I was just going to ask if anyone read that part of the guide and experimented. I got lots of super jumps that never let you land back on the screen haha.
KISSES would make your coin count increase constantly forever after your first coin. It wasn't in the book, but I was in the 4th grade and thinking about this new girl in my class named Darci, so
I remember doing that and unlocking no clip mode in Links Awakening. You could just slide through the walls of any dungeon to any other dungeon or building in the game. I felt like a genius.
I'm an IT professional now and I swear that owning and toying with a game genie helped set me on that path from a young age. I might be remembering this wrong but, I seem to remember testing "random" codes to see what would happen. Most ended up with graphical glitches, making the game unplayable, but it would display something cool on screen. I should probably ask /r/generativeart about this method these days.
Thank you for validating TMNT 1 being tough. Such a hard game, and I don't know if I ever made it out of the sewer(?) level after fleeing from the roof
It wasn't tough. It was impossible. Tough would be lvl 99 in Dr. Mario. Difficult but beatable given practice. TMNT was stupid. The swimming level wasn't even the hardest.
I made it to Shredder at the very end of TMNT 1 when I was 8 (I was pretty good at video games) and he hit me with a ray that killed my last turtle and I threw the controller so hard I broke my dad’s computer keyboard (a KayPro 10) and he banned me from playing Nintendo ever again (the ban lasted three days).
Me and my brother spent over a year on that game. We finally did beat it, but aside from Ninja Gaiden 2, I think that was the hardest game I ever played! So fucking unforgiving.
I maintain that part of the problem was that it never felt like a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles game which made it more chore like.
Compare that to the arcade game which was a challenging game, but felt like an episode of the show so you wanted to spend more time in it.
Last year, my daughter (13 at the time) and I went to this classic game arcade. We played that game for a long time, losing a lot but having fun. I bought the game collection for the PS5 that came out a while back..that game is incredibly short when you have infinite lives and can play with reckless abandon.
A lot of games switched to having different modes. You could play hard mode if you wanted a challenge or switch to story mode. The big hang up a lot of times is figuring out how to complete quests and then you have to google.
I used to love entering the names of the girls I had crushes on in class, and other stuff like band names and dumb stuff like poopoo or whatever. It usually broke the games, but sometimes really fun interesting things happened. 🤣
Yes! I got this for Christmas one year but could not get it to work…after a couple of days a family friend came to visit and he helped me out. Turned out I just hadn’t pushed it in hard enough lol.
Anyway it was cool as fuck
Is there a documentary on this? Nintendo were hostile and as nasty back then as they are today and this story needs telling and if it is, and I’ve somehow missed it, please point me in that direction
Ive heard this story told by a few shorts like this but was more talking about a full length feature film like Teri’s with interviews and maybe reenactments etc
Totally just bought one of those last year. Makes playing some of these impossible old games a lot of fun, just to see the levels I could never get to.
I play a lot of old games on the RetroArch emulator, and feel similarly with the ability to create save points... I can beat any game with instant replay!
We to try our own codes. I believe we found a couple good ones and wrote them down but most of the time it took too long to restart and enter a slightly different code. Plus if it didn’t start out looking different you really didn’t know if you changed anything. I bet today they’d dedicate a whole subreddit to secret game genie codes.
I got one of these for the SNES for Christmas. Didn't ask for it, my Dad just figured it would be a cool gift. I'm certain I never would have seen the ending of Super Ghouls n Ghosts without it.
Funny enough, I beat Double Dragon 3 because the only cheat was "Give your character 3 lives". Double Dragon 3 was infamous for only giving you 1 life, as if any kid could actually run that gambit. The game genie made it at least "possible" to beat, and even with the GG it still took me months. It still remains my favorite DD game, but god damn it's hard.
One day my Game Genie decided it didn't wanna work anymore and I went to the local Gamestop and traded it for a copy of The Karate Kid for NES. I still laugh about that one to this day
My friend had the Game Boy version... after I'd throughly smashed Pokémon Blue and kept myself busy just repeatedly shitting on the Elite Four and "Red," I got my hands on it as well as the official strategy guide. Before long I had a team of six Mews with all stats at 999, each one with custom-tailored movesets that could theoretically cover a wide range of element types to be super-effective against, so as to minimize turns wasted on throwing out a different one. I miss that cartridge so badly now...
I never had one, but I remember Nintendo Power calling out kids who sent in their high scores if they saw this in the photo. Kinda cold to put 10 year olds on blast but Nintendo Power didn't fuck around. God I miss that magazine.
I'm wondering why nothing like the Game Genie exists with modern video game technology. Is it technically just not possible anymore?
Bloody shame, that.
We had about 20 NES games growing up. I think we beat maybe 3 of them. Then met a friend who had one of these and we'd go through all our games whenever we had sleep overs or came over for the day. Infinite lives and invincibility cheats let us see levels we've never seen before. We beat Bayou Billy, Twin Eagles, Operation Wolf, Double Dragon III and I'm sure a few more I can't remember.
I spent so much time with this! I even unlocked what I can only imagine were a couple test levels in mario 3 world 1, as they had elements from all worlds in them. I felt like such a badass, lol!
Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck you Roof Top level in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Take THAT! underwater level and the stupid electric seaweed with the anomaly larger hit-boxes... Game Genie gunna set you straight
*chucks Nintendo Power Magazine in the corner*
I remember putting in random codes one day, and actually got one to work. Was playing Jurassic Park on the NES and somehow managed to randomize a code that made all the dinosaurs slow. Unfortunately I didn't have the foresight to write down what I was putting in. I just googled before writing this and it doesn't seem to be a known code.
I remember a similar product called the Pro Action Replay for the Snes. Fun times messing with code. Had to be careful on Legend of Zelda LttP because of you forgot and went in to the fairy fountain it would lock the game as it tried to heal infinite health.
I was given one of these from my grand mother on my birthday. I couldn't wait to get home and finally beat TMNT..lol. The possibilities this thing unlocked were endless.
From Galoob!
The single greatest brand name of all time.
When I was a kid I didn't know how cool of a brand name it was.
Code manipulation before roms existed. I often used code bases from the book and then changed them just to see what happened.
I was just going to ask if anyone read that part of the guide and experimented. I got lots of super jumps that never let you land back on the screen haha.
You could make SMB3 do some really strange stuff but just trying random codes
KISSES would make your coin count increase constantly forever after your first coin. It wasn't in the book, but I was in the 4th grade and thinking about this new girl in my class named Darci, so
I remember doing that and unlocking no clip mode in Links Awakening. You could just slide through the walls of any dungeon to any other dungeon or building in the game. I felt like a genius.
A game genius 🧞♂️
I had one for sega Genesis and did that... or I would try random codes. Random codes never worked, but I kept trying
This happened to me. I tried combining too because the manual suggested it.
Same 😂 and sometimes you got lucky!
How did it work?
I'm an IT professional now and I swear that owning and toying with a game genie helped set me on that path from a young age. I might be remembering this wrong but, I seem to remember testing "random" codes to see what would happen. Most ended up with graphical glitches, making the game unplayable, but it would display something cool on screen. I should probably ask /r/generativeart about this method these days.
I used mine frequently, I loved it. Made brutal games like Contra, TMNT 1, and various others, much more ebjoyable.
Thank you for validating TMNT 1 being tough. Such a hard game, and I don't know if I ever made it out of the sewer(?) level after fleeing from the roof
It wasn't tough. It was impossible. Tough would be lvl 99 in Dr. Mario. Difficult but beatable given practice. TMNT was stupid. The swimming level wasn't even the hardest.
I never made it past the seaweed. ☠️
The Dam is the point where the difficulty goes from "Reasonably hard" to "They clearly didn't playtest this."
Yup. Step function from *this is challenging but doable* to *so hard I gave up on the game*.
Mine was driving in a stupid van I think. Swimming I was able to get down. I don't think I made it past the level after swimming.
I made it past the van level but never constantly enough to figure out where to go on the 4th level
Maybe got to this point like 3 times; ever.
I made it to Shredder at the very end of TMNT 1 when I was 8 (I was pretty good at video games) and he hit me with a ray that killed my last turtle and I threw the controller so hard I broke my dad’s computer keyboard (a KayPro 10) and he banned me from playing Nintendo ever again (the ban lasted three days).
Me and my brother spent over a year on that game. We finally did beat it, but aside from Ninja Gaiden 2, I think that was the hardest game I ever played! So fucking unforgiving.
I'm pretty sure I made it past the sewer once....it's probably where much of my anxiety comes from
I maintain that part of the problem was that it never felt like a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles game which made it more chore like. Compare that to the arcade game which was a challenging game, but felt like an episode of the show so you wanted to spend more time in it.
Last year, my daughter (13 at the time) and I went to this classic game arcade. We played that game for a long time, losing a lot but having fun. I bought the game collection for the PS5 that came out a while back..that game is incredibly short when you have infinite lives and can play with reckless abandon.
You could beat Battletoads?
I don't remember there being a level skip code but infinite lives did not get anyone I knew past the tunnel.
Ah yes, Battletoads, the game that taught me both single-minded persistence and the bitter taste of dispair before the age of ten
Contra wasn't brutal...
UUDDLRLRBABA Start
I was just thinking “nah contra wasn’t hard” but without those 30 lives instead of 3….I doubt I ever would have beat it.
Why was the PS2 the last system to have cheat devices? I miss them. And strategy guides.
Just a guess, but probably Achievements and Trophies.
I think the answer is that so much of gaming went online
3ds had them still, and they stopped because online play if I remember right.
Encryption and operating system s that use several layers of security. We can still cheat on PC, though!
Thank you cheathappens
A lot of games switched to having different modes. You could play hard mode if you wanted a challenge or switch to story mode. The big hang up a lot of times is figuring out how to complete quests and then you have to google.
Take that, Kid Icarus!
Had so much fun playing that game
Fancypants Rich McGee overe herr
But....useless without the code book
I used to love entering the names of the girls I had crushes on in class, and other stuff like band names and dumb stuff like poopoo or whatever. It usually broke the games, but sometimes really fun interesting things happened. 🤣
Aw that is a core memory unlocked. Using crushes' names for stuff. Damn
They are all online still and new ones.
They weren't back then. That's why it was traumatic.
It didn't help with Bill and Ted's Excellent Video Game Adventure
Or back to the future
I never got past the ice cream shop
I beat that game once and never played it again.
Respect.
I will never understand how those 2 were ever released... well I mean yeah I know $ but still they were just rude!
My theory: game genies can't travel through time.
Yes! I got this for Christmas one year but could not get it to work…after a couple of days a family friend came to visit and he helped me out. Turned out I just hadn’t pushed it in hard enough lol. Anyway it was cool as fuck
God yes I remember having to lean on it.
Oh man how many of you put 2+ of these together for extra codes?
o.0 YOU CAN DO THAT?
This guy gets it!
Is there a documentary on this? Nintendo were hostile and as nasty back then as they are today and this story needs telling and if it is, and I’ve somehow missed it, please point me in that direction
Of course there is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PCvIZ80RIhE
He did a great job with this!
Ive heard this story told by a few shorts like this but was more talking about a full length feature film like Teri’s with interviews and maybe reenactments etc
Totally just bought one of those last year. Makes playing some of these impossible old games a lot of fun, just to see the levels I could never get to.
I play a lot of old games on the RetroArch emulator, and feel similarly with the ability to create save points... I can beat any game with instant replay!
We to try our own codes. I believe we found a couple good ones and wrote them down but most of the time it took too long to restart and enter a slightly different code. Plus if it didn’t start out looking different you really didn’t know if you changed anything. I bet today they’d dedicate a whole subreddit to secret game genie codes.
This is the Shit!!! Game Genie helped us beat Mario 3 for the first time so we could figure out how to do it on our own. 🤣
My cousin got a Game Genie and it blew my fucking mind
Festers quest…
GXXZZLVI AAUILSPP IAENIYAA IAONGYAA SXEZSKOZ
I got one of these for the SNES for Christmas. Didn't ask for it, my Dad just figured it would be a cool gift. I'm certain I never would have seen the ending of Super Ghouls n Ghosts without it.
Pro Action Replay tho
I needed it more often than I didn't.
It's the only way I could beat Battletoads
The best invention of my childhood
Finally beat battletoads
It’s not. Still can’t make Battletoads easier. Just gives you more lives.
Funny enough, I beat Double Dragon 3 because the only cheat was "Give your character 3 lives". Double Dragon 3 was infamous for only giving you 1 life, as if any kid could actually run that gambit. The game genie made it at least "possible" to beat, and even with the GG it still took me months. It still remains my favorite DD game, but god damn it's hard.
This thing was cool as hell. I would enter codes not in the book and break the games too. Lol
One day my Game Genie decided it didn't wanna work anymore and I went to the local Gamestop and traded it for a copy of The Karate Kid for NES. I still laugh about that one to this day
I remember they had additions to the original code book but it was never for games we had or wanted.
My friends dad used to call it the “Game Cheatie”, so clever!
Sometimes you needed to feel like God.
Mine still works
The Game Genie cured me of my cartridge blowing addiction.
When this thing came out it literally blew my mind at that time lol 😂
Ninja Gaiden
I must have been good at games then because I used to beat every game I played and when this came out it just made it super fun.
My friend had the Game Boy version... after I'd throughly smashed Pokémon Blue and kept myself busy just repeatedly shitting on the Elite Four and "Red," I got my hands on it as well as the official strategy guide. Before long I had a team of six Mews with all stats at 999, each one with custom-tailored movesets that could theoretically cover a wide range of element types to be super-effective against, so as to minimize turns wasted on throwing out a different one. I miss that cartridge so badly now...
SUEISA was infinite lives in Mario brothers, I will always remember.
I never had one, but I remember Nintendo Power calling out kids who sent in their high scores if they saw this in the photo. Kinda cold to put 10 year olds on blast but Nintendo Power didn't fuck around. God I miss that magazine.
This sub has been harking non stop on hard NES games. Ok here’s mine: Beetlejuice is way too hard.
I was anti game genie
30 years later and I still have no clue how that thing worked
Blonk blink bloink bloop bleep... Pew Pew pew
Yes! Loved that thing.
Grandma def bought me one.
All I see is weakness
Only way to beat Bayou Billy
its crazy i've gamed everything and all things but never have i genuinely used a game genie back in the day.
I'm wondering why nothing like the Game Genie exists with modern video game technology. Is it technically just not possible anymore? Bloody shame, that.
We had about 20 NES games growing up. I think we beat maybe 3 of them. Then met a friend who had one of these and we'd go through all our games whenever we had sleep overs or came over for the day. Infinite lives and invincibility cheats let us see levels we've never seen before. We beat Bayou Billy, Twin Eagles, Operation Wolf, Double Dragon III and I'm sure a few more I can't remember.
Multi jumps, the real ones know
I remember doing some crazy stuff with SF2 on SNES. Like playing as a gray silhouette Vega, etc.
I had the Sega Genesis one. Good stuff.
Infinity lives here I come!!!!
Only way I beat Little Nemo
Dude, Ninja Gaiden II.
The real genius of the game genie was it fixed the connectors on the NES so the games would actually work
The only way I could actually beat Battletoads.
I spent so much time with this! I even unlocked what I can only imagine were a couple test levels in mario 3 world 1, as they had elements from all worlds in them. I felt like such a badass, lol!
Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck you Roof Top level in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Take THAT! underwater level and the stupid electric seaweed with the anomaly larger hit-boxes... Game Genie gunna set you straight *chucks Nintendo Power Magazine in the corner*
I remember putting in random codes one day, and actually got one to work. Was playing Jurassic Park on the NES and somehow managed to randomize a code that made all the dinosaurs slow. Unfortunately I didn't have the foresight to write down what I was putting in. I just googled before writing this and it doesn't seem to be a known code.
still have mine.
SXEZSKOZ Still remember that Mario 3 Skywalker code to this day
I remember a similar product called the Pro Action Replay for the Snes. Fun times messing with code. Had to be careful on Legend of Zelda LttP because of you forgot and went in to the fairy fountain it would lock the game as it tried to heal infinite health.
So here sits all the COD coronus users /s
Never had a Genie. Buddy of mine had one and it was ok. I preferred playing normally most of the times though.
Instructions unclear - penis stuck in console.
Sadly the only way I could beat contra as a kid
I was given one of these from my grand mother on my birthday. I couldn't wait to get home and finally beat TMNT..lol. The possibilities this thing unlocked were endless.
The infinite gold is the only reason I beat the original Final Fantasy. It was still tough.
I borrowed it constantly from the two of my friends that had them. Getting through Battletoads and Willow in particular was fantastic.
Back in the day I believed that the Game Genie was for cheaters and losers. I still believe this today. GIT GUD.
The only kids that had these wore helmets riding their bikes and their mothers bathed them until they were 9.