In fact, creating codes has become a bit of a niche for some of the more technical types, and you’ll find many threads on NintendoAge where people are requesting new codes for older games that perform a specific function. Because it acts as a pass-through between the console and cartridge, you can implement changes in real-time. It's an organic piece of hardware whereby codes can be created and changed by anyone at anytime, whether the game is 20 years or 2 years old. "One of the interesting aspects of the Game Genie is that I spoke to Dain Anderson, founder of, about this process. Even today, gamers are developing new codes. Codes were traded among gamers, and published in booklets collecting the best ones. By putting those two pieces of information together, you got a code. So to create a Game Genie "code" (their simplified alphabetical interface for inputting memory locations and values to pop into them), an enterprising gamer could find the location, then experiment with possible contents to pop in there-lots of contents could just crash the game, but ultimately you could hit on something usable. The Game Genie thus used two important pieces of information to make an important effect occur within the game: The location of a variable, and the content of that variable. (For the record, apparently the code SXIOPO offers infinite lives for both players in SMB.) So by finding "How Many Lives Left" in Super Mario Bros., you could switch the standard number of lives (three) with a much bigger number, and play the game with effectively infinite lives. By finding these locations (almost always through trial and error-because game developers don't share that information), Game Genie users could then insert new numbers into them. Sometimes these locations in memory contained simple numbers. Each Nintendo game cartridge set up a series of locations within the NES's memory where various pieces of information were stored-the number of lives you had left, the level you began on, the items you had, or even cooler things like the height your character could jump. The Game Genie's technical functions were surprisingly basic when examined from a computer science perspective. From there on out, the Game Genie acted as an intermediary between cartridge and NES, intercepting requests and spitting out different results based on the codes that had been entered. On that menu, the player could enter one or more codes, which would modify certain aspects of the game. When using a Game Genie, the NES started up showing a basic Game Genie menu. Here's a totally rad commercial (right down to the Bill and Ted knockoff dudes) explaining, in kid-friendly terms, how the Game Genie worked:Ī Slightly More Technical Explanation of the Genie's Magic So the good news was that if you were willing to keep the Game Genie in there forever, it could provide a more reliable connection for your games, and was probably better than blowing into your cartridges. But if you left it inserted permanently, it effectively replaced the NES cartridge slot, and that connection could be more reliable than inserting and removing games within the NES itself. This connection ended up being a double-edged sword: using the Game Genie could eventually damage your NES's cartridge slot if you inserted and removed it a lot. The Game Genie had a wicked set of connector pins that attached to the NES's slot with a death grip. The NES Game Genie was designed to be crammed into the front of the NES it stuck out the front and you had to attach game cartridges to the slot on the Game Genie. Plugging Inįrom the start, the Game Genie was marketed as a "game enhancer," though there's a fine line between "enhancing" and "cheating." In short, it was able to modify games at startup, so you could change them in ways that made your gaming life easier-typical enhancements involved adding lives or weapons, or in rare cases strange things like accessing hidden areas of the game that weren't normally playable. Here's exactly how it worked, and how people are still using it today. with infinite lives, or get infinite rockets in Metroid. Here was a device that would let me play Super Mario Bros. The Game Genie was the technological holy grail of my Nintendo-playing childhood.
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