487 words about: Freedom Fighters “Nail Gun” Cheat Code

I press the following sequence: Y-A-X-A-B-A-Left on my Gamecube controller and from this point on any Soviets I shoot and kill will fly through the air and remain fixed to a wall. This is a rather enjoyable experience until one of my own fighters is suddenly lifted up and thrown half a mile away. It would be funny were it not for the fact that their body will hang there leaving me unable to heal them, and now I’m down one soldier as I’m about to storm an electricity plant filled with Soviets.

 Freedom Fighters is a 2003 third-person shooter, action-adventure videogame about the Soviet Union invading the City of New York. It’s dumb-speculative-fiction-patriot-porn at its best and I loved playing it. Cheat-codes helped a lot, mostly to get more charisma to recruit more soldiers, or get a free rocket launcher (because fuck your helicopter Nikolai) but I tried the “Nail Gun” cheat once or twice because of the surreal absurdity of it. Like “Hippo Stomp” in Pharaoh, the cheat-code “Nail Gun '' doesn't serve much of a purpose in-game other than to create sheer chaos. It’s at first grotesque watching enemy soldiers literally nailed to walls and dangling, but given the graphics of the game, and the low-poly rendering, Soviet soldiers wind up looking like ragdolls. Glitches are common in the game and so it’s not unusual for the model to begin jerking about as they dangle around the “nail” that’s holding them in place. Again, this would be disturbing in a more realistic-looking game, but the sheer ridiculousness of it makes any initial-horror melt away into laughter.

Watching twenty dudes jiggling on a wall like jello on a paint-mixer hardly inspires true terror. It just undercuts the violence.

Freedom Fighters is a violent game; it’s about war. As such most of the cheats are about getting better weapons or being able to recruit more soldiers. “Nail-Gun” is an outlier, but likewise reflects an older mentality of game design:  videogames are software programs that have been made by engineers rather than traditional storytellers. 

They’re machines that foster play.

Cheat-codes like “Nail Gun” were ways to fool around with code and allow players the chance to manipulate reality for their own amusement. I could play Freedom Fighters from beginning to end and never use cheat-codes and still enjoy the experience, but the codes allow me the agency to create something new in this system. They also allow me to just cut through the dramatic tension and laugh at the violence on screen.

Watching soldiers fly through the air disrupted the melodramatic narrative about “saving the United States” and “fighting for freedom.” It was dumb physical humor that reminded me that I was playing a videogame; I was supposed to be having fun, and that beneath the surface of this “war” there was still a system that I could impact and change if I wanted to.

Joshua “Jammer” Smith

3.11.2024

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***UPDATE***

I’ve uploaded a video on YouTube of myself reading this essay. You can listen to me read it by following the link below:

487 words about: Freedom Fighters “Nail Gun” Cheat Code (youtube.com)