Debug Room

A debug room is a location in a computer game, structured like other rooms in the game, within which game-playing actions can be used to set options, pick characters and items, and control other aspects of game play. It is not intended to be accessible to players within the game, but only to programmers or play-testers debugging the game. It can only be accessed by cheating, which in some cases requires special hardware devices.

One of the best known debug rooms is in Final Fantasy VII. One example of what can be done, from Andrew Dean's guide, is: "In the Main Debug room, talk to Yuffie and choose 'full name'". This "puts a load of gibberish in each character's name" and will also "mess up the weapon and armor statistics" but has the "interesting side effect" of making you "practically invincible. Every attack made upon you by the enemy will miss, or if they are lucky enough to actually hit you then the damage will actually heal."

Final Fantasy VIII, Xenogears, Mother 3 and Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars also contain noteworthy debug rooms. The earliest known debug rooms is from Chrono Trigger's beta version, released in 1994.