I remember playing Final Fantasy 2 with the Genie making our character invulnerable and reaching a boss in the dwarf fortress whose life points were somehow coupled to ours.
It took us kids a while (over two hours of battling) to figure out we had to turn off the genie on this battle to finally end it!
I remember the first time I learned about the Game Genie.
I was 12 when I walked into our local game store late one night and saw Super Mario Bros 3 being played on the big screen, except Mario had 99 lives, jumped higher than the screen, and looked like a beetle throwing hammers. WTF!
I asked the guy playing how he did it, and he replied with one word, "genie". I was so floored by what I was seeing, I didn't even think to ask any follow up questions.
I spent the next three months searching every corner of that game for the Genie, like he was a super secret character built-in. I only stopped after finding the Game Genie for sale at that same store :D
They even had Shigeru Miyamoto in court - he came to San Francisco.
They were saying that because the player was plugging in the
interface and making Mario jump higher, the player was making a
derivative work, and we were helping him infringe copyright. In the
end, the judge said it was not permanently changed when you
unplugged it, and for a derivative work to exist it has to be
permanent.
[...] Some of the team's tactics were quite interesting,
highlighting the hypocrisy of Nintendo, as Menzies explains. "I
helped with the lawsuit by creating non-Game Genie codes that could
be entered into an official Nintendo game's own password system and
would crash it, cause graphical corruption, weird behaviour, and so
on. Basically all of the things that Nintendo's lawsuit accused
Game Genie of doing, so we could say to the judge 'look, this isn't
anything to do with us, Nintendo's games do this on their own, it's
just how video games work'."
Funny to read this at this time of year. I remember my sibling and I pouring over the absurdly small book for the Game Boy version, pictured in one of the photos, one Christmas. It seemed magical that every game we ever came across was in there. Little did we know that someone had been grinding out game after game. There was a kick from knowing that you were somehow modifying the game in real time, even though I was too young to know about hacking culture.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 33.5 ms ] threadI remember playing Final Fantasy 2 with the Genie making our character invulnerable and reaching a boss in the dwarf fortress whose life points were somehow coupled to ours.
It took us kids a while (over two hours of battling) to figure out we had to turn off the genie on this battle to finally end it!
I was 12 when I walked into our local game store late one night and saw Super Mario Bros 3 being played on the big screen, except Mario had 99 lives, jumped higher than the screen, and looked like a beetle throwing hammers. WTF!
I asked the guy playing how he did it, and he replied with one word, "genie". I was so floored by what I was seeing, I didn't even think to ask any follow up questions.
I spent the next three months searching every corner of that game for the Genie, like he was a super secret character built-in. I only stopped after finding the Game Genie for sale at that same store :D
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I even remember Nintendo power running an article telling people NOT to buy these.
https://www.howtogeek.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/game_ge...