It was the summer of 1992. Nirvana dominated the airwaves, Batman Returns squatted resolutely in multiplexes all over the world and Alan Shearer became Britain's most expensive football player with a now laughable £3.6m transfer from Southampton to Blackburn. But to be honest, I had to look all this up on Wikipedia, because I really didn't notice it at the time. I was locked in a small office on a Leamington industrial estate testing Game Genie codes for the Game Boy.
If you don't know what a Game Genie is, congratulations, you are very young. Designed by games publisher Codemasters and sold by US toy giant Galoob, it was a cheat cartridge that you slotted into the back of your console, before plugging in a game - it would then let you enter codes to get extra lives, or unlimited cash or other juicy benefits. It was a brilliant example of idiosyncratic British innovation, and typical for Codemasters at the time, a plucky irreverent company, run out of a barn in Southam by brothers Richard and David Darling. They were already making their own NES cartridges for titles like Dizzy and Micro Machines because Nintendo wouldn't give them a developer license. Then, one night they came up with a fantastic idea while brainstorming in David's Leamington flat, with engineer Ted Carron.
The first model was released for the NES in 1990 and did spectacularly well. This was an era before GameFaqs, before mods and downloads and other internet-reliant fancies, so frustrated gamers leapt on the Game Genie in their thousands. Nintendo then sued for copyright infringement, but Galoob won, meaning Codemasters could (very cautiously) start developing the Genie for other platforms. And that's where I came in.
"One that sticks with me was for the first Mickey Mouse game on the Game Boy," recalls Jon. " I can't remember what code I was trying to find but I inadvertently made it so that when Mickey Mouse jumped the enemy dogs patrolling each level turned into fire hydrants. We laughed quite a lot at that one in the office, and submitted it anyway. But I do remember Codemasters QA coming back and questioning why this was a benefit to the player".
I've kept this for years. I printed this page by page with a dot matrix printer, and I remember it took me like an entire afternoon and night to print. Started in the afternoon and when I finished, the sun was coming up.
I also modded my SNES Game Genie to accept the extra pins on SNES cartridges with additional chips so that I could work with Star Fox.
It is very impressive all the stuff you can do with such accessories (inc. Action Replay).
I was trying things recently with an Action Replay and Shining Force III, and you can even swap in/out characters from the other scenarios in the third scenario.
And the game will work just fine. Which is totally amazing.
It is very impressive all the stuff you can do with such accessories (inc. Action Replay).
I was trying things recently with an Action Replay and Shining Force III, and you can even swap in/out characters from the other scenarios in the third scenario.
And the game will work just fine. Which is totally amazing.
That's because the game can already do that. Those characters are already in Scenario 3. Game Genie and Pro Action replay just edit memory values, they don't really add anything new to games.
Ah, the old days of using cheats and codes to beat games. Granted, some games are very unfair with their difficulty, but even good games provided quite a challenge. I don't even know how we found out the Contra code, but it completely changed the game for me.
These days, I can beat a game and barely remember much of it because there were no consequences to dying. I didn't learn the game, or perfect the mechanics. I know it done cause games were also short, but it made them memorable too. Now, I can't remember half the stages in some random FPS.
The fun codes were the best, but they quickly became obsessed with "cheat through the game" codes and never anything else. Infinite lives, infinite health, infinite ammo, infinite continues. Whoopie. Good for beating some broken games and seeing the ending, especially on Game Boy, but really not that exciting. (That clip of the article bums me out, because that's the type of code I wanted to see more of.)
I think one of my favorites was SUE-ISA for SMB1, if I remember right. Mario would eat enemies like power-ups. I jumped almost over Bowser at one point, and it chomped off the tiles that were just his backside. I swear he glitched out and started running around faster after it happened, but youth memory, and I couldn't repeat it easily.
I tried the same code with SMB3, some variations of it, and mashing it up with another code. It didn't work the same, but at one point I got SMB3 locked into always running right at full speed.
I made Super Mario Run first, pay me Miyamoto
It was fun to experiment, but it's a shame that they were obfuscating codes, so it was harder to be scientific with it. The SNES one adding the switch was a big help, too.
Edit: I forgot the GB one had the switch as well.
All I remember was that Nintendo/whomever was saying it would damage our systems/games yet we still used the thing any way because we had drawers full of discount games our aunts bought us that were hard as shit and we wanted to see levels beyond three
That's not copy protection, that's tmss - trade mark security system. It was a legal loophole that allowed console makers to sue companies who produced unlicensed games for trademark infringement, not prevent the copy of games. It was specifically to keep unlicensed games from existing. These schemes have been deemed illegal since Sega v Accolade.
That's not copy protection, that's tmss - trade mark security system. It was a legal loophole that allowed console makers to sue companies who produced unlicensed games for trademark infringement, not prevent the copy of games. It was specifically to keep unlicensed games from existing. These schemes have been deemed illegal since Sega v Accolade.
