Possibly they still do it, even today?

It's definitely not fair. That's why finding a debug menu in a game through ROM or Gameshark/Action Replay hacking is a major accomplishment. Besides the fact that they're EXTREMELY difficult to find (IF the menu is still in the game, the offset that tells whether or not it's being displayed probably has a value of 00, and, because 00 is a "filler" value in ROM & RAM, you're going to have to probably go through millions of 00's in order to see if you've got the right one, or look for addresses that, in the RAM, always stay set to 00, throughout the entire game; with games and the consoles' RAM sizes getting so large, this is near impossible), people can give the developer a good "nyah, nyah, we found the debug menu, and we get to mess around in the game like you could."

 

Back to Sonic Heroes, Sonic Cult actually did have the beta of it on their site for like a day, then took it down. I believe it was the demo that was used at one of those game shows (like E3).

 

sonic heros. that's not even out in australia. we have the demos in our shops though. it looks like a good game, but very buggy.

 

An incorrect and unfair generalisation. The filler value for an EEPROM such as the type used by the Genesis/Megadrive is FF. On the Gameboy the RAM is initially filled with random data which is overwritten by instructions from the ROM.

 

Slightly incorrect it may be, but a filler value's a filler value - if it's nothing but padding, it doesn't matter what value you use. Hence, "a filler value."

Also, what's so unfair about what I said?