16 ms·

When Nintendo fought a device that gave Mario 'new superpowers'

98 points by avery42 6y ago

loa_in_ 6y ago
This might be the earliest case of corporations abusing (electronic) copyright laws to influence competition I know of. Clearly, there is no real basis to claim that a memory poker infringes Nintendo's copyright, but Nintendo successfully lobbied against it anyway.
- schoen 6y ago
  Not successfully at the time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_Galoob_Toys,_Inc._v._Nintendo_of_America,_Inc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_Galoob_Toys,_Inc._v._Nin.... (Perhaps successfully later on with the DMCA.)
  - zinekeller 6y ago
    Yikes, broken link. This one should be fixed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_Galoob_Toys,_Inc._v._Nintendo_of_America,_Inc.# https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_Galoob_Toys,_Inc._v._Nin... (Hint: if the last character is not alphanumeric, put a # (a blank URL fragment) to work around HN's autodetection of punctuation) (Edit: I don't recommend percent-encoding URLs, mainly because certain web servers react differently to percent-encoded URL, like https://www.google.com/search?q=world+dog https://www.google.com/search?q=world+dog and https://www.google.com/search?q=world%2bdog https://www.google.com/search?q=world%2bdog (first one is interpreted by Google search server as space, second one as a plus sign) while a blank URL fragment is guaranteed to be safe.)
    - codetrotter 6y ago
      > Hint: if the last character is not alphanumeric, put a # (a blank URL fragment) to work around HN's autodetection of punctuation I usually use URL encoding (aka percent encoding) [0] in this case but that’s a pretty neat trick and certainly more convenient than for example pasting the URL into https://meyerweb.com/eric/tools/dencoder/ https://meyerweb.com/eric/tools/dencoder/ and pressing the encode button and copying the encoded URL. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percent-encoding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percent-encoding
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
    - qu4z-2 6y ago
      So, fun fact about percent-encoding: the space character can be percent encoded as %20 or +, and a literal plus must always be percent encoded as %2b. When you put plusses in Google Search those are actually pre-percent encoded spaces, which is why it treats them as spaces. Of course, if you chuck it into a percent encoding script again it treats them as literal spaces since presumably the input isn't already percent encoded (just as it'd encode the % in other encoded characters). At least that's if I recall correctly and it wouldn't surprise me if other servers do handle things in zany ways.
  - kmeisthax 6y ago
    Actually successful later on with the DMCA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MDY_Industries,_LLC_v._Blizzard_Entertainment,_Inc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MDY_Industries,_LLC_v._Blizzar....
cthomson 6y ago
I think this is a sticky issue that continues to this day. The scope of Nintendo’s IP should include the delicate game balance of jump distance etc that makes the game what it is. On the other hand the creation of these other products is sort of ‘complementary’ to Nintendo’s products in the same way phone cases complement iPhones.
- bawolff 6y ago
  Under what basis? If we take the theory that nintendo's IP includes such things, that's an argument that people shouldnt be able to use those elements in a competing game. However making a cheat cartridge is not like that. Copyright is after all about restricting the right to make copies. Its not a catchall monopoly that allows the owner to dictate how to use the product that has been sold to them. Companies sometimes try with EULAs, which is different from intellectual property, but im unclear how enforcible they are, and they seem even less enforcible against the third party selling the cheat device who wouldn't even be a party to the eula. Maybe you could argue their moral right to the artistic integrity of the work was violated, but that seems like it would be a rather uphill battle. In a modern context if DRM was involved, maybe the anticircumvention would come into play. IANAL
  - kmeisthax 6y ago
    No need for moral rights. In a modern context anticheat is very much legally DRM: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MDY_Industries,_LLC_v._Blizzard_Entertainment,_Inc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MDY_Industries,_LLC_v._Blizzar.... The thing is, 30 years ago a Game Genie was just a way to get some fun out of old cartridges, or blast through an unfair game. Nowadays most games have some kind of an online component, if they're not entirely multiplayer. Hell, most players of online multiplayer games would love to see the cheaters plaguing their games go to jail. Effectively, not only have the conditions of the market changed so much as to render the Galoob precedent unusable, it also makes it kind of anti-consumer, at least in the context of online multiplayer. Microtransactions also ruin the Galoob precedent - obviously if people are selling you what are effectively cheats, then your cheat device is usurping the market. I bet you if Nintendo had found a way to charge you a quarter every time Mario lost a life, the court would have ruled the other way. (Blizzard is also responsible for using the DMCA to ban server emulators, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bnetd#Blizzard_takedown_demand_and_lawsuit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bnetd#Blizzard_takedown_demand... . They argued that a server emulator that doesn't check CD Keys is a circumvention tool, and won. Hell, I'm pretty sure this is THE reason why the DMCA exception for old game servers explicitly only covers situations in which the developer released an authorized server program, such as Valve games or Java Minecraft.)
lxe 6y ago
Towards the end of the second video, 3:50-ish they mention how Nintendo is being anti-competitive by fully controlling what (and how) software can run on their systems, and their reasoning is "quality control". Sounds familiar?
- kmeisthax 6y ago
  Nintendo literally invented the App Store model.
  - schoen 6y ago
    I have the impression that the NES was the first device whose manufacturer tried to license the developers of compatible software. Does anyone know an earlier example?
    - sokoloff 6y ago
      Activision ended up paying Atari royalties on VCS game sales, but it's not clear if you'd consider that an attempt to license 3rd party devs or a reaction to ex-employees who quit because you treated them poorly and the royalty was the result of a court battle not a mutual negotiation.
    - kens 6y ago
      The TI-99/4A home computer (1981) restricted software to licensed vendors through a lockout chip. This was one factor that led to the failure of the TI-99/4A.
      - schoen 6y ago
        Huh, I hadn't been aware of that example. But Wikipedia seems to think that the lockout chip came in in 1983 in a revision of the TI-99/4A design and that earlier models didn't have it. In that case, it might be roughly tied with the NES.
        tadfisher 6y ago
stopFalse 6y ago
Nintendo is the Apple of gaming. Anti consumer, anti developer, big marketing budget. Back when BP spilt oil, people refused to buy their gas. Where is that outrage for these companies anti consumer practices?
grawprog 6y ago
I had a game genie, pretty sure it was responsible for giving my nes the blanking screen of death. Seems like nintendo should have been happy, the game genie probably led to a bunch of snes sales due to its console killing tendencies(possibly just a myth...but I swear...that thing caused trouble on my nes.) and you literally needed a nes and games to use it. I get the philosophy behind making games unfun and such, I personally would rather beat a game genuinely than cheat, but seems kinda hypocritical from a company that prides itself in making games where players can enjoy themselves in their own way. There's a Miyamoto interview on the front page currently espousing exactly such things. Nintendo does many things I personally find counterintuitive and even counterproductive. Especially in regards to things like this. I also owned a few of those black 'non-licensed' nes cartridges that exist for similar reasons. Nintendo makes some damn good games and I understand the Disney-esque protection over their ip, but some of the things they do just seem like it would be better off if they just let things be.
- redisman 6y ago
  I had the game genie too and by far the most fun thing was to slightly edit the codes they provided you. You could get some weird memory hacks that would give you a broken power or some other way it broke the game world and then shortly crash afterwards
  - grawprog 6y ago
    Yeah. Messing around with silly things like that breaking the game is what I remember most about it. It didn't really stop me from playing the game normally, it was just something you played around with to make crazy stuff happen. I probably spent more time playing games legit than using the game genie. It was fun, but the novelty wore off after a while.
- userbinator 6y ago
  The NES was famous for flaky cartridge connectors (leading to the lore about blowing on them... which didn't really help) even when stock; the GG's design just stressed it more. https://console5.com/wiki/Improving_NES-001_Reliability https://console5.com/wiki/Improving_NES-001_Reliability
ravenstine 6y ago
Man, I loved things like the Game Genie and Gameshark. They gave me my earliest understanding of how software runs in memory and the nature of the memory. Was great to just poke at parts of the memory with it and just see what happens. I didn't need to be reminded of another reason to hate Nintendo. I think I air my grievances in every HN thread about Nintendo. But this does add to the pile. Around the same time I lost interest in Nintendo, games like Halo became attractive because Bungie explicitly wanted people to mod the PC version of the game. At the time, it was really cool for a game company to embrace the creativity of their players instead of putting a lock in their imaginations like Nintendo wanted. Nintendo's misguided hatred of memory editors goes beyond just punishing players. They essentially against the nerds who one day might have become inspired to build their games. The only kids I knew who had the Game Genie/Shark were nerds. Average people didn't really have them and being able to "cheat" in the games wasn't really going to ruin their experience.
- minimaxir 6y ago
  The Game Genie/Gameshark incidentally scared child-me away from computer science because I didn't understand how the hell they came up with these codes (aside from 99 in hex is 63 and 255 in hex is FF). One Game Shark came with a "how to hack" VHS which came down to "it's easy, just observe which values change in memory when you perform an action, and just freeze that value!". That's one way to get imposter syndrome. The best unintentional introduction to computer science/memory abuse in a video game for me was the Missingno glitch in Pokemon Red/Blue.
  - Lammy 6y ago
    > The best unintentional introduction to computer science/memory abuse in a video game for me was the Missingno glitch in Pokemon Red/Blue. Same for me, as well as forcing wild encounters to be Mew (#151), the Pokémon normally unobtainable outside of Nintendo events. That "0115D8CF" address/value is burned into the same part of my brain as the "FuCK GateWay" WinXP key.
  - colordrops 6y ago
    If this is what scared you from computer science, then if game genie didn't exist, something else would have scared you.
aaron695 6y ago
Interesting mention in the video - Video game crash of 1983 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_crash_of_1983 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_crash_of_1983
14 6y ago
I am using my game genie daily these days. My 4 year old does better on my old Nintendo since the controls are so basic. I had to replace all the capacitors on the nes before it would work and all my old games didn’t work right away they had to wiggle back and forth before making a good pin connection and I assume wear some of the tarnish off since the games since start better no messing around. I have always wondered how the game genie worked on a technical basis I will have to see if there is anything out there on the matter.
- sircastor 6y ago
  I wasn’t able to find it with a quick Google search, but I recall seeing a couple of years ago a replacement 72 pin connector that would work more reliably that the original, if you were interested in making the effort.
  - ficklepickle 6y ago
    Indeed, the originals are prone to corrosion. The replacement pins are gold-plated.
lancefisher 6y ago
I really recommend checking out The Gaming Historian on YouTube. He did a video on the Game Genie nine years ago. His newer videos are more polished, but even back then it was well done. https://youtu.be/PCvIZ80RIhE https://youtu.be/PCvIZ80RIhE
croes 6y ago
I guess nowadays Nintendo would win the case.
oriolid 6y ago
I wonder if it occurred to Nintendo at the time that they could have sold the device by themselves. Right now it seems that one of the best business models in (casual mobile) games is to make the game unwinnable at some point and then sell boosters that allow progress to next level.
- rograndom 6y ago
  That was what Nintendo Power magazine subscriptions were for. Recurring revenue for stuff that should've been in the game manuals (maps, secret explanations, etc)
  - oriolid 6y ago
    To me it sounds more like cheats for people who can't be bothered to draw the map or find the secrets than something that should be included in game instructions. So, almost like selling gems now. Btw, the map that came with Star Control II was brilliant storytelling addition. It was really there for copy protection, but in-game it represented the game universe in the past and if you had the map, you were in for some surprises.
schwartzworld 6y ago
Honestly the language used makes it sound like the Game Genie was a cheating device, but it was a lot more than that. Game Genie allowed you to breathe new life into your old games. I had the game genie for Sega Genesis. I had like 15 games for it, and I played some of them like Sonic 2 and Kid Chameleon a lot. Sega games didn't have a way to save them, so you played the beginning levels again and again until you knew the Blue Hill Zone map inside and out. "Cheats" were the only way to change this. Even without GG, you could enter debug mode in Sonic 2, (1 9 9... Damn I can't remember the rest.) and use it to reshape levels in fun new ways. Game Genie gave you access to those sorts of features on all your games. Sure, being able to jump higher is helpful in Mario, but in Sonic the Hedgehog it's just different, and sometimes harder. My friends and i tried thousands of codes at random, noting the ones that still loaded a playable game. We also noticed the digits of the hex codes were significant. So to stick with the jumping example, we figured out which digits meant "jumping code" and then tweak the others. I didn't know what hexidecimal was, so it was a wow moment when I realized a > 9 I think it's worth noting that Sega incorporated the thru-cartridge design of the GG into the game Sonic and Knuckles. If you connected it to other Sonic titles you could play those games as Knuckles. If you connected it to any other random game you got new levels of the mini ring collecting game that was part of Sonic 3/Sonic and Knuckles.
- skocznymroczny 6y ago
  > I didn't know what hexidecimal was, so it was a wow moment when I realized a > 9 Reminds me when I was a kid in DOS days. I somehow managed to learn how to save a game, modify something (e.g. sell some items to get gold), save a game again, compare two savegames and then use a hex editor to modify the memory that changed between those two savegames. I also didn't really know hexadecimal back then, I just knew to put 0xff into all changed fields. I always wondered why it gave me "ugly" numbers like 4294967296, but I wasn't complaining because it was a lot of ingame gold.

98 points by avery42 6y ago

This might be the earliest case of corporations abusing (electronic) copyright laws to influence competition I know of. Clearly, there is no real basis to claim that a memory poker infringes Nintendo's copyright, but Nintendo successfully lobbied against it anyway.

schoen 6y ago
Not successfully at the time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_Galoob_Toys,_Inc._v._Nintendo_of_America,_Inc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_Galoob_Toys,_Inc._v._Nin.... (Perhaps successfully later on with the DMCA.)
- zinekeller 6y ago
  Yikes, broken link. This one should be fixed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_Galoob_Toys,_Inc._v._Nintendo_of_America,_Inc.# https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_Galoob_Toys,_Inc._v._Nin... (Hint: if the last character is not alphanumeric, put a # (a blank URL fragment) to work around HN's autodetection of punctuation) (Edit: I don't recommend percent-encoding URLs, mainly because certain web servers react differently to percent-encoded URL, like https://www.google.com/search?q=world+dog https://www.google.com/search?q=world+dog and https://www.google.com/search?q=world%2bdog https://www.google.com/search?q=world%2bdog (first one is interpreted by Google search server as space, second one as a plus sign) while a blank URL fragment is guaranteed to be safe.)
  - codetrotter 6y ago
    > Hint: if the last character is not alphanumeric, put a # (a blank URL fragment) to work around HN's autodetection of punctuation I usually use URL encoding (aka percent encoding) [0] in this case but that’s a pretty neat trick and certainly more convenient than for example pasting the URL into https://meyerweb.com/eric/tools/dencoder/ https://meyerweb.com/eric/tools/dencoder/ and pressing the encode button and copying the encoded URL. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percent-encoding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percent-encoding
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  - qu4z-2 6y ago
    So, fun fact about percent-encoding: the space character can be percent encoded as %20 or +, and a literal plus must always be percent encoded as %2b. When you put plusses in Google Search those are actually pre-percent encoded spaces, which is why it treats them as spaces. Of course, if you chuck it into a percent encoding script again it treats them as literal spaces since presumably the input isn't already percent encoded (just as it'd encode the % in other encoded characters). At least that's if I recall correctly and it wouldn't surprise me if other servers do handle things in zany ways.
- kmeisthax 6y ago
  Actually successful later on with the DMCA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MDY_Industries,_LLC_v._Blizzard_Entertainment,_Inc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MDY_Industries,_LLC_v._Blizzar....

cthomson 6y ago

I think this is a sticky issue that continues to this day. The scope of Nintendo’s IP should include the delicate game balance of jump distance etc that makes the game what it is. On the other hand the creation of these other products is sort of ‘complementary’ to Nintendo’s products in the same way phone cases complement iPhones.

bawolff 6y ago
Under what basis? If we take the theory that nintendo's IP includes such things, that's an argument that people shouldnt be able to use those elements in a competing game. However making a cheat cartridge is not like that. Copyright is after all about restricting the right to make copies. Its not a catchall monopoly that allows the owner to dictate how to use the product that has been sold to them. Companies sometimes try with EULAs, which is different from intellectual property, but im unclear how enforcible they are, and they seem even less enforcible against the third party selling the cheat device who wouldn't even be a party to the eula. Maybe you could argue their moral right to the artistic integrity of the work was violated, but that seems like it would be a rather uphill battle. In a modern context if DRM was involved, maybe the anticircumvention would come into play. IANAL
- kmeisthax 6y ago
  No need for moral rights. In a modern context anticheat is very much legally DRM: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MDY_Industries,_LLC_v._Blizzard_Entertainment,_Inc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MDY_Industries,_LLC_v._Blizzar.... The thing is, 30 years ago a Game Genie was just a way to get some fun out of old cartridges, or blast through an unfair game. Nowadays most games have some kind of an online component, if they're not entirely multiplayer. Hell, most players of online multiplayer games would love to see the cheaters plaguing their games go to jail. Effectively, not only have the conditions of the market changed so much as to render the Galoob precedent unusable, it also makes it kind of anti-consumer, at least in the context of online multiplayer. Microtransactions also ruin the Galoob precedent - obviously if people are selling you what are effectively cheats, then your cheat device is usurping the market. I bet you if Nintendo had found a way to charge you a quarter every time Mario lost a life, the court would have ruled the other way. (Blizzard is also responsible for using the DMCA to ban server emulators, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bnetd#Blizzard_takedown_demand_and_lawsuit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bnetd#Blizzard_takedown_demand... . They argued that a server emulator that doesn't check CD Keys is a circumvention tool, and won. Hell, I'm pretty sure this is THE reason why the DMCA exception for old game servers explicitly only covers situations in which the developer released an authorized server program, such as Valve games or Java Minecraft.)

lxe 6y ago

Towards the end of the second video, 3:50-ish they mention how Nintendo is being anti-competitive by fully controlling what (and how) software can run on their systems, and their reasoning is "quality control". Sounds familiar?

kmeisthax 6y ago
Nintendo literally invented the App Store model.
- schoen 6y ago
  I have the impression that the NES was the first device whose manufacturer tried to license the developers of compatible software. Does anyone know an earlier example?
  - sokoloff 6y ago
    Activision ended up paying Atari royalties on VCS game sales, but it's not clear if you'd consider that an attempt to license 3rd party devs or a reaction to ex-employees who quit because you treated them poorly and the royalty was the result of a court battle not a mutual negotiation.
  - kens 6y ago
    The TI-99/4A home computer (1981) restricted software to licensed vendors through a lockout chip. This was one factor that led to the failure of the TI-99/4A.
    - schoen 6y ago
      Huh, I hadn't been aware of that example. But Wikipedia seems to think that the lockout chip came in in 1983 in a revision of the TI-99/4A design and that earlier models didn't have it. In that case, it might be roughly tied with the NES.
      - tadfisher 6y ago

stopFalse 6y ago

Nintendo is the Apple of gaming. Anti consumer, anti developer, big marketing budget. Back when BP spilt oil, people refused to buy their gas. Where is that outrage for these companies anti consumer practices?

grawprog 6y ago

I had a game genie, pretty sure it was responsible for giving my nes the blanking screen of death. Seems like nintendo should have been happy, the game genie probably led to a bunch of snes sales due to its console killing tendencies(possibly just a myth...but I swear...that thing caused trouble on my nes.) and you literally needed a nes and games to use it. I get the philosophy behind making games unfun and such, I personally would rather beat a game genuinely than cheat, but seems kinda hypocritical from a company that prides itself in making games where players can enjoy themselves in their own way. There's a Miyamoto interview on the front page currently espousing exactly such things. Nintendo does many things I personally find counterintuitive and even counterproductive. Especially in regards to things like this. I also owned a few of those black 'non-licensed' nes cartridges that exist for similar reasons. Nintendo makes some damn good games and I understand the Disney-esque protection over their ip, but some of the things they do just seem like it would be better off if they just let things be.

redisman 6y ago
I had the game genie too and by far the most fun thing was to slightly edit the codes they provided you. You could get some weird memory hacks that would give you a broken power or some other way it broke the game world and then shortly crash afterwards
- grawprog 6y ago
  Yeah. Messing around with silly things like that breaking the game is what I remember most about it. It didn't really stop me from playing the game normally, it was just something you played around with to make crazy stuff happen. I probably spent more time playing games legit than using the game genie. It was fun, but the novelty wore off after a while.
userbinator 6y ago
The NES was famous for flaky cartridge connectors (leading to the lore about blowing on them... which didn't really help) even when stock; the GG's design just stressed it more. https://console5.com/wiki/Improving_NES-001_Reliability https://console5.com/wiki/Improving_NES-001_Reliability

ravenstine 6y ago

Man, I loved things like the Game Genie and Gameshark. They gave me my earliest understanding of how software runs in memory and the nature of the memory. Was great to just poke at parts of the memory with it and just see what happens. I didn't need to be reminded of another reason to hate Nintendo. I think I air my grievances in every HN thread about Nintendo. But this does add to the pile. Around the same time I lost interest in Nintendo, games like Halo became attractive because Bungie explicitly wanted people to mod the PC version of the game. At the time, it was really cool for a game company to embrace the creativity of their players instead of putting a lock in their imaginations like Nintendo wanted. Nintendo's misguided hatred of memory editors goes beyond just punishing players. They essentially against the nerds who one day might have become inspired to build their games. The only kids I knew who had the Game Genie/Shark were nerds. Average people didn't really have them and being able to "cheat" in the games wasn't really going to ruin their experience.

minimaxir 6y ago
The Game Genie/Gameshark incidentally scared child-me away from computer science because I didn't understand how the hell they came up with these codes (aside from 99 in hex is 63 and 255 in hex is FF). One Game Shark came with a "how to hack" VHS which came down to "it's easy, just observe which values change in memory when you perform an action, and just freeze that value!". That's one way to get imposter syndrome. The best unintentional introduction to computer science/memory abuse in a video game for me was the Missingno glitch in Pokemon Red/Blue.
- Lammy 6y ago
  > The best unintentional introduction to computer science/memory abuse in a video game for me was the Missingno glitch in Pokemon Red/Blue. Same for me, as well as forcing wild encounters to be Mew (#151), the Pokémon normally unobtainable outside of Nintendo events. That "0115D8CF" address/value is burned into the same part of my brain as the "FuCK GateWay" WinXP key.
- colordrops 6y ago
  If this is what scared you from computer science, then if game genie didn't exist, something else would have scared you.

aaron695 6y ago

Interesting mention in the video - Video game crash of 1983 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_crash_of_1983 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_crash_of_1983

14 6y ago

I am using my game genie daily these days. My 4 year old does better on my old Nintendo since the controls are so basic. I had to replace all the capacitors on the nes before it would work and all my old games didn’t work right away they had to wiggle back and forth before making a good pin connection and I assume wear some of the tarnish off since the games since start better no messing around. I have always wondered how the game genie worked on a technical basis I will have to see if there is anything out there on the matter.

sircastor 6y ago
I wasn’t able to find it with a quick Google search, but I recall seeing a couple of years ago a replacement 72 pin connector that would work more reliably that the original, if you were interested in making the effort.
- ficklepickle 6y ago
  Indeed, the originals are prone to corrosion. The replacement pins are gold-plated.

lancefisher 6y ago

I really recommend checking out The Gaming Historian on YouTube. He did a video on the Game Genie nine years ago. His newer videos are more polished, but even back then it was well done. https://youtu.be/PCvIZ80RIhE https://youtu.be/PCvIZ80RIhE

croes 6y ago

I guess nowadays Nintendo would win the case.

oriolid 6y ago

I wonder if it occurred to Nintendo at the time that they could have sold the device by themselves. Right now it seems that one of the best business models in (casual mobile) games is to make the game unwinnable at some point and then sell boosters that allow progress to next level.

rograndom 6y ago
That was what Nintendo Power magazine subscriptions were for. Recurring revenue for stuff that should've been in the game manuals (maps, secret explanations, etc)
- oriolid 6y ago
  To me it sounds more like cheats for people who can't be bothered to draw the map or find the secrets than something that should be included in game instructions. So, almost like selling gems now. Btw, the map that came with Star Control II was brilliant storytelling addition. It was really there for copy protection, but in-game it represented the game universe in the past and if you had the map, you were in for some surprises.

schwartzworld 6y ago

Honestly the language used makes it sound like the Game Genie was a cheating device, but it was a lot more than that. Game Genie allowed you to breathe new life into your old games. I had the game genie for Sega Genesis. I had like 15 games for it, and I played some of them like Sonic 2 and Kid Chameleon a lot. Sega games didn't have a way to save them, so you played the beginning levels again and again until you knew the Blue Hill Zone map inside and out. "Cheats" were the only way to change this. Even without GG, you could enter debug mode in Sonic 2, (1 9 9... Damn I can't remember the rest.) and use it to reshape levels in fun new ways. Game Genie gave you access to those sorts of features on all your games. Sure, being able to jump higher is helpful in Mario, but in Sonic the Hedgehog it's just different, and sometimes harder. My friends and i tried thousands of codes at random, noting the ones that still loaded a playable game. We also noticed the digits of the hex codes were significant. So to stick with the jumping example, we figured out which digits meant "jumping code" and then tweak the others. I didn't know what hexidecimal was, so it was a wow moment when I realized a > 9 I think it's worth noting that Sega incorporated the thru-cartridge design of the GG into the game Sonic and Knuckles. If you connected it to other Sonic titles you could play those games as Knuckles. If you connected it to any other random game you got new levels of the mini ring collecting game that was part of Sonic 3/Sonic and Knuckles.

skocznymroczny 6y ago
> I didn't know what hexidecimal was, so it was a wow moment when I realized a > 9 Reminds me when I was a kid in DOS days. I somehow managed to learn how to save a game, modify something (e.g. sell some items to get gold), save a game again, compare two savegames and then use a hex editor to modify the memory that changed between those two savegames. I also didn't really know hexadecimal back then, I just knew to put 0xff into all changed fields. I always wondered why it gave me "ugly" numbers like 4294967296, but I wasn't complaining because it was a lot of ingame gold.