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
When Nintendo fought a device that gave Mario 'new superpowers'
41–50 of 62 posts
Re: When Nintendo fought a device that gave Mario 'new superpowers'
#42I 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 wondere…
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.
Re: When Nintendo fought a device that gave Mario 'new superpowers'
#43Towards 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?
Nintendo literally invented the App Store model.
yes and no, I think. The aggressive gatekeeping might have been popularized by them, but Xbox Live Arcade in late 2004 was probably the first mass-market implementation of that model even if iOS's store quickly became the biggest one once it launched in 2008.
Re: When Nintendo fought a device that gave Mario 'new superpowers'
#44I 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…
I also had a game genie. There was a tendency for the nes to bug out when the gg was in use, but not when it wasn't. The thing is though, the issues started to manifest more and more over time even when the gg wasn't in use. There certainly felt and appeared to be a correlation between the use of the gg and the console not working properly anymore.
That said, I definitely used said Mario cheats and modifiers, also battletoads, and quite a few other games. Flicking through the old glossy paged code manual was always fun - I even bought a couple of games I had previously rented or borrowed based on the extra help the gg could give.
Re: When Nintendo fought a device that gave Mario 'new superpowers'
#45I guess nowadays Nintendo would win the case.
Re: When Nintendo fought a device that gave Mario 'new superpowers'
#46Man, 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 lo…
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.
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.
Re: When Nintendo fought a device that gave Mario 'new superpowers'
#47Man, 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 lo…
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.…
If this is what scared you from computer science, then if game genie didn't exist, something else would have scared you.
Re: When Nintendo fought a device that gave Mario 'new superpowers'
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
They were just coming out of the Atari crash, which in a large part was blamed on a surplus of shitty games.
The 2600 was not exactly easy to make any good games with either, containing only 128 bytes of RAM and having very primitive graphics capabilities.
I had to double-check this because I was sure you must have made a typo. Indeed, it was 128 bytes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_2600
In that time the code and "assets" (such as they were) didn't reside in RAM (it was all in the cartrige), so this was only for a game state. Still, other home computer systems at that time (while addmittedly a few times more expensive) had plenty more ram, measuring in kilobytes!
Re: When Nintendo fought a device that gave Mario 'new superpowers'
#49I 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.
Re: When Nintendo fought a device that gave Mario 'new superpowers'
#50I 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…
I also 'had a Game Genie', but I didn't have a NES. I didn't even know it was a product for the NES. I had a Game Genie for the (orig.) Nintendo Game Boy. I don't remember much about it, except that it didn't fit with the rubber protector.
I do remember my favorite games for the Game Boy: Mystic Quest and Speedball 2.