I remember the Commodore 64 era. That distinctive, unmistakable sound of the tape deck loading a game, and the vibrant tension as I waited for the screen of scurrying, pixelated ants to finally become a world I could play in. And I remember the frustration of being stuck on a level for hours, sometimes for days. Then, I got a list from one of my “guru” friends, and on it was the holy grail: the cheat codes. POKE 32496,173 for infinite lives, POKE 33252,173 for invincibility. They were mystical strings of characters that seemed like magic, but they really weren’t. It was just that some people who understood the system’s logic had shown me the loopholes.
There's a digital May Day fair in the Hűvösvölgy fields,
I heard the software's great, so to its charm I yield.
Five ICs are the entry fee, for kids it's just three chips,
Programmed computers entertain until the morning drips.
On an infra-sound grill, they're cooking electric hot dogs,
Processor Henriett orders a Plexi-cola from the logs.
A thyristor supercomputer's brain controls the carousel's ride,
The shooting gallery is sensor-based, watched by the crowd with pride.
Digital May Day fair,
Every miracle is real.
Digital May Day fair,
No game feels trivial.
With some friends, we signed up for the great tug-of-cable race,
We won it laughing by a wide signal-strength space.
The sudden power outage didn't cause any fright,
Luckily, E.T. was there and screwed in a space-screw tight.
Digital May Day fair,
Every miracle is real.
Digital May Day fair,
No game feels trivial.
On the May Day stage, a robust figure,
Singing for the crowd, it's Digital Gyula.
(A little background for my English-speaking readers: Gyula Vikidál was an iconic Hungarian rock singer of the ’80s.)
It’s only recently that I’ve realized that these kinds of codes exist in almost every area of life; you just have to understand the internal logic of the thing you’re dealing with. That’s what schools, conversations with parents, and learning from older people are for. All the things we tend to shrug off when we’re young.
I must have been 12 when I asked my father what the saying “keep your eyes wide open while you’re getting to know a girl, but once you have her, keep them half-shut” meant. My father was a simple man; he didn’t think in metaphors. He answered, “While you’re getting to know her, watch for every warning sign! Is she short-tempered? Messy? Does she swear? But once you’ve decided she’ll be your partner, don’t bring it up later.” Of course, he also said some purely “physical” things: “Don’t be surprised if the girl living with you takes a dump. But when she does, don’t just close your eyes, plug your ears, not to mention your nose.” We had a good laugh. Despite his simplicity, I learned a lot from him. About life, about women. He was a real ladies’ man, and he could sum up the secret in one sentence: “Give them respect and attention. If you do that, you can get anything from them. Anything.”
That was POKE 001, my cheat code for girls. And it worked. I could easily strike up a conversation with complete strangers without saying much myself. I’d ask a few trivial questions and just listen, and they would talk and talk. After a while, I became the attentive guy you could talk to about anything. I ended up in the friend zone with many of them (which is a big drawback of this technique, by the way), but the rest were all jackpots.
And as the years went by, cheat codes kept showing up in more and more forms.
When I started my AsEasyAsPIE YouTube channel, my goal was clear, but the execution was a failure. The content was good, but nobody saw it. Over a thousand uploaded videos, with 50-100 views in the best-case scenario. For years, I didn’t even bother with the whole thing. But now, I’ve started diving into the world of YouTube SEO, and suddenly, everything is different. Keyword research, multilingual titles, competitor analysis… all to find the cheat codes of the online space.
I realized that YouTube SEO isn’t some dark magic, but a game with its own rules, levels, and yes, its own codes. When I search for a keyword in the TubeBuddy program and, after all the red bars, it suddenly gives me a 100/100, “Excellent” rating, it’s just as euphoric as when “READY.” appeared on the screen after typing in a POKE command in the old days.
The next level of the game was designing the “shop window.” No matter how perfect the SEO is, the battle for clicks is won or lost on the thumbnails. I polished the strategy for a long time, and I’m not sure it’s finished yet: I went from the initial, clean artistic images to a hybrid solution where my own caricature and targeted, high-contrast text sell the “product.” Then came the multilingual part. The Hungarian, Vietnamese, Indonesian, German, and Spanish “bait texts” are ready, with which I’m targeting local markets, hoping that the message written in their language will lure them into the forest of English-language songs. The system is responding slowly, but the signs are encouraging.
Interestingly, the audio version of my song “Barking Up the Wrong Tree” came to life on its own on YouTube Music, getting over a thousand plays in a few days because it was added to various playlists. And although my target audience is non-native English learners, most of the listeners are from the USA and the UK. At first, this bothered me, but then I realized it’s the highest compliment: the musical “packaging” can stand on its own.
To steer the system in the right direction, I launched the video version of the song with a small, daily YouTube ad campaign, specifically targeting the selected countries. The result exceeded all my expectations. Although the views come almost exclusively from the ad, the average view duration is over 60%, which means that once the content reaches the target audience, they love it. The algorithm is now getting a ton of data about who my real viewers are. So the cheat code works, but the game, as always, has more surprises in store.
By the time I finished writing this post, the average view duration of 2:34 had dropped to 2:07, but that’s still an result over 50%.
Why do I enjoy this? Because it has the same childlike joy as back then. The joy of understanding the system, of experimenting, and of succeeding. Whether it’s a Commodore 64 game, human relationships, or a global video-sharing algorithm, the logic is the same: observe the system, understand its rules, and find the key.