Nintendo SUED and LOST... So What Happened to Game Genie?
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- čas přidán 23. 09. 2022
- Game Genie was a game cheating device created by Codemasters and released in the United States by Galoob. In this video I talk about its history and what ended up happening to it.
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www.nintendolife.com/features...
www.nesdev.org/wiki/Game_Genie
www.plagiarismtoday.com/2013/...
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#nintendo #gamegenie #retrogaming #retrogames #NES - Hry
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More videos sound great! Your uploads are amazing when you do eventually upload!
How tf is the comment 11h ago and the video is 1h💀☠💀💀☠
@@supahmario64fan I uploaded and scheduled the video last night 👍
@@itsgruz ahhhhhh ok
@@itsgruz Is it possible to do a video on the save wizard and give your thoughts about it and you could compare it to the other cheat devices mentioned in this video?
I'm 39, got the Game Genie when it first came out, and play it STILL with my kids (using your videos) to make crazy Mario 1 games. They love it and we laugh so hard making glitchly combos. And I NEVER put together that it had 3 lines, like 3 WISHES! This is why we need you Gruz!!
a year behind you my dude, a friend gave me his game genie back when I was like 9 or 10 living in some apartment complex. It was the coolest sh*t to be able to revisit my NES games and screw around with them after I had moved on to the Genesis and newer consoles were right around the corner. Another friend had it for genesis, and I have a distinct memory of either the GG manual or one of the quarterly companion pamphlets calling Hyper Sonic in S3&K "Super Duper Sonic" lol
without the game genie there will
be no game shark.
Yeah I never put that together either until now. Awesome profile pic btw.
Funny the sega gensis one and gamegear had more than 3 lines 5 if i can recall correctly.
Same here I’ll be 40 this month I miss the good old days
The Game Boy lasted so long in the industry it not only got a Game Genie but also a Game Shark and an Action Replay giving portable fans multiple ways to enhanced their games. While you can't get Mew for Pokemon Red and Blue on Game Genie, you certainly can on Game Shark.
Brainboy was a side project of game geine iirc
I certainly remember getting mew on red/blue with a game genie and still have my cartridge somewhere that I did it on.
You don't need any of them to get Mew...there's a fun method of getting one in red and blue
@@AzraelThanatos I remember doing this when I was a kid, but it required battling a trainer early in the game and I had already past it. My brother is an awesome brother and let me restart his Blue version so I could try it out :) It worked
This is incorrect for Mew. You can get Mew with a Game Genie very easily. There are codes for certain encounter areas and you change which pokemon spawns. I’ve also messed around looking at the ROM mapping and determined you can even change their levels and made codes that work.
One of the reasons I didn't get excited about the mini-console boom was the fact I couldn't stick in a Game Genie
That’s what he said
mini genesis by atgames
But you can still hack them to add more games or even add the option to load cheats also on emulators you can load way more than 3 cheats, you get about as many "wishes" as the game can handle before crashing (I almost guarantee you won't get to that limit unless you're loading thousands of codes at a time).
The DS/3DS are some of the best systems to emulate on.
@@draconic5129 or like... use the device you left this comment with.
One of things I absolutely love about hacking devices...uh I mean "game enhancers", is its possible to find hidden content or unused content within a game. There were a couple of codes released for the Gameshark for WWF Smackdown 2: KYR that allowed you to play as Ken Shamrock & Big Show. They were out of WWE at the time the game released, but not completely removed from the game's files.
I remember some hacking devices like GameShark that reinstated the Japanese Version of the games from back in the day..
Yep, they allowed you to access unused or beta content, as long as the data still remained in the game. It was awesome, especially if fully functional. There are many examples of things that are either almost finished or completely finished but not used for various reasons. Many old rpgs usually have a handful of interesting unused items.
game genies soul rest in game shark.
Castlevania: Symphony of the Night had a lot of items removed in the US version that worked in the Japanese. They looked glitchy, but they were fun to play with.
One that immediately comes to mind for me is Jade Cocoon 2, the fan community fixed their game with these codes.
There's an NES inspired indie game that came out fairly called Infernax . It had a Game Genie reference that was really well done. There's a a statue hidden in a corner of the map and when you interact with it you get the "Game Wizard" that looks nearly identical to the old code entry screen. It gives you various in game cheats and effects you can then toggle on and off if you know the proper codes.
Axiom Verge includes an actual code system that will act like modern trainers. That is, using these style of codes will alter memory values for the game, making it work differently.
and Retro City Rampage made parody of Game Genie called Great Gamedini. main character once called him to not drive around for 3 hours and artificially lengthen game even more
I love the absolute power move of going up to Sega and just saying "Hey, this is happening, and if you disagree, look at what happened to good 'ol Nintendo over there."
Chad Galoob
In Beanie Siegel voice: Either get down, or lay down 😂😂😂
@@darnellhagood1052Yea but hopefully not with Beanie's ridiculously terrible acting attached to it cuz seriously if someone approached me like that I'd start laughing my ass off
Don’t forget about us console modders, since it’s always offline (Switch, PS4 for example) you can do whatever you want to do without risking your system and/or account being banned for cheating
Oh yeah
isnt there a detection thing?
@@dorkfish1275 That only triggers if you connect to the internet, and only if you do certain things.
#CWCheat
#TempAR
Only no talent pussies need to cheat.
Did you know, on NES, you could stick 2 Game Genies on and enter twice as many codes? I only remember this failing on a couple games that have batteries. It worked on everything else every time.
I discovered this by being a petty brat who wouldnt share my Game Genie with my sister, so we ended up with 1 each. Got the idea to stick them together, and it worked!
That's awesome! I guess that's how emulators can have more than 3 codes
@@nthgth Since Game Genie codes can be translated into memory addresses and values to modify, you can have a big list and the emulator will just apply each changed value at the given address.
This is wild. I had no idea, never tried this, and never heard this until today. Im surprised we never tried it.
I found that out in 92 when my friend and I had genies and stacked them. I published this trick in 1994 in my fanzine.
how would this work with the game genie gui only having 3 lines?
this made games easier, but it also could be used to give new challenge to games. there were codes that made every enemy on super mario bros throw hammers. there were also a lot of codes that just made things more interesting. Also you could hook up 2 of them to get 6 codes
... I wonder what the minimum amount of Game Genies hooked up as a daisy chain would be required to make a game using only Game Genie codes?
Don't forget the Super Mario Bros. LSD code lol
game genie truly was the video game enhancer
@@DragonGrafx-16
I never heard of this code.
I was always more interested in using the game genie to cause glitchy effects rather than beat the game. One of the first things I did was use my game genie with FF2 on SNES to walk through walls and sequence break the game. Later, when I got a gameshark, and just got access to the internet, I was looking up random sites with codes for Goldeneye. Not to beat the game, but to find deleted content, or travel to secret areas, or glitch out the graphics. Games felt so much more mysterious back then.
I completely screwed at least 2 Final Fantasy 2 saves for SNES playing with values. I was 14 trying to figure out how to have Fu So Ya, Golbez, and a Chocobo in my party and I never did get all three of them without deleting/corrupting a save lol. I found out it's MUCH easier to do FF7 PC and put Sephiroth and a Chocobo in your party permanently.
Ah, a simple time that was. Honestly I think it'd be pretty neat for game Devs; at least on purely single player games, to go ahead and start throwing cheat codes back in for people to discover. Sure, give a warning that using them will make your save invalid for earning achievements and such from then on, so people who DO put the hard work in aren't being invalidated, but let the people who just wanna fly around with their character in a T pose while firing Mario style fireballs like a chain gun have their fun too.
Achievements lmfao
Frankly I love it when games leave the dev console in and don't even attempt to secure it. The purpose of a game is to have fun, and digging through the "employees only" area of the game usually yields pretty interesting results. But yeah achievemnts are a waste of time, they aren't "putting in hard work". Somewhere some software developer was like "Hey, I bet we can convince some idiot to spend 100 hours of his life doing nothing but kicking this door," and all earning that achievement indicates is that you are that one idiot.
The only Game Genie that I got to use when I was younger was the SNES one. My cousin had it when I used to visit him. I didn't think much of Game Genie at the time since I was too young, but it was fun seeing different effects via the different codes in the various games. When I was using the Game Genie on the SNES version of Chrono Trigger, I would stumble across two cut songs that would be used in the DS version of Chrono Trigger. Those songs were Battle 2 and Singing Mountain.
The Battle 2 song would be implemented for DS Chrono Trigger's monster battle mode and Singing Mountain got in as a bonus dungeon in DS Chrono Trigger. On hindsight, I wish I still had access to Game Genie (or bought my own).
Great video. I never understood Nintendo's stance on the Game Genie until i was an adult and in marketing. The Game Genie made kids enjoy their games much longer, which made them not purchase / ask for new games (in theory). It's all about money.
back in the day Nintendo were being
a bunch of babies.
they even got pissed when sega
started there own game ratings.
like that's cheating.
I never thought about the idea that games lasting longer is technically a bad business model, that's very interesting. Personally, I've always just thought it was mostly that Nintendo is generally not fond of people modifying their games in any way. Now that I think about it, though, Nintendo has said themselves they consider ROM hacking and Pokémon nuzlockes to be on the same level (that is to say, very very bad). However, nuzlockes don't even modify the game at all, it's just a completely legitimate yet more challenging way of playing the original game! Thus, your comment has made me wonder: how much is it about improving length vs. modification of IP? Probably a healthy dose of both, I'd imagine...
Thank you for your insight! It's super intriguing to think about how companies operate in this sense, so getting a little bit more knowledge of a different perspective has really helped me see why Nintendo does what it does, as it often seems incredibly strange or counterproductive.
@@nemopouncey3827 I mean, did that really change? especially with fan-made content made around their IPs.
@@roshibomb4247 with nuzlocks, they were talking about modded nuzlocks lol
yeah fuck nintendo
There actually existed a Famicom version of the Game Genie which was sold by Realtec in places where clone consoles are more common.
As for Codemasters, they’re now better known as a purveyor of racing sims like Colin McRae and later DiRT. Sad that they got bought out by EA though.
The one bad thing about the Game Genie for the Sega Genesis is that, when combined with a Sonic game paired up with the tails "lock-on" cartridge, is that big "tower of game carts" rocked easily and the lightest bump would freeze your game :/
gotta clean all the carts, both male and female sides lol
Nah there is single cartridge now so you don't need lock on technology
Genesis > Sega CD > 32x > Game Genie > Sonic and Knuckles > Game
Tower of Power
The Game Genie didn’t always grant you 3 wishes sometimes one wish (code) would take up the spot of 2 or even all 3 wish slots for just one wish (code)
I was the first kid in school who heard of game genie before it came out from a radio interview with the producer. They all called me a liar. Then never gave me credit.
Liar
Liar
My favorite use of the Game Genie was for Dr. Mario making the pills not fall, making it easy to pass the higher levels on high speed and being able see what is flying. Also in 2 player mode, if the other guy wasn't aware of it, they would be stunned just long enough to get a lead on.
Truly one of the saddest parts of modern gaming is the loss of game enhancers. Yes, game enhancers. It is funny that the Game Genie was marketed as that... But your channel is a shining example of just how true that title is. Sure, we all used these things to cheat the games as kids, but as I grew up and found fun in a good challenge, I also realized all the fun in accessing cut or hidden content, bending the game to do new things or play differently, making it glitch out in interesting ways, or even creating new challenges - all possible thanks to these devices. By extension, built in cheat codes could allow for many similar things, and I sorely miss them as well.
Trophies and the like are nice, multiplayer isn't much my thing but also nice, but I still wish I lived in the timeline where these devices and cheats were embraced and things like competitive multiplayer and achievements were just disabled when using them. Video games were always products, but there was so much infused in them and the culture for the players own amusement, but as time goes on, despite how passionate many developers still are, they are less and less about the players and more about tricking the players into opening their wallet as much as possible for as little effort and cost on the publisher's end. Just my opinion, I like a lot of new games too but just how I feel as a whole.
Anyway, great video as always Gruz.
I'd gladly take cheat devices over trophies/achievements any day. Easily.
Some games had options to make it harder too. I would rather have fun and change the game however I want then have an achievement that will just be forgotten someday.
They’re not gone. If you have a PS4 get yourself Save Wizard.
Glad to see you active. One of the things I liked about GG was being able to begin at a certain level in games that didn't use passwords.
When I was still working in game design, the trophies weren’t the reason for not including cheat codes so much as the included feature required verification and approval from publishers like levels, DLC, and features and could introduce bugs so they were jettisoned because they were time consuming for the company….
And also not worth the cost…
To be honest, the more I think about it, why is the usage of big publishers still a thing? Like the big record labels, it feels like an obsolete concept that needlessly ties the hands of the actual creators. There are plenty of indie games that bypass them and some of those even have cheat codes.
I always thought the developers added them secretly and never let anyone else know.
@@szr8 funding. That's why there are still publishers
What I find neat about Game Genie is it's ability to patch broken games to play like it was intended to. Displaced Gamet does this all the time with broken jump physics, attack patterns, status effects, and such.
Fun fact, the first part of the code is the memory address you want to modify and the last two characters are the value you want to set for that address. If you want the code to be permanent and stay no matter what that usually requires a second code to tell it to stick and not be changeable.
Man, this video brung me back to when I never heard about cheat devices and experienced one for the first time. I was one of those maniacs that made the game harder for myself by limiting it to one life or having it spam enemies that dont usually belong in certain levels and spots.
Great video!
This is an absolutely fantastic documentary! I love deep dives into gaming history. I had the NES Game Genie, but I never had the version for the Genesis. A local retro game store near me usually has it in stock. I really should pick one up.
Huh? Super Nintendo did indeed have a Game Genie! I used it many times on games like Sim City and Maximum Carnage! The Game Boy also had it's own Game Genie, which was REALLY nice because it included a compartment to store the code book!!
4:54 imagine not watching the video before you leave an insipid comment
Man, I remember getting a Game Genie for Christmas when it first came out. That thing was worth its weight in gold and always took it with me when I went to a friends house. Unfortunately I lost it and forgot about it as I got older. Probably lent it out or forgot it at someone's place. Good times though! Thanks for bringing back some forgotten memories.
Cheat devices will be missed, the world has moved on to just using software to cheat but we will still have in our hearts using the physical devices to apply our cheats :')
That is true. Nowadays, consoles have online services and online games, and with companies being strict when it comes to cheating in online gaming, any company who releases a cheat device wind up risking legal action from Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo, or any third party because people used said device to cheat in online Call of Duty, as well as unless they state they cannot be held responsible for console bans, they can be sued by players who got banned.
Thanks for the awesome piece of history! Love what you do on your channel, so thanks for all your incredible work!
There was some work done to release the game genie for the nintendo wii. I worked with the company and wrote some of the software for a cheat device that was sold in chinese markets. It worked for the entire console, not just per game. When they talked about releasing it to the US market, they had the artwork that was very similar to what you showed for the DS game genie. I guess a deal fell through somewhere and it never made it to market.
no you didn’t
I had one rule for me and my nephews. No game genies or code breakers allowed til you beat the game the normal way first.
Ah, a real gamer. I knew a kid that claimed to have beaten nearly every NES game back in the day. It turned out he had used a game genie to beat them.
@@dinoflagella4185 yeah I didn't get my Game Genie til nearly the end of the Nintendo's rain. I didn't get the one for my SNES til after I had fully beat Zombies ate my neighbors and my Sega one after I had beat Comic Zone and Page Master
They never made a Game Genie for the Sega Master System. It pissed me off so much as a kid.
Years later, I found out they DID make an Action Replay for the Sega (in Europe). I finally scored one from Germany around a year ago. Still haven't used it.
I just don't play videogames like I used to.
There is a save editor for PS4/PS5 called the Save Wizard. It supports almost every ps4/ps5 game out there. It makes Resident Evil Village way more fun!
can you tell me more about this? :)
@@SuperHitman55 it’s a save editor. Save your ps4 save to a usb and edit the save on save wizard and plug the new save into the ps5 and there you go. It’s really easy
@@darkheartt302 It gives your save file mod tools?
@@SuperHitman55 whatever quick codes are posted or you can try advanced mode to write your own but it’s in hexadecimal. There is also a discord where people post the codes they come up with.
Excellent video! You've earned my like and subscription! It's very uplifting to hear tales of Galoob bossing around these bossy game companies like Nintendo and Sega themselves! You presented this in a real awesome manner. Cheers.
I miss game genie. Kind of wish something like this still exists today.
It does. There’s a program called Save Wizard for modding PS4 save files. I’ve been using it for years.
For PC there's CheatEngine which basically functions in the same way, although given the way modern systems allocate memory it often doesn't work. Also don't try using it on online multiplayer games, as you'll very quickly get caught and banned.
Game Genie also had codes in its handbook that allowed you to add some _NEW_ challenges by handicapping the player with things like lower jumps or only having ONE life. Nobody talks about that.
I am all for more Gruz! This is a very well made and interesting video.
Oh, Camerica was the US subsidary or Codemasters... Camerica = Codemasters America!
But most excellent video Sir, if you ever intend to follow it up with Nintendo NES lawsuits they lost, then you might want to look a the time they sued Blockbuster Video :)
I miss the days when games had built-in codes that were either cheats or just silly things like turning your car into a milk carton.
GameShark was also what really got me into computer science. The N64 was probably the best system for this - even though the GS was terribly, terribly designed, it did have built-in tools that used the Expansion Pak to let you edit memory and search for changes all right on the console itself. Then once you learned more advanced techniques you could plug it into a PC for even more tools.
Since N64 copies all code from the cartridge into memory before running it (since cartridges were slower than RAM) you could do all kinds of crazy things by patching the program itself, not just changing variables - the kinds of things Game Genie could do, but now you could have way more codes, and you didn't have to type them in every time.
The Codebreaker for Game Boy was also excellent, again offering powerful on-console tools, including save states!
There were big online communities dedicated to using these devices to make awesome mini-mods and sharing knowledge. It was such a fun way to learn about how games and computers work.
Sadly it all kinda collapsed in the GameCube era when the device makers got greedy and started removing these cool features and adding DRM, and then so did the community admins. By the time the Wii came along things had started to recover, but digital signatures made it virtually impossible to sell such devices. There are still communities of people who mess around with homebrew programs that serve the same purpose, but they're a shadow of what they once were - games, like you said, aren't designed the same anymore, and the barrier to entry is much higher. Instead of buying a thing and plugging it in, now you need to follow a multi-step guide to mod the system and then deal with updates...
I've been watching your videos for like, a decade at this point. I'm really glad you're still making them!
I love the game genie... it can make games easier, harder, weird rules, etc.
This is a cool video. And I never knew that the game genie people were the ones who initiated that lawsuit!
I remember Game Genie back in the day. I like how some of my Xbox One classic games (Doom and Duke Nukem 3D) have cheats but disable achievements
Gruz! Great job on the growth and view count! I’m rooting for you brother!
0:18 that perfectly explains the abundance of awful games back in those times. Back then effort wasn't put towards making better games it was put towards keeping people playing the games as long as possible. I get that their options were very limited but still.
Nostalgia makes you see things through rose-colored glasses, even if those things weren't that great. I remember having way more fun playing these older games back in the day then I did revisiting the games in recent times because after the nostalgia wore off I realized just how frustrating a lot of these games actually are.
True
Even though a lot of these comments are shitting on Nintendo they actually made games that still hold up today because they actually focused on fun and fairness, the original Super Mario Bros and Mario 3 are great examples of this with their accessible gameplay
At one point in time, a store called Spencer Gifts was selling the Camerica version of the NES GG. They got in trouble and had to remove them from their shelves. I remember calling Camerica, I got in big trouble for making the call to Canada, and they sent me one of their codebooks. Now, on to the issue of Galoob getting NOA to refrain from modding the NES to make it incompatible with the GG, they did so with the SNES version. I vividly remember that my copy of SF II Turbo and Mortal Kombat did not work when using the GG. Galoob was already aware of this problem and you had to send in your GG for an exchange that was compatible with not only the games that I just mentioned but those that made use of the SFX chip. Galoob found a workaround to get the SFX games to work even though the GG lacked the additional pins on both male and female connectors. When Nintendo released the Top Loader NES, you could get the GG to work in one of two ways. The first way was to practically shove the GG into the cartridge slot and just leave it there. The second way was to call Galoob and request the now extremely hard-to-find adaptor. What Nintendo did with the Top Loader was modified the cartridge slot by making it a little tighter so that it would almost always make a good connection with the cartridge. The GG was designed with a thicker chipboard designed for the original version of the NES, not the Top Loader. Which is why the PIN connector would always get screwed up. Now, since emulators have the ability to use GG and other cheat device codes, there is a website that still creates codes for all cheat devices to this very day. I have to be careful about entering a URL in a comment because YT has banned me for doing so. The name of the site is "Game Hacking dot net"
I recall certain SNES consoles that would scramble the game genies codes making the device useless. It was the SNES consoles that didn't have the lock in feature that older SNES carts had.
Also I had a game genie that had a broken black handle. So it was permanently in my NES. This actually made playing game easier. No more blowing in carts, fiddling left or right while hitting reset, etc. Even if you didn't want to cheat in a game it was easier to play your games.
Fun fact: There actually used to be a phone number Nintendo owned where you could ring them up of you were stuck on a certain videogame and they would help you out.
Pretty sure they charged per min tho
I used that once when I was a kid, the nintendo power hotline. My 20 minute call cost my parents like 60-70 dollars. There was NO internet back then. You couldn't look up Fatalities or moves for ANY of the mortal kombat characters. You had to know someone who knew the moves. My 20 minute call I was writing the whole time and I made a book with all the moves I could squeeze out of the other other person on the phone.
That binder of moves caused a few fights at the boys and girls club because people wanted to know the moves so badly. Eventually it was stolen from my locker at boys and girls club, someone smashed the lock off and nabbed it.
... and now you can just google everything.
can't wait for Codemasters to develop the PS5 Game Genie
There is kind of game genie for the ps4/ps5 called save wizard. It actually does work!
Great video Bro, keep growimg please, your narrator skills are nice.
My mom told me that when she and her sister were kids, they had Super Mario Bros. for the NES, but also had a thing called the Game Genie. She told me and my siblings what it was, and I honestly found it hard to believe, but this was when I was like much younger. I eventually did look into it and honestly this is so freaking cool- But I'm sad to see that it eventually went away and stuff.
"And stuff"
My understanding was the original “cheat codes” were originally designed for play testing scenarios for the QA team so they could get around certain situations to ensure they could play test different features/levels/situations without needing to play the game like normal. They eventually became known to the public and then integrated into games on purpose.
Fun fact: this actually marks the first and only time Nintendo actually lost in court
Not even close, one of very notable cases was them suing Blockbuster for renting games and Nintendo took a big L there as well.
If I recall, the reason why Galoob sued first was because Nintendo was telling stores that if they sell the Game Genie, then they would not be receiving Nintendo products. This was very anti-competitive and illegal for common sense reasons. It was a slam dunk for Galoob. Nintendo basically being stupid.
What about Mario Party Palm?
sometimes fun facts are wrong. thats the fun part.
@@Galford8322 hopefully Nintendo would not make the same mistake often, unlike what Disney is doing lately.
42 now, just finished building a "new" NES with the NESessity motherboard, a Hi-Def NES HDMI output, and managed to find an original Game Genie so I could relive the NES shenanigans of my childhood. My own kids are gonna love playing with this....
Not only are cheat codes vanishing, some publishers try to make you pay extra money for things like all weapons unlocked, ammo refill, etc.
5:07 ofc sega would they love there fans they love people who like to cheat
Game Genie 2 didn't come out?
It absolutely did. I LOVED that thing for the SNES.
I don't think they called it a "2" though. It was just Game Genie.
I remember getting the code updates for the SNES and NES edition of it and I loved how the SNES one snapped onto the cartridge.
5:01- He pointed out the Super Nintendo Game Genie. What he meant concerning the Game Genie 2 was that it was supposed to be a second revision of the SNES Game Genie.
Game genie, game shark, codebreaker... all was my jam as a kid. I use to LOVE the resident evil series, back when it was on the original playstation. The game shark letting me have invincibility, infinite ammo, rocket launcher, mini gun, etc, is what let me experience the game from start to finish, literally countless times, on my own. The uncle that had to play it to entertain me while i was at my aunts really grew to appreciate that lol.
I never actually realized the three lines three wishes connection but yeah that makes total sense
I always had a fascination with the Game Genie when it first released. Of course, the first one I bought was for the SNES. Later, I bought one for the Genesis & Gameboy.
I also subscribed to Galoob to receive updated Game Genie code books for SNES. The only problem is the books would only be for a limited amount of games & the codes were released several months after a game's release. We didn't have the internet back in those days.
I miss the days when you actually had to play the game to unlock things without spending extra money.
Thanks for dissecting this. I had no idea how this worked!!
I find is video to be very informative. It makes sense that cheat codes were only a necessity for some of the earlier titles like the NES and the Genesis. Like you said, they had more memory constraints. If the Game Genie was to be plugged into a Nintendo Switch, it would likely interfere with a difficult trophy. Good thing mods exist.
I had a game genie for every system I had.
I remember sitting up for HOURS imputing codes I made up and seeing how it would change things. Some really messed up the game 😂 smb3… I wanted unlimited hop socks tanookie suits… Mario came out looking like an old boot and a minecraft character😂
I like how the game genie lets you manipulate any line of data from an NES game, you could literally change ANYTHING if you knew where to look within the code of a game
My favorite use of the game shark for ps1 was giving myself units in FFT that you normally can't get access to. It was fun to mess around with after you already beat the game a few times.
I don't think I'll ever forget riding my bike to one of the local video rental stores when I was a kid and praying that the stack of nintendo power and gamepro magazines they had would have something about the game I was stuck on.
Game genie was a life changer for me as a kid I had it for every system I own. I remember on weekends I would take when their little update magazines or their big code book that came with my game genie to the rental store to figure out what game I wanted to rent that weekend and beat and I would literally choose games based upon how good the codes were for them and how it would make the game a lot more playable and easy for a bad gamer like myself
Subbed! Great Video Man
Am I the only one who rarely if ever used the Game Genie to actually cheat and more so enjoyed accessing unused content or just totally screwing the game up? Starting _Final Fantasy VI_ with 99 Illuminas and Paladin Shields is fun for about ten minutes until you realize how overpowered you'll be for the rest of the game. Getting General Leo in your party after he's dead? Or being able to put **Kefka** in your party? Now that's cool.
Ahhhhhhh..... Game Genie. The start of my game hacking/modding/editing. Went from figuring out that adding 'FF' at the end of my codes maxed their values in Final Fantasy (NES) to working on emulated server systems for ASCENT pirated world of warcraft and more recently singleplayer pirated Escape From Tarkov.
Thank you Galoob. I wouldn't have posted over 20 Skyrim mods, 100s of Pokemon codes, and a few custom mods for FF7 PC without having my interest sparking in how video games work.
Nor would I have spent 100s of hours contributing to and modding for the Monster Hunter World: Iceborne community. Game Genie taught me 'I' control how I want to play my games. It gave me the power to enjoy my games on easier and harder difficulties not intended by the game devs. Having enough skill on a game genie meant you basically had scaled difficulty options on games before they even existed. You could take 2x dmg from everything on Zelda NES, or take .5 dmg. To little 9 year old me that felt like the power of the world in your hand. Little did I know I would be able to make almost every game my bitch later in life.
I accredit all my interest in video game hacking/modding/editing to Game Genie.
Great video! keep doing these great videos!
One of the best parts of my childhood... man, kids born after the 80's just missed out.
I’m 18 and I found my parents’ game genie and was fascinated by it. I’ve also found plenty of Minecraft mods named after the systems, one of them named GameShark
Thanks algorithm... I missed this notification somehow so it was a nice surprise to see this in my feed.
Good job. Nostalgic and informative
i like how at the start of the video the captions just show the entire video script lol
"Days"? Are you kidding? For a 7 year old, Blaster Master, Mega Man, Gouls and Ghost and Ninja Gaiden took me nearly a decade to beat!
Fun fact: Codemasters is still alive and kicking with, of all things, the DIRT series of rally racing games!
AWESOME video I leant a ton about Game Genie I didn't know.
4:13 - I Was Distracted with Mario Eating Bowser in the middle of the video
Crazy, I was just thinking about the Game Genie and whatever happened to it. Great video that eerily hit the spot for me!
Also I agree I'm completely fine with Game Genie, GameShark, etc. no longer being relevant. Most games these days don't have that "arcade" kind of feel to them where you just blow up everything on the screen or need infinite lives to get further into the game. Cheat codes a la Goldeneye 64 have their place, but that kind of mayhem is really a relic of a bygone era in a lot of video games. Maybe it will make a comeback with mobile games going back to basics? Hard to say.
Gloob firing first was an absolutely genius move and probably made a huge difference
I enjoyed the NES Game Genie too as a kid, but it is most definitely a copyright infringement. The courts missed the mark on that one. Saying it "doesn't permanently alter the game" is a red herring. Every copyright infringement in history never permanently altered the original material either. The Game Genie still takes NES designs: cartridge slot dimensions, connector specifications, memory maps, etc. This outcome is ridiculous. And for Galoob to actually attack Nintendo first in court, demanding that they cannot even protect the hardware from this accessory: totally absurd. The law really dropped the ball here.
As long as a game is offline, I see no reason to stop "cheats" in games if you can really call it that. Some games were so brutally difficult that you had to start over the ENTIRE GAME for dying only 3 times that it was invertible that some way to get around that would appear. Imagine how angry people would be if most current games forced you to start over from scratch for failing a level or just stop playing for the day.
These videos are so awesome gruz! YOU ROCK!
I really truly miss cheat devices.
Still use mine for genesis
I'm 38. I can remember buying the Xploder for my PS1 and entering the endless 50+ pages of code for the Tomb Raider Laura Croft nude code. Yes, it actually works. I miss the days of cheat codes.
Please go in depth of the others like GameShark ect.. I haven’t seen anyone talked about their histories. It’s always GameGenie
I think I still have my old game genie for my Gameboy. I had a super Gameboy cartridge for my SNES mini as a kid and decided to do my first ever mod by taking a pair of nail clippers and trimming back the molding just enough that it would fit around my super Gameboy, while leaving enough that it could grip onto both the cartridge and my Gameboy for support, as when my cousin tried it with his, he had trimmed off the entire bit which made it way too wobbly and would crash his games if he wasn't careful.
Excellent content.
Subbed
I like to thing modding and homebrew is the spiritual successor to the Game Geine. You modify a game using it's code by injecting your own code. You can even use it to make the game that much easier. The difference between the two is that modding is community made and the code has to be a lot more precise, while the Game Geine was sold by a company and used any random code since it was modifying the hexcode
I didn't own one but a friend did and sometimes we would mess with it. We found that stuff like infinite lives or ammo often made the game less fun. Also it often made the games very glitchy.
Love the simons quest draculas castle music, my favorite!
I was born in 1996 and I had no idea this thing ever existed until now. Thanks for teaching me a little bit about gaming history I find it fascinating.
I remember something called GameShark being namedropped which I assume was some sort of competitor to Game Genie.
Nice video as usual.
It’s missing some important information. Codemasters came up with Aladdin game enhancer that allowed them use cheaper cartridges than official expensive Nintendo ones and few other Nintendo restrictions. That whole court case allowed them to hold it’s release until 1993 when SNES was already out, so after all they lost a battle to win a war. That’s a TLDR version and I will get into more details in comment for those interested in topic
One of the more recent forms of "Cheat Codes" I can think of is with Oxygen Not Included, where you can just drop a blank text document named "debug_enable" into it's folder, boot up a save, hit Backspace and access different World Edit stuff than what the Sandbox gives
The reason these cheat devices fell out of popularity is likely down to system software/firmware updates made by the consoles manufacturers (Microsoft, Nintendo and Sony) which would block any said cheat devices and not just modchip devices from future firmware updates, which has always been the case since the seventh generation of game consoles. (6:06)