PetriP-TNT
Member
Eurogamer.net released this pretty great article about the development process of Game Genie codes for Game Boy
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2...ified-that-summer-i-played-230-game-boy-games
It's a short read, but pretty funny too.
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2...ified-that-summer-i-played-230-game-boy-games
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.
It's a short read, but pretty funny too.
"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".