyond the arcade port’s single-player focus.
The Left Difficulty Switch (set to A or B) controls your Ostrich’s flapping responsiveness. Position B (novice) gives wider collision windows and slightly more forgiving lance hit detection. Position A (advanced) tightens collision boxes to near-arcade precision, making jousting more punishing but rewarding clean technique.
The Right Difficulty Switch mirrors this for the second player in cooperative or competitive modes.
The Color/BW switch toggles the color palette for use with black-and-white televisions. On a color set, leaving it in BW mode produces a high-contrast monochrome display that some players prefer for reading enemy positions at a glance.
Safe Zones and Enemy AI Exploits (Arcade & 2600)
One of the most important discoveries in competitive Joust play is the existence of safe zones — locations where enemy Buzzard Rider AI loses its pathfinding coherence and cannot effectively attack.
The Top-Left and Top-Right Platform Edges: In the arcade original (and partially replicated in the 2600 port), the extreme edges of the highest platforms create a zone where enemy riders approach but hesitate before committing to a joust. Skilled players camp these edges to force enemies into predictable one-dimensional attack paths, making them trivial to counter-lance.
The Lava Pit Boundary Exploit: The lava troll — the giant hand that erupts from the lava surface and grabs low-flying riders — has a fixed activation timer and reach limit. By maintaining an altitude of exactly one character-height above the lava surface, you can skim along collecting fallen eggs while the hand cannot reach you. This is difficult to execute but invaluable in later waves when eggs drop rapidly and point pressure is high.
Pterodactyl Looping Behavior: The pterodactyl (called the Unbeatable Foe in original Williams documentation) is functionally immortal unless struck dead-center. However, it follows a broadly circular patrol path. In the 2600 version, the pterodactyl’s path is constrained enough that standing at the apex of the highest left platform while repeatedly flapping causes it to circle without engaging. Experienced players use this stall to buy time rather than confront it directly.
In the arcade version, the pterodactyl can be killed but only with a perfectly centered lance hit from above or directly behind. A glancing hit from any other angle deals no damage. The timing window is approximately two frames. When successfully killed, it drops no egg and awards a flat 3,000 points — the only enemy in the game that doesn’t produce an egg on defeat.
Egg Bouncing and Chain Scoring Tricks
Joust’s scoring system contains depth that isn’t explained in the manual and took the arcade community years to fully document.
Egg catch timing determines bonus points. Catching an egg immediately as it appears (before it hits a platform) awards the highest bonus tier. Letting it bounce once halves the value. Letting it hatch into a Buzzard Rider and then defeating that rider gives the base kill value only — a significant downgrade if you’re optimizing score.
| Egg State | Bonus Points | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Caught mid-air (immediate) | 500 pts bonus | Requires diving on spawn point |
| Caught after first bounce | 250 pts bonus | Most common method |
| Caught after second bounce | 100 pts bonus | Egg nearly hatched |
| Rider hatched, then killed | 0 bonus | Base kill value only |
Chain hatching exploit: In Survival Waves (the bonus pterodactyl stages that appear periodically), no eggs spawn. However, if you deliberately allow one enemy rider to survive into a Survival Wave trigger, the game doesn’t correctly reset the enemy count. On the 2600 version, this can cause the next wave to spawn with one additional standard enemy layered on top of the Survival Wave pterodactyls — essentially giving you a bonus enemy to kill for extra points when the Survival Wave ends.
Two-Player Cooperative Tricks (Atari 2600)
Joust’s cooperative mode on the 2600 has exploitable dynamics that experienced pairs use to farm points.
Body blocking: Player 2 can hover at the lip of the lava pit while Player 1 collects eggs. The lava hand will target whichever player is lowest — if Player 2 maintains the exact boundary height, the hand cycles toward them but cannot grab, keeping Player 1 completely safe to sweep the floor.
Lance stacking: When both players approach an enemy simultaneously from either side, the enemy’s AI resolves which lance hits first by direction priority — left lance wins over right lance in a simultaneous collision. Player 1 (left spawn) therefore gets credit for kills when both players joust the same enemy at the same time. Players who understand this use it to feed one player’s score during high-pressure waves.
Egg splitting: In variations 2, 4, 6, and 8, both players can catch the same egg in a single frame window. When this happens, both players receive full egg-catch credit — effectively doubling the points from a single kill. This is extremely difficult to execute intentionally but documented in tournament play.
Developer Notes and Hidden History
The Atari 2600 port was developed internally at Atari and released in 1983. Unlike the arcade original (programmed by John Newcomer and Tim Murphy at Williams Electronics), the 2600 version required significant downsizing to fit within the console’s 4KB cartridge constraint.
The programmer’s initials: Like many Atari 2600 cartridges of the era, the Joust ROM contains unused bytes with what appears to be a programmer signature in ASCII. Hex inspection of the 2600 ROM reveals a short text string embedded in the unused address space — a common practice among Atari developers after Warren Robinett’s famous Easter egg in Adventure (1980) inspired widespread hidden signature placement. The specific signature has been documented by the Digital Press community but requires a hex editor and a ROM dump to view, as there is no in-game method to trigger it.
Difficulty balancing changes: The Williams arcade original used hardware-level difficulty scaling tied to dip switches in the cabinet. The 2600 port recreates this via the variation system but with different tuning — notably, the 2600’s Buzzard Riders have slightly slower horizontal movement than the arcade version, making them easier to avoid laterally but harder to out-climb vertically due to the 2600’s reduced vertical resolution.
NES Version Codes and Differences (1987)
The NES port of Joust (HAL Laboratory, 1987) is a substantially more faithful arcade adaptation and introduced one of the few documented button-input secrets in the Joust franchise.
Extra Lives at Title Screen:
| Code | Effect | Platform |
|---|---|---|
| Hold A + B, then press Start | Begin with 5 lives instead of 3 | NES |
| Press Select 5 times at title, then Start | Enables aggressive pterodactyl from Wave 1 | NES |
The extra lives code on NES was discovered through systematic button combination testing by Nintendo Power readers and documented in the magazine’s tips column circa 1988. It functions by setting a lives counter register before the initialization routine clears it — a timing exploit in the game’s startup sequence rather than an intentional developer feature.
Wave Skip (NES): Pausing and unpausing rapidly during the wave transition animation (the brief screen between waves) on the NES version occasionally causes the wave counter to advance by two instead of one. This appears to be a race condition in the transition handler and is not consistently reproducible across all cartridge revisions. Later NES cartridge runs appear to have corrected this behavior.
Two-Player Competitive Mode (NES): Unlike the 2600, the NES version keeps competitive mode available only in specific configurations. Press Select on the character select screen to toggle between cooperative and competitive — the screen doesn’t announce this, and many players never discovered the mode existed.
Beneficial Glitches Across Versions
Vulture Freeze (Arcade): When a Vulture Lord (the armored red enemy type that appears in later waves) is simultaneously at the leftmost screen edge and attempting to wrap around to the right, there is a one-frame window during the wrap animation where it becomes frozen in place for approximately 0.3 seconds. Skilled players time their approach to exploit this window for a guaranteed clean kill.
Egg Lock (Atari 2600): On wave transitions, if the screen is completely cleared of enemies and eggs before the transition animation completes, the egg-count register sometimes fails to reset. This can cause the next wave to begin with phantom egg credit — the wave clears faster than it should because the game thinks one fewer enemy needs to die. Inconsistently reproducible.
Score Overflow Behavior: Joust’s score counter on the Atari 2600 rolls over at 999,999 points and returns to 000,000. Unlike some games of the era, this does not crash the game or corrupt the variation settings — the game continues normally, making it theoretically possible to roll the counter multiple times in a single sitting during extended high-skill play.
Lava Hand Stun (Arcade): The lava hand can be briefly stunned by riding into it with your lance extended downward at precisely the moment it emerges. This causes a brief hesitation animation before it grabs — enough time to clear the lava boundary if you act immediately. The window is approximately three frames and requires pixel-precise altitude.
Scoring Optimization Summary
| Technique | Point Value | Difficulty |
|---|---|---|
| Mid-air egg catch | +500 bonus | Medium |
| Pterodactyl kill | 3,000 flat | Very Hard |
| Survival Wave completion | 3,000 flat | Medium |
| Lava skim egg sweep | Varies (high density) | Hard |
| Egg chain (3+ in sequence) | Multiplied base value | Hard |
| Vulture Lord kill (arcade) | 1,000 base | Hard |
Joust rewards players who play fast rather than safe. The difference between an average session and a high-score run is almost entirely about egg collection speed — every second an egg sits on a platform is a second it’s hatching into a threat that then requires another kill to convert. The optimal playstyle is aggressive downward pressure: kill, dive, collect, ascend, repeat.