When Nintendo fought a device that gave Mario 'new superpowers'
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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.
As it turns out though, the pin array can be easily removed and serviced (just clean the pins and gently bend them back into shape) with next to zero risk of damaging the NES. Of course, none of us had the web to look any of this up back in the day, and we were left with schoolyard superstitions like blowing on the cartridge. Now though, it’s quite easy to get a “dead” NES working again. Or just get the revised NES model from 1993 that dumped the NES10 lockout chip and the failure prone front loading slot.
I got an NES in 1988 when I was 4 or 5 and it died in 1993 and I got the new design for my birthday (a month before I got an SNES for Christmas, so it didn’t get a ton of use). I stupidly sold it at a garage sale for $20 in 1995, not realizing it would be worth a ton later on. But in 2001 or 2002, I actually took that original NES to an authorized repair center, they shipped it off and it returned, essentially brand new. It still works today. As I recall, I paid less than $50 for the repair, which was less than a front-loading NES was going for at the time on eBay. The fact that Nintendo would service a system that was 16 or 17 years old always stuck with me, especially since Sony disavowed working on a 1996 or 1997-era PSX at that same time (I managed to fix it myself, but Sony was utterly disinterested in even allowing me to pay to repair a misaligned laser and just wanted me to buy the redesigned PS One). It’s part of why I’ve continued to be a loyal Nintendo customer for more than 30 years.
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.
I do remember my favorite games for the Game Boy: Mystic Quest and Speedball 2.
I'm amazed at the number of times I heard about Nintendo basically shooting themselves in the foot just to retain more control. Like banning Psycrow from Mario maker. Using content identification to silence audio from streamers. Taking down fan-made Mario-related content. Every one of those bringing them free advertisement and more customers.
I'm surprised that smm rom-hacks still exist given the restrictions.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_Galoob_Toys,_Inc._v._Nin....
(Perhaps successfully later on with the DMCA.)
(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 and 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.)
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/ and pressing the encode button and copying the encoded URL.
At least that's if I recall correctly and it wouldn't surprise me if other servers do handle things in zany ways.
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.
Video game crash of 1983 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_crash_of_1983
Back when BP spilt oil, people refused to buy their gas. Where is that outrage for these companies anti consumer practices?
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
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... . 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.)
With multiplayer games cheating is definitely a TOS violation but again not copyright infringement.
If I modify my honda civic with a body kit I'm breaking IP?
If I put a sticker over the apple logo on my MBP I'm infringing on their design?
to me the modification of bits in MY Nintendo from MY Cartridge should be none of their business.
The things you describe are legitimately derivative works in the scope of copyright's worldview.
The issue is that viewing every single idea or concept as "property" with an owner and a price tag attached is a fundamentally broken model.
My original point about the idea that someone can own a song or a number as if it were property is fundamentally insane.
The fact that it being a violation or not depending upon whether the song is sung in public or in private illustrates that point nicely.