I had a game genie, pretty sure it was responsible for giving my nes the blanking screen of death.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
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.<p>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.<p>Nintendo's misguided hatred of memory editors goes beyond just punishing players. They essentially against the <i>nerds</i> 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.
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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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<p>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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Interesting mention in the video -<p>Video game crash of 1983
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_crash_of_1983" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_crash_of_1983</a>
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. <a href="https://youtu.be/PCvIZ80RIhE" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/PCvIZ80RIhE</a>
Nintendo is the Apple of gaming. Anti consumer, anti developer, big marketing budget.<p>Back when BP spilt oil, people refused to buy their gas. Where is that outrage for these companies anti consumer practices?
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.