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Comment by freedomben | Hacker News Reader

For those who didn't live through the era, it's hard to understate how much a Game Genie really did make things more fun and interesting. The thing basically gave you a huge menu of settings/tweaks you could make to a game, more common examples being "99 lives" or "Maximum HP" or something like that, but it could also make games more difficult for those who wanted that. It really felt to me like bumpers at a bowling alley, except the bumpers could be moved around to make it easier to get a strike or nearly impossible.

I never got one myself, but a friend did and we had endless fun tweaking different properties of all of our games. It was much more about exploration than it was about "cheating" at games. Game Genie was one of my first experiences of being mindblown at somebody's clever hack and use of technology, and I am grateful to have been able to live through that age.

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Two other fun details:

In some cases they could be used to get things that were in the game "legitimately" but which you might not have access to. E.g. getting Mew in Pokemon Blue/Red or Surfing Pikachu in Pokemon Yellow.

Sometimes the codes would break in interesting ways. For example, an invincibility code might cause problems if it was on during a battle that you are scripted to lose. Or the "invincibility" code might actually work by instantly healing you; so you might find out that you are vulnerable if an enemy is strong enough to take all of your health with a single hit.

Like the parent post said, there was a lot of experimentation even when everything was working "correctly".

In the name of "Show, Don't Tell," here are some fun examples:

Super Mario Bros 3 (NES + Game Genie) equipping Hammer Suit / Invincibility:

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/FUVOM3rxZ5U

Super Mario World (SNES + Game Genie) causing weird memory distortion glitches, enabling swimming anywhere, and other more useful things:

https://youtu.be/o7_eFcpwq24?si=_io5oSzpRxdvuEMp&t=164

Super Mario RPG (SNES + Game Genie) enabling the hidden developer debug menu:

https://youtu.be/bH-uh9BnIfU?si=0L7qviRp5T-Nokjs&t=402

Pokemon Red (Game Boy SP + Game Genie) unlocking the unobtainable Mew (which Nintendo only gave away at rare in-person tournament events) at game start:

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/yzqTRbixnak

Zelda Link's Awakening (Game Boy + Game Genie) changing the value of "1" rupee to "255" rupees for effectively infinite currency (the creator isn't aware of the significance of "255"):

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/dRFqU_Dz3M8

Super Mario 64 (N64 + Gameshark) adding Dorrie the Plesiosaur to Lethal Lava Land:

https://youtu.be/DVBMdwn8Kc0?si=cUZ5ioG1GEvY0l-H&t=84

Super Mario 64 (N64 + Gameshark) showing off the Gameshark menu and a bunch of Mario character animation swaps:

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/AptK2MbqLXQ

Banjo-Kazooie (N64 + Gameshark) replacing the main characters with the Rareware logo and adding an "infinite jump by pressing A" hack, which adds displacement or velocity with a button press (yes, this is totally absurd):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XF6pwm00vtY

Zelda Ocarina of Time (N64 + Gameshark) spawning a hidden developer-only enemy, the Starfox Arwing, which shoots lasers at Link:

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/KOQUhm1cNu8

Smash Bros 64 (N64 Emulator) spawning Master Hand (final boss) as a playable character in a standard stage:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A1i9TRLifaw

Zelda Majora's Mask (N64 + Gameshark) spawning special items, equipping the wrong items, using the wrong weapons, manually adjusting the clock, etc.:

https://youtu.be/ae2q9CjqXsc?si=IPB7XcPFWZyzpbh3

Smash Bros Melee (Gamecube emulator) spawning infinite items and damage for total chaos:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IDZZiL4rqlk

Quick Game Genie hardware overview:

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/WzHokvjdvDc

Goldeneye on N64 had some really cool hidden modes that could only be turned on with Game Genie. I don't recall which ones exactly required the Game Genie, but I'm pretty sure there was one that made everyone invisible until their first death in multiplayer. That was a lot of fun.

Some of the hidden stuff in Goldeneye was available without memory hacking, it just required a long sequence of button presses that was unknown for a fair amount of time. I believe stuff like invisibility in multiplayer or the special developer models are only available via button sequences.

I memorized the invisibility sequence. Grabbing Oddjob and smashing in that invis cheat was a sure way to make everyone hate you at a party. Oddjob was a good pairing because you weren't completely invisible, so his short stature/hitbox made the effect more scummy.

I just liked to make everyone wear sunglasses. Plus loading the tank into every level possible.

Game genie was only on regular Nintendo. Those other modes on goldeneye were an Easter egg built into the game, iirc

You're right that N64 did not have Game Genie (Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis also did), but N64 did have Gameshark, which was the spiritual successor to Game Genie (along with Action Replay). There is a project (https://github.com/JCR64/GoldenEye-007-N64-Gun-Game) that adds games to Goldeneye via Gameshark

From your first link - I apparently still have 'xnkxglie' memorized...

> E.g. getting Mew in Pokemon Blue/Red

0115D8CF is one of those sequences that is permanently burned into my brain to the same level as FCKGW

Wow. Talk about burn in. RHQQ2 I think was the next part. It's been over a decade since I used that code...

UUDDLRLRBASlSt

I have a hunch I’ll somehow remember the Konami Code well after I’ve forgotten everything else.

Not a Game Genie code but I have this catchy thing burned into my wetware:

Down, Up, Square, Triangle, Triangle, O, Down, Up, Square, Triangle

It's for MediEvil (PS1) and 'spells' Dust To Dust, fitting for the game's theme.

Mew can also be obtained through glitches without any game alteration devices.

Correct, however I’m afraid I can’t award any points because you didn’t begin with “Um actually” (also no idea why the downvote on your comment)

Edit: wording

The game genie did not give you a menu, you inputed codes which would persistently modify the memory map of the cartridge allowing for things like 99 lives or max Hp. The “menu” you describe was a booklet containing every game and a list of code changes.

Of course you could write in your own codes and make your own hacks but a lot of the time you ended up with garbled graphics or an unbootable game. They did keep this developer documentation to a minimum and this was before the internet. Although my local BBS had an ascii document detailing game genie’s internals and how to write your own codes, it was far from the reach of most 10 year olds

The game genie knockoff clone (I forget the name but remember the ads lol) had all of the codes in memory and as such gave you a menu to choose from

>Of course you could write in your own codes and make your own hacks but a lot of the time you ended up with garbled graphics or an unbootable game.

My favorite one I ever randomly got was on one of the Mega Man games. The bullets had no momentum but still worked. You could "place" a bullet and the enemy would walk into it and die.

SXEZSKOZ - Skywalker

Relevant Isaac: https://bindingofisaacrebirth.wiki.gg/wiki/Anti-Gravity

I managed to figure out hacking NES Game Genie codes pretty well at about 14, even without any documentation besides the Genie book itself.

I'd read enough library books about computers to understand binary and hexadecimal. So from the existing codes in the Genie book (like 5 lives / 99 lives / etc), I figured out how those values were coming from some of the letters defining binary/hex values. So I could extrapolate to more codes for different values. And from there I realized the other letters must specify the memory location, so I could bump that too and change some different stats that weren't in the book. I particularly had fun with Final Fantasy 1, where I figured out how to set inventory values and even tried out-of-range values and got items that didn't exist.

What I didn't know until years later was the difference between 6-letter (3 byte) and 8-letter (4-byte) codes. The additional byte in the longer code specifies a value such that the override takes place only if the memory location already equals that value. The purpose is to handle bankswitching (memory mappers), to have the code active only when the correct memory bank is. In practice, what this meant was that randomly trying 8-letter codes almost never did anything (1/256 that you happen to hit the right value) and so I only tried the shorter ones, and found a few weird effects from them.

> The game genie did not give you a menu, you inputed codes which would persistently modify the memory map of the cartridge allowing for things like 99 lives or max Hp. The “menu” you describe was a booklet containing every game and a list of code changes.

Yes definitely, I meant the booklet as the "menu" (just like many restaurants give you a menu that is like a booklet) and decided to call it that so it would be more relatable, but yes it was just a series of codes, but codes you read off the paper similar to a menu (or maybe better, a dictionary or index?)

I never used the knockoff clone, but now I'm feeling some very, very delayed FOMO :-D

That's still a menu. Menu is also a generic term for any selection set, and menus printed on signs and cards are still called...menus.

(Edit: I think the story below was for the original Playstation, with it's action-replay expansion port module. Should still have it somewhere in storage )

I also remember it having a serial or parallel port (at least the european Action Replay did), which you could hook upto a PC and with some debugging-software, do things like runtime memory manipulation, breakpoints and other nice debugging tools.

I think you could even run your own (small) binaries by sending them to the cartridge/addon, but this was ~20+ years ago, so the details lack me.

Was GameShark the knockoff you're thinking of?

It was the name of the game in PSX type stuff for this.

And they didn't obfuscate the hex addresses like the game genie did IIRC.

I hacked my own codes on things like xenogears and vagrant story , good times. Almost as fun as save file hacking

You could also find new codes in magazines like Nintendo power which was always fun.

a list of known games and tested "well-behaving" codes

the really fun part was exploring building your own codes and how/why they worked or didn't

>The game genie knockoff clone

GameShark!

I was one of the unfortunate suckers who paid around $100 USD to get one shipped from Canada before the US ban lifted, but it sure made renting games from video stores a lot more satisfying.

My favorite use of the Game Genie (Well, _Super_ Game Genie) was finding codes that would break a game in a way that made it more challenging--but not impossible--to play. Generally, this meant graphical glitches. But sometimes it meant stuff like changing how the character moved or making power-ups/items do random things.

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