The Story of the Game Genie, a Cheat Device Nintendo Tried (and Failed) to Kill

Interesting legal tidbits:

  They even had Shigeru Miyamoto in court - he came to San Francisco.
  They were saying that because the player was plugging in the
  interface and making Mario jump higher, the player was making a
  derivative work, and we were helping him infringe copyright. In the
  end, the judge said it was not permanently changed when you
  unplugged it, and for a derivative work to exist it has to be
  permanent.
  
  [...] Some of the team's tactics were quite interesting,
  highlighting the hypocrisy of Nintendo, as Menzies explains. "I
  helped with the lawsuit by creating non-Game Genie codes that could
  be entered into an official Nintendo game's own password system and
  would crash it, cause graphical corruption, weird behaviour, and so
  on. Basically all of the things that Nintendo's lawsuit accused
  Game Genie of doing, so we could say to the judge 'look, this isn't
  anything to do with us, Nintendo's games do this on their own, it's
  just how video games work'."

I remember the first time I learned about the Game Genie.

I was 12 when I walked into our local game store late one night and saw Super Mario Bros 3 being played on the big screen, except Mario had 99 lives, jumped higher than the screen, and looked like a beetle throwing hammers. WTF!

I asked the guy playing how he did it, and he replied with one word, "genie". I was so floored by what I was seeing, I didn't even think to ask any follow up questions.

I spent the next three months searching every corner of that game for the Genie, like he was a super secret character built-in. I only stopped after finding the Game Genie for sale at that same store :D

So many good memories of this device.

I remember playing Final Fantasy 2 with the Genie making our character invulnerable and reaching a boss in the dwarf fortress whose life points were somehow coupled to ours.

It took us kids a while (over two hours of battling) to figure out we had to turn off the genie on this battle to finally end it!

Funny to read this at this time of year. I remember my sibling and I pouring over the absurdly small book for the Game Boy version, pictured in one of the photos, one Christmas. It seemed magical that every game we ever came across was in there. Little did we know that someone had been grinding out game after game. There was a kick from knowing that you were somehow modifying the game in real time, even though I was too young to know about hacking culture.

One of the coolest tricks during gaming's golden age!

I even remember Nintendo power running an article telling people NOT to buy these.

The original was awesome but the first external mods to the PS1 also has some nifty stuff to hack around with just an lpt1 port away

That page layout is puke. The number of ads is really distracting when trying to read on mobile.

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