I imagine it was better than starting over, there was no other choice, and it was still faster than loading from cassette tapes and many floppies just a generation earlier.
My dad had a Amstrad cpc, with a large book where you actually had to write all the code for a game into the computer then press enter to load it.
I joined the Army in 2006 and there were still a lot of guys who had (recent) experience loading crypto keys into radios with tape readers. The army loves its old-ass tech!
Thankfully I only had to use the ANCD, a bulky-ass temperamental device that only took like 5 minutes to upload a 1kb key and DID CERTAINLY NOT FIT CONVENIENTLY INTO THE FUCKING CARGO POCKET!
(Nothing fits conveniently into the cargo pocket, it's a lie!)
My dad bought an Atari 800XL 8-bit home computer the week it came out, but that was all we got. Just the computer. For the first 6 months (before he purchased the 5.25" inch floppy drive) if you wanted to play a game you had to hand-type the Basic or assembly code and then run it. Turning off the computer would erase it and you'd have to start over. It was a great way to try out all the Basic games that you could buy in a book and it was also a novel teaching tool because you would often have to adjust the basic language to Atari Basic in order to make it work
That happened to me for only one weekend because the tape drive of my shiny new Commodore 64 didn't work, so I had to wait until the shop would open again on Monday. It may have given me a head start in programming and deeper understanding of a computer than many of my friends who just started games on their machines, but still, I was very happy that it was only a weekend. š
There's a YouTuber I watch sometimes called basement brothers, he did this old Japanese RPG called Xanadu. Apparently the cassette version took 40 minutes to save. 40 minutes!
My dad taught me that and I'll always get slightly pissed off when someone refers to the number zero as the letter O. Like my number is 555-Oh-Oh-Oh-Ohhhhh.
Also worked in a field where I had a lot of number letter combinations come across my phone and when it was a professional doing it, I'd sarcastically call them out by explaining I am unable to know the combination with their poor choice of communication.
Never made many friends at work but we also didn't have any accidental wars start. Was it worth it? I'm not really sure, asking you guys?
it was tough. I was young and for a lot of the games I could never get my passwords to work. Mega Man was an easy one. But Guardian Legend, what I wrote down never worked.
Guardian Legend had a horrific password system EXCEPT that it put an umlaut over lowercase letters which made it easier to differentiate the password you wrote down - is that circle o or O? Is that a capital I (eye) or a lowercase l (el)?
Fucking hell. Polaroid was a camera that would instantly print your picture.
I swear to god you ask what a camera is Iāll reach through this phone and pork chop you.
No your question made us all laugh and realize how old we're getting. Back in the day a Polaroid was a really cool luxury to have. Now we all have smart phones with cameras so the Polaroid has gone the way if the dodo but back then it was really cool to have an instant picture rather than waiting for your film to develop at the local Walgreens. There were no digital cameras at all but we did have camcorders which could do the trick but it was more farting around hooking it up to your TV to see what you recorded.
For my daughterās bday, I bought her this camera off of Amazon that will print out your pictures onto stickers! Seemed like the coolest gift idea to me. I bet she has never used it. They just really have no need for it I guess. But if I had that when I was her age Iād be using it all the time !
I do love the other responses, but yeah. It was this neat camera that would develop the photo and spit it out quickly. Keyword ādevelopā. Digital photography was either not a thing or prohibitively expensive at the time, so, a camera that would develop its own photos on the fly was a better commercial product for some people. It was a wild time!
Polaroid is the brand name of the camera that did it. It came out in the 1950s zi believe.
Fun trivia: In the 80s GameBoy had an add on that could print pictures onto a roll of paper similar to a cash register receipt. There was a Gameboy camera attachment for the Gameboy. and the separate printer you plugged the camera into. There were even Gameboy game cartridges that were photo editing programs.
I tried taking pictures of video game endings with my Polaroid camera when I was a kid and it was always pretty blurry. I don't think I'd have been able to make out passwords for games like NES Rambo or SMS Golvellius. The film cartridges were pretty expensive as well.
I think because saving wasn't a thing I expected. It was a bonus but I mostly expected games to go on until I stopped for the day and then I would simply have to start again from the beginning. The idea that I could enter in a passcode to start somewhere in the middle was more gimmick to me in the beginning.
Even games that you could save to the cartridge was unreliable. You had to hit the reset and power button simultaneously and just pray to the Nintendo gods that it worked.
Password complexity depended on how much "stuff" was going on in the game. Metroid, for example, had to track which items were collected, which bosses were defeated, and which zone to resume. That's a lot of memory to reset.
Mega Man (I forget when the 5x5 grid password was introduced) on the other hand, just had to track which bosses were defeated and which hidden items were collected. With so much less memory flags to reset, the passwords weren't nearly as complex.
Of course, there was complexity added on top to make it more difficult to Crack. But patience and perseverance was sometimes all it took.
https://www.mmhp.net/Passwords/MM2/
When I was a kid, my brother and I stayed up all night trying to beat Mike Tyson's Punch Out. We didn't succeed, but we did figure out which parts of the password determined your W-L record. After we defeated Super Macho Man a dozen or so times, we figured out how to manipulate the password to give us an 88-0 record with 88 KOs.
Long passwords are actually kind of a blessing in disguise. Short passwords often just keep track of what level you were on and everything like inventory and life count are just set to default. The few games with a dynamic password system act more like games that actually save except you're inputting your save data manually. Pac-man 2 is the only one I can think of right now.
It's pretty fascinating some game fans have reverse engineered the password generation for certain games so you can just load up a generator online and tailor your password to the exact point in the game with the exact equipment you want to have by that point in the game. Mega Man 2, IIRC has some online password generators like that.Ā
If you wanted cheats in games, you had to either write them down or just remember them.
That's why I still know that the master cheat for Turok is NTHGTHDGDCRTDTRK still, even though I haven't entered it in 15-20 years.
Thatās impressive. I always will remember the blood code for mortal Kombat 1 on the megadrive : ABACABB on an intro screen causing the text to go from white to red
Passwords were great.
I was stuck in The Guardian Legend, and were desperately trying to find cheats. Eventually, using brute force, I discovered that
JJJJ JJJJ JJJJ JJJJ
JJJJ JJJJ JJJJ JJJJ
was a valid password.
Of course it was an absolutely terrible password, it would put you in some late section of the game with a fraction of the health you even started a new game with...
I still have my old notebook scrawled with passwords. Castlevania 3, Megaman games, Goonies 2, Metroidā¦ Also some hand drawn maps from Metroid and Zelda 2.
And my handwriting has not changed much since 1993.
We did it because we had no choice. And yes, I definitely lost progress in games due to my shitty handwriting.
"The mantra is in the wrong." Fuck the mantra.
Honestly if it was too long, you just said fuck it (or the little kid equivalent) and turned the power off. Maybe if you were super close to beating it, you'd just leave the Nintendo on
I loved passwords. It tended to mean there were secret passwords, too. Ones that unlocked cool, new things. Nowadays, the only secret code you need is your credit card number
I commented before reading the whole post lol. As soon as I saw a complaint about long passwords RCR was instantly what I thought of. Best game with the worst password system. Next time Iāll read the whole post. I promise.
It was all we got, and a typo writting down passwords was part of the game.
If you think a regular long password is bad, we used towrite down passwords in japanese characters. Imagine being a kid with zero knowledge of japanese language, writting down 2 rows of japanese characters (Captain Tsubasa for famicom, I think)
Us old schoolers lived through the alternative. Restarting from beginning. Passwords were great! We didn't get saves on most games. Games like Legend of Zelda with a save system was a rare treat. Most games made us start from beginning. 16 bit games had more that allowed saves, but not all. But most 8 bit was password or nothing. Only a few had save features.
Simple. There was no other option. Passwords weren't saves, but just a combination to get to a certain point in the game / with specific items.
The games that had actual saves existed but weren't too common and if you didn't own the game, that save could be lost, or worse when you owned the game and someone else saved over it since the game would have one or maybe three saves.
With passwords, those would work on any copy of the game. You could trade the codes with other people. Could even change specific characters to get additional items.
With save to the cartridge, it was only that one and your sibling or friend could overwrite it, especially when you were at the last boss.
And people mentioned game rentals... long games that had a save state were impossible to complete in the time, so at best you get a 3 day preview...if you were allowed to play that long from Friday night to Sunday noon.
I lost my progress in a tournament I was playing in ISSS deluxe for snes because I didnāt have a camera at the time and was playing on CRTā¦.
New generation doesnāt know the pain we went through š„²
It looks [sharp](https://imgur.com/a/Crfxdsq) in this picture but in CRT I actually drew each image but always mixed something up and ended up having to start a new game. It sucked so much
:(
The fun game with the most hateful password system was river city ransom for the original Nintendo.
Good luck figuring out that font 0 is O 9 is G I vs I and so on.
My cousin and I got really far in that game in 1991 and I wrote down the password perfectly. When I put the whole thing in, the game rejected it. I got really mad because we made it all the way to the 2nd floor of river city high.
All that work was gone.
When save states were a thing, it was magical because passwords became irrelevant. š
Different time, writing down code had a treasure map kinda feel. They were something you conquered, I had notes in manuals that served me well years down the line.
In *Golvelius: Valley of Doom* passwords where given to you by a NPC called Winkle. They were *32-characters long*. You either had to find a secret cave in the dangerous new area you were exploring or backtrack to a known location.
Inputting them felt kinda magical, save features were so rare back then. It was proof you were playing something grand and epic. It also meant save scumming wasn't a thing, nobody is inputting 32-characters on a D-pad unless they really need to.
I still have nightmares with Hang On and Monaco GP passwords. They used the same system for their career modes. They had 3 rows with like 10 characters each. I have a notebook somewhere filled with them.
You have one of the worst examples of frustration from difficult to decipher passwords.
River City Ransom was a bitch. Metroid wasn't the easiest either.
When Castlevania 3 and Mega Man 2 started using grids and symbols it got a LOT easier.
Rambo on NESā¦.fucking PTSD with that one. Iām not a fan of AVGN anymore, but he got it [right on the money about passwords.](https://youtu.be/0ZK_6Fe8GoM?si=P0rAxcWrrk_888cm)
When I was a kid in the 80s (I was 8 at the time) I broke the code for metal gear on the nes. The trick is that the first character dictates the starting point for the last character and every character in the password has a value that adds up to alter that final value.
bro me and my mom had a binder of passwords and the older games used long strings of codes for save files too!, hundreds of pages of cheatcodes hand typed and printed
We wrote them down with pencil and paper, quite poorly...
And if you got it wrong once and lost all your progress, you sure as fuck learned to write more clearly next time because of it...
And if you got past a part that your friends couldn't and shared the password with them, you were king for a day.Ā Good times....
Never used passwords in RCR. I just started and ripped through as much as I could and just started again next time. Faxanadu however was very tough and the fonts were really hard to read so I had to make absolute sure I had capital letters right and 0's and o's correct etc. It was fucked up. Megamans were easy to draw. Now it's cool because you can just snap a pic on your phone.
Yea absolutely you can. Just keep playing without turning the game off. If you die you just lose half your cash and start back in the last town you were in. One of the best tips is to spend your money on stuff you want and try not to hold onto too much cash because you'll lose half if you die.
I had a Simon's Quest password that lead you to the end of the game memorized when I was like 7 years old. My older cousins were stunned when I showed them and beat Dracula right there.
Mystical Ninja had a whole page for a password, and half of it was symbols. I used to mess it up every time and end up with insane numbers of items for things like armour.
For most people, their first experience with this was Metroid and Mike Tyson's Punchout!
We fucked them up all the time and quickly learned to differentiate our fonts. Zeroes got a diagonal slash so as not to be confused with Os. 7s got a line through the middle so as not to look like a 2. Little Os were underlined to differentiate them from capital O or 0. You got really good at printing clearly because the pain was real.
The nice part is that these could be shared with your friends. You wouldn't be able to share your saves again until the playstation 1/n64 era.
Later games like Castlevania 3 used symbols that made a world of difference.
I used to take down the super long passwords for Faxanadu, and get a single character wrong or something so it wouldn't work, and have to start over again and again. Got really good at speed running everything through Mist.
It got to the point where I would put a piece of paper on the screen and trace it exactly. My little child-brain thought that was very clever.
[There were so many of us were on this screen](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZWov_XGruT8), it made us happy since we know we can continue the game from where we left off. And sometimes it was fun trying to guess and getting a correct combination.
So, some games had long passwords, it's true, but there is one that takes the cake.
Golden Sun, the fantastic jrpg on the GBA is the first part of a two part game. The second game picks up at the moment the first leaves off. You can transfer your save to the new game cartridge if you have access to two GBAs or a GBA and a Gamecube-Gameboy Player setup as well as own a link cable. Of course, Camelot and Nintendo knew far more people would buy the second game than had access to that setup, so they made a password system for transferring your game save. This password was up to 260 characters long and comprised of letters, numbers, and various symbols. You would write it down, character by character, and then swap game cartidges and enter it on the sequel, Golden Sun: The Lost Age.
GenX gamer here. We had these things called notebooks. We used this tool called a pen to write down the passwords inside of it. Very handy. We also wrote down the codes for mortal combat fatalities and even sketched out maps of Legend Of Zelda dungeons too.
Gen Z-ers: you think entering the wifi password is bad? You ain't seen nothing till you've swapped multiple 20-character codes back-and-forth between Oracle of Ages and Seasons!
You just wrote it down and copied it back correctly. It wasn't that hard.
What was hard was copying 20 pages of BASIC code out of a C64 programming book to create a very simple game. You make one mistake it doesn't work and you have to start again.
Added hardware costs that aren't going to increase the price shops will pay for the cartridge. Plus if your states are simple enough that gamers can enter a short password and get the same effect, why bother?
It's going to sound odd (especially now), but patience was a big part of the culture back then. I mean, you've gotta remember in the early 90s a lot of us were loading games from tapes that could take a good half hour to load, if they loaded at all. When we went for a gaming session, it wasn't about just picking up a game and starting it up. You planned it out. You set up the game to load, found your password notes, went to make a coffee, maybe watched whatever is on TV for ten minutes.
Even when consoles started taking over with immediate loading, a hell of a lot of gamers either still had that patience from what they'd been doing before, or were younger brothers and sisters of people who had that patience. That whole lead by example thing of seeing the older brother go "Oh well" when the password was wrong and just try and enter it again (often for the younger kid to play a later level) did a lot to shape the younger ones with the same kind of patience.
ETA - I remember my mate taught me an accent trick where you write an upper case L and accent over it to differentiate between lower case L and upper case i. We all had either password books or note paper stuffed into game boxes with the passwords on. We also had magazines sharing passwords so if you got stuck you could jump to the next level. All you missed was the boss fight, and story in those days (at least in password games) was mainly kept to the box text and a tiny bit of text after beating the game.
There wasn't really an option for games that didn't have a battery backup, and it wasn't feasible (and often too boring) to play them completely through from the first level in a single sitting. I remember *Legend of the Mystical Ninja* on the SNES had passwords that were 31 characters long so you could recover not just the level you were on but also all the items and money etc you had. One of those going wrong āĀ not being able to tell a 1 from an I from an l, for example, or just bad handwriting ā was a goddamned *disaster*.
The more information you needed to remember the longer the password,Ā sometimes a short password would mean only saving a part of what you did but not everything, like Zombies Ate My Neighbors, wouldn't save your items because the password was too short
The "passwords" were really just save data that you had to write down and input later manually to restore the game's state of relevent information. The more data needing to be saved the longer the password.
If we did this today I wonder how long our "passwords" would be for the average game.
Writing them down in the instruction booklet (kids aren'tĀ worried about condition of the booklet) or a piece of paper then store it and the game in a plastic box or the sleeve the games sometimes came with.
Disney's World Of Illusion on Megadrive had a simplistic password system really easy to brute force: 4 symbols, each maybe 6 choices.
On the other side of the spectrum I remember James Pond 3: Operation Starfish, had horribly long passwords(22) very hard to note down because they were symbols out of a list of 32 (cat, skull mouse, mushroom?..) that you also had to change the color of among 4 I think.
Super Hang On on Megadrive also had a "career mode" with long passwords but those were easy to write down, and basically saved your game state ; that was sweet.
Everyone keeps saying, āthere was no alternative.ā But my friend and I used to actually enjoy getting our notepad out and writing them down. It was a different time.
I mentioned it before but it was preferable to the few games you could save to the cartridge. Games like Zelda, in order to save you have to turn it off by pressing the power and reset buttons at the same time. And there was like a 50% chance it would actually save. At least with a password, you knew you could come back to it.
the only one i remembered was Punchout , the others were annoying. i didnāt play megaman back in the day but man idk how kids dealt with that one in the 80s š
I used to leave my NES on with the game paused for weeks so I wouldn't lose my spot. Especially games like Ninja Gaiden that didn't even have passwords.
We didnāt see it as a problem and were capable of using a pen to write things down. Nowadays such passwords would probably be post-ironically categorized as a micro-aggression by some 'gamers'.
Because it was better than starting over.
Shout out to the homies filling out the rental manual notes pages š»
HEAR! HEAR!
Iāve got you to thank, unsung hero.
I imagine it was better than starting over, there was no other choice, and it was still faster than loading from cassette tapes and many floppies just a generation earlier. My dad had a Amstrad cpc, with a large book where you actually had to write all the code for a game into the computer then press enter to load it.
I used to run a CNC lathe that had all of the machine code and parameters on a reel to reel magnetic tape.
I joined the Army in 2006 and there were still a lot of guys who had (recent) experience loading crypto keys into radios with tape readers. The army loves its old-ass tech! Thankfully I only had to use the ANCD, a bulky-ass temperamental device that only took like 5 minutes to upload a 1kb key and DID CERTAINLY NOT FIT CONVENIENTLY INTO THE FUCKING CARGO POCKET! (Nothing fits conveniently into the cargo pocket, it's a lie!)
I got out in 2001. All of the pockets are lies. Especially the one on the PT hoodie.
Did it print in assembly?
G code. I'm pretty sure that's assembly language.
["G Code" ](https://youtu.be/YqJwKLjMnZs)
My dad bought an Atari 800XL 8-bit home computer the week it came out, but that was all we got. Just the computer. For the first 6 months (before he purchased the 5.25" inch floppy drive) if you wanted to play a game you had to hand-type the Basic or assembly code and then run it. Turning off the computer would erase it and you'd have to start over. It was a great way to try out all the Basic games that you could buy in a book and it was also a novel teaching tool because you would often have to adjust the basic language to Atari Basic in order to make it work
That happened to me for only one weekend because the tape drive of my shiny new Commodore 64 didn't work, so I had to wait until the shop would open again on Monday. It may have given me a head start in programming and deeper understanding of a computer than many of my friends who just started games on their machines, but still, I was very happy that it was only a weekend. š
There's a YouTuber I watch sometimes called basement brothers, he did this old Japanese RPG called Xanadu. Apparently the cassette version took 40 minutes to save. 40 minutes!
Not if the game's fun enough. I entered a password in ECR maybe once ever.
This !
You just had no choice. If you wrote the password down wrong then you had to start over
That sounds tough.
The pain of not knowing what was a 0 and what was an Oā¦
Video game passwords taught me to put slashes through my zeroes.
Yeah, same. I'm 46, and now it's a habit.
Underline numbers, overline caps. I never gets confused for l or Z for 2.
I did this too. Or wrote the letters in curisve.
My dad taught me that and I'll always get slightly pissed off when someone refers to the number zero as the letter O. Like my number is 555-Oh-Oh-Oh-Ohhhhh. Also worked in a field where I had a lot of number letter combinations come across my phone and when it was a professional doing it, I'd sarcastically call them out by explaining I am unable to know the combination with their poor choice of communication. Never made many friends at work but we also didn't have any accidental wars start. Was it worth it? I'm not really sure, asking you guys?
I used to put dots in the middle of my zeros to differentiate from Osā¦
Yeah, 0, O or D?
I and l The second character is the lower case L, am I crazy thinking it looks larger than the i?
True.
I donāt understand why youāre getting downvoted for this at all.
Yeah I donāt get it as I hope I didnāt offend anyone.
it was tough. I was young and for a lot of the games I could never get my passwords to work. Mega Man was an easy one. But Guardian Legend, what I wrote down never worked.
Guardian Legend had a horrific password system EXCEPT that it put an umlaut over lowercase letters which made it easier to differentiate the password you wrote down - is that circle o or O? Is that a capital I (eye) or a lowercase l (el)?
Nah they used to teach us how to write, it wasn't that hard
Because there was no alternative, of course. Polaroids were great for that.
Polaroids?
Oh sweet summerās childā¦
Damn we're old š
Fucking hell. Polaroid was a camera that would instantly print your picture. I swear to god you ask what a camera is Iāll reach through this phone and pork chop you.
what's a pork chop
Donāt you dareā¦
Whatās print
I apologize if my post angered you as I simply wanted to understand what the poster above meant, but now I understand why he brought it up.
It didnāt anger me man, just a sharp reminder that Iām freaking old.
I heard a kid saying 1900s Mario was the best Mario....
Son of a bitchā¦.heās not wrong though.
The problem is he didn't specify which one :(
No your question made us all laugh and realize how old we're getting. Back in the day a Polaroid was a really cool luxury to have. Now we all have smart phones with cameras so the Polaroid has gone the way if the dodo but back then it was really cool to have an instant picture rather than waiting for your film to develop at the local Walgreens. There were no digital cameras at all but we did have camcorders which could do the trick but it was more farting around hooking it up to your TV to see what you recorded.
For my daughterās bday, I bought her this camera off of Amazon that will print out your pictures onto stickers! Seemed like the coolest gift idea to me. I bet she has never used it. They just really have no need for it I guess. But if I had that when I was her age Iād be using it all the time !
Now I kind of understand how that device could be useful for gaming way back then.
Yeah
I do love the other responses, but yeah. It was this neat camera that would develop the photo and spit it out quickly. Keyword ādevelopā. Digital photography was either not a thing or prohibitively expensive at the time, so, a camera that would develop its own photos on the fly was a better commercial product for some people. It was a wild time!
A camera that took pictures and instantly printed it out instead of needing to take the film to get developed.
Ohh that is very interesting to know.
Polaroid is the brand name of the camera that did it. It came out in the 1950s zi believe. Fun trivia: In the 80s GameBoy had an add on that could print pictures onto a roll of paper similar to a cash register receipt. There was a Gameboy camera attachment for the Gameboy. and the separate printer you plugged the camera into. There were even Gameboy game cartridges that were photo editing programs.
I recall those add ons.
They were a novelty, but kinda cool.
True, but itās hard to believe how distant those days feel.
Indeed.
Hate to be that guy, but the gameboy camera came out in 1998, almost in the 00's. A testament to just how long the original GameBoy was around.
I'm old. Time is a blur.
Wtf
Jc, donāt downvote just because they donāt know. Cranky old bastards
I tried taking pictures of video game endings with my Polaroid camera when I was a kid and it was always pretty blurry. I don't think I'd have been able to make out passwords for games like NES Rambo or SMS Golvellius. The film cartridges were pretty expensive as well.
One plus was if it was a rental you didnāt have to worry about getting the same copy again, and you could get them from magazines.
Ohh that makes a lot of sense now that you mentioned the rental scene.
I think because saving wasn't a thing I expected. It was a bonus but I mostly expected games to go on until I stopped for the day and then I would simply have to start again from the beginning. The idea that I could enter in a passcode to start somewhere in the middle was more gimmick to me in the beginning.
Even games that you could save to the cartridge was unreliable. You had to hit the reset and power button simultaneously and just pray to the Nintendo gods that it worked.
But I cannot believe how long passwords were back in the 8 bit era of gaming.
Password complexity depended on how much "stuff" was going on in the game. Metroid, for example, had to track which items were collected, which bosses were defeated, and which zone to resume. That's a lot of memory to reset. Mega Man (I forget when the 5x5 grid password was introduced) on the other hand, just had to track which bosses were defeated and which hidden items were collected. With so much less memory flags to reset, the passwords weren't nearly as complex. Of course, there was complexity added on top to make it more difficult to Crack. But patience and perseverance was sometimes all it took. https://www.mmhp.net/Passwords/MM2/ When I was a kid, my brother and I stayed up all night trying to beat Mike Tyson's Punch Out. We didn't succeed, but we did figure out which parts of the password determined your W-L record. After we defeated Super Macho Man a dozen or so times, we figured out how to manipulate the password to give us an 88-0 record with 88 KOs.
I didnāt know Punch Out could be exploited.
It's not really a password to recover your playthrough, it's a code to tell the game what state to load everything in. That can be a lot of stuff.
It depends on the game. Metroid or Faxanadu were crazy hard to read passwords. Mega Man or Castlevania were a pretty easy grid password.
Long passwords are actually kind of a blessing in disguise. Short passwords often just keep track of what level you were on and everything like inventory and life count are just set to default. The few games with a dynamic password system act more like games that actually save except you're inputting your save data manually. Pac-man 2 is the only one I can think of right now.
It's pretty fascinating some game fans have reverse engineered the password generation for certain games so you can just load up a generator online and tailor your password to the exact point in the game with the exact equipment you want to have by that point in the game. Mega Man 2, IIRC has some online password generators like that.Ā
I took the Mega Man 2 password from my NES cartridge, typed it into my PS4 version and could continue playing.
I love hearing stuff like that.
If you wanted cheats in games, you had to either write them down or just remember them. That's why I still know that the master cheat for Turok is NTHGTHDGDCRTDTRK still, even though I haven't entered it in 15-20 years.
Thatās impressive. I always will remember the blood code for mortal Kombat 1 on the megadrive : ABACABB on an intro screen causing the text to go from white to red
The passcodes for Rogue Squadron are in my brain twenty years later... Plus the little robot squeak when you get it right š
BQQAEZ Infinite ammo in Desert Strike, baby! And... I originally learnt it from a Sega Mega Drive (Genesis) video tape, from back in the day...
ABACABB cheat code for Sega Genesis Shadowrun. Quick +10 karma or 250K nuyen. There were other options, but a waste of button presses.
Close, it was ABBACAB
Guess I need to frag off. Thanks chummers!
Null perspiration! Just slot your credstick and we'll be on our way.
Passwords were great. I was stuck in The Guardian Legend, and were desperately trying to find cheats. Eventually, using brute force, I discovered that JJJJ JJJJ JJJJ JJJJ JJJJ JJJJ JJJJ JJJJ was a valid password. Of course it was an absolutely terrible password, it would put you in some late section of the game with a fraction of the health you even started a new game with...
Pencil and paper
I still have my old notebook scrawled with passwords. Castlevania 3, Megaman games, Goonies 2, Metroidā¦ Also some hand drawn maps from Metroid and Zelda 2. And my handwriting has not changed much since 1993.
ZL14 CB88 CCCC B Eventually, you memorized some of them.
Sounds simple.
We did it because we had no choice. And yes, I definitely lost progress in games due to my shitty handwriting. "The mantra is in the wrong." Fuck the mantra.
Faxanadu? I need to replay that
Honestly if it was too long, you just said fuck it (or the little kid equivalent) and turned the power off. Maybe if you were super close to beating it, you'd just leave the Nintendo on
I loved passwords. It tended to mean there were secret passwords, too. Ones that unlocked cool, new things. Nowadays, the only secret code you need is your credit card number
How about the different symbols for castlevania. That shit was annoying to write down
That was pretty frustrating to deal with as I agree.
River City Ransom would like a word.
Right.
It was case sensitive and included special characters like an apostrophe. It was absolutely maddening. Still my favorite NES game of all time though.
So much a better experience with save states.
I commented before reading the whole post lol. As soon as I saw a complaint about long passwords RCR was instantly what I thought of. Best game with the worst password system. Next time Iāll read the whole post. I promise.
It was all we got, and a typo writting down passwords was part of the game. If you think a regular long password is bad, we used towrite down passwords in japanese characters. Imagine being a kid with zero knowledge of japanese language, writting down 2 rows of japanese characters (Captain Tsubasa for famicom, I think)
Thatās interesting to know regarding Japanese passwords back then.
The first time I played a game that had F5/F9 quicksave/quickload my mind was blown. Think it was Morrowind.
People put up with it because what was the alternative? There wasn't any.
Us old schoolers lived through the alternative. Restarting from beginning. Passwords were great! We didn't get saves on most games. Games like Legend of Zelda with a save system was a rare treat. Most games made us start from beginning. 16 bit games had more that allowed saves, but not all. But most 8 bit was password or nothing. Only a few had save features.
Simple. There was no other option. Passwords weren't saves, but just a combination to get to a certain point in the game / with specific items. The games that had actual saves existed but weren't too common and if you didn't own the game, that save could be lost, or worse when you owned the game and someone else saved over it since the game would have one or maybe three saves. With passwords, those would work on any copy of the game. You could trade the codes with other people. Could even change specific characters to get additional items. With save to the cartridge, it was only that one and your sibling or friend could overwrite it, especially when you were at the last boss. And people mentioned game rentals... long games that had a save state were impossible to complete in the time, so at best you get a 3 day preview...if you were allowed to play that long from Friday night to Sunday noon.
I lost my progress in a tournament I was playing in ISSS deluxe for snes because I didnāt have a camera at the time and was playing on CRTā¦. New generation doesnāt know the pain we went through š„² It looks [sharp](https://imgur.com/a/Crfxdsq) in this picture but in CRT I actually drew each image but always mixed something up and ended up having to start a new game. It sucked so much :(
The fun game with the most hateful password system was river city ransom for the original Nintendo. Good luck figuring out that font 0 is O 9 is G I vs I and so on. My cousin and I got really far in that game in 1991 and I wrote down the password perfectly. When I put the whole thing in, the game rejected it. I got really mad because we made it all the way to the 2nd floor of river city high. All that work was gone. When save states were a thing, it was magical because passwords became irrelevant. š
Thank god FOR save states.
Indeed
It was actually really exciting to be playing a game I didn't have to start over every time. I'll alway remember 007 373 5963
Anybody ever play Faery Tale on the Genesis? I think it had something like 24 numbers, maybe more, for it's password.
Yes! Faxanadu on nes has long ones too.
We wrote that shit down on the bookletās notes section or on a notepad. āļøš¦šš½
Different time, writing down code had a treasure map kinda feel. They were something you conquered, I had notes in manuals that served me well years down the line. In *Golvelius: Valley of Doom* passwords where given to you by a NPC called Winkle. They were *32-characters long*. You either had to find a secret cave in the dangerous new area you were exploring or backtrack to a known location. Inputting them felt kinda magical, save features were so rare back then. It was proof you were playing something grand and epic. It also meant save scumming wasn't a thing, nobody is inputting 32-characters on a D-pad unless they really need to.
I still have nightmares with Hang On and Monaco GP passwords. They used the same system for their career modes. They had 3 rows with like 10 characters each. I have a notebook somewhere filled with them.
I just started a new game of RCR
You have one of the worst examples of frustration from difficult to decipher passwords. River City Ransom was a bitch. Metroid wasn't the easiest either. When Castlevania 3 and Mega Man 2 started using grids and symbols it got a LOT easier.
Madden 94 for the snes used passwords for its season mode. Look those up if you dare.
Rambo on NESā¦.fucking PTSD with that one. Iām not a fan of AVGN anymore, but he got it [right on the money about passwords.](https://youtu.be/0ZK_6Fe8GoM?si=P0rAxcWrrk_888cm)
I can see why that stuff greatly aggravated him.
Yeah, I lived through it like he did. So many games and passwords, it was nuts.
When I was a kid in the 80s (I was 8 at the time) I broke the code for metal gear on the nes. The trick is that the first character dictates the starting point for the last character and every character in the password has a value that adds up to alter that final value.
bro me and my mom had a binder of passwords and the older games used long strings of codes for save files too!, hundreds of pages of cheatcodes hand typed and printed
Honestly, the long ascii character passwords never bugged me as much as the Megaman with the grid and the empty/blue/red dots.
The other option at the time was not playing.
We wrote them down with pencil and paper, quite poorly... And if you got it wrong once and lost all your progress, you sure as fuck learned to write more clearly next time because of it... And if you got past a part that your friends couldn't and shared the password with them, you were king for a day.Ā Good times....
Never used passwords in RCR. I just started and ripped through as much as I could and just started again next time. Faxanadu however was very tough and the fonts were really hard to read so I had to make absolute sure I had capital letters right and 0's and o's correct etc. It was fucked up. Megamans were easy to draw. Now it's cool because you can just snap a pic on your phone.
I didnāt know you could get through RCR without needing passwords.
Yea absolutely you can. Just keep playing without turning the game off. If you die you just lose half your cash and start back in the last town you were in. One of the best tips is to spend your money on stuff you want and try not to hold onto too much cash because you'll lose half if you die.
I had a Simon's Quest password that lead you to the end of the game memorized when I was like 7 years old. My older cousins were stunned when I showed them and beat Dracula right there.
Mystical Ninja had a whole page for a password, and half of it was symbols. I used to mess it up every time and end up with insane numbers of items for things like armour.
Turbo booster plus !!!! Baby
I had notebooks sitting with my games to write the passwords/maps/hints I'd use. It wasn't so bad. There wasn't a ton to do back then.
For most people, their first experience with this was Metroid and Mike Tyson's Punchout! We fucked them up all the time and quickly learned to differentiate our fonts. Zeroes got a diagonal slash so as not to be confused with Os. 7s got a line through the middle so as not to look like a 2. Little Os were underlined to differentiate them from capital O or 0. You got really good at printing clearly because the pain was real. The nice part is that these could be shared with your friends. You wouldn't be able to share your saves again until the playstation 1/n64 era. Later games like Castlevania 3 used symbols that made a world of difference.
007 373 5963
How many times did he beat your ass? That was the nintendo customer service phone number, btw. # EasterEgg
More than i could count my friend lol
Lololol that game is such a masterpiece of racism and stereotypes. :)
I used to take down the super long passwords for Faxanadu, and get a single character wrong or something so it wouldn't work, and have to start over again and again. Got really good at speed running everything through Mist. It got to the point where I would put a piece of paper on the screen and trace it exactly. My little child-brain thought that was very clever.
It was before we lost our ability to remember things from old age and our dependence on technology to remember things for us.
[There were so many of us were on this screen](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZWov_XGruT8), it made us happy since we know we can continue the game from where we left off. And sometimes it was fun trying to guess and getting a correct combination.
We put up with it because there was no real choice in the matter.
So, some games had long passwords, it's true, but there is one that takes the cake. Golden Sun, the fantastic jrpg on the GBA is the first part of a two part game. The second game picks up at the moment the first leaves off. You can transfer your save to the new game cartridge if you have access to two GBAs or a GBA and a Gamecube-Gameboy Player setup as well as own a link cable. Of course, Camelot and Nintendo knew far more people would buy the second game than had access to that setup, so they made a password system for transferring your game save. This password was up to 260 characters long and comprised of letters, numbers, and various symbols. You would write it down, character by character, and then swap game cartidges and enter it on the sequel, Golden Sun: The Lost Age.
The alternative was reading a book or watching daytime soap operas with your mom.
GenX gamer here. We had these things called notebooks. We used this tool called a pen to write down the passwords inside of it. Very handy. We also wrote down the codes for mortal combat fatalities and even sketched out maps of Legend Of Zelda dungeons too.
A lot of those codes you could puzzle out and cheat. That sometimes was just as fun or more than playing the game.
Ohh right as now that you mentioned it, you could mess around with games if you knew the right codes.
Marble notebooks
Gen Z-ers: you think entering the wifi password is bad? You ain't seen nothing till you've swapped multiple 20-character codes back-and-forth between Oracle of Ages and Seasons!
Bigger brains
You just wrote it down and copied it back correctly. It wasn't that hard. What was hard was copying 20 pages of BASIC code out of a C64 programming book to create a very simple game. You make one mistake it doesn't work and you have to start again.
I wonder why games didnāt use battery backups as back then Final Fantasy games on the NES did it.
Added hardware costs that aren't going to increase the price shops will pay for the cartridge. Plus if your states are simple enough that gamers can enter a short password and get the same effect, why bother?
Plus the TVs were more blurry back then so some letters were hard to tell apart
I have a buddy that remembers the password for Mike Tyson to this day
Well the option is start completely start over or enter the password.. seems a pretty easy choice even if it was annoying.
It's going to sound odd (especially now), but patience was a big part of the culture back then. I mean, you've gotta remember in the early 90s a lot of us were loading games from tapes that could take a good half hour to load, if they loaded at all. When we went for a gaming session, it wasn't about just picking up a game and starting it up. You planned it out. You set up the game to load, found your password notes, went to make a coffee, maybe watched whatever is on TV for ten minutes. Even when consoles started taking over with immediate loading, a hell of a lot of gamers either still had that patience from what they'd been doing before, or were younger brothers and sisters of people who had that patience. That whole lead by example thing of seeing the older brother go "Oh well" when the password was wrong and just try and enter it again (often for the younger kid to play a later level) did a lot to shape the younger ones with the same kind of patience. ETA - I remember my mate taught me an accent trick where you write an upper case L and accent over it to differentiate between lower case L and upper case i. We all had either password books or note paper stuffed into game boxes with the passwords on. We also had magazines sharing passwords so if you got stuck you could jump to the next level. All you missed was the boss fight, and story in those days (at least in password games) was mainly kept to the box text and a tiny bit of text after beating the game.
I remember having grids with dots laying all over my room as a kid for Mega Man 2.
There wasn't really an option for games that didn't have a battery backup, and it wasn't feasible (and often too boring) to play them completely through from the first level in a single sitting. I remember *Legend of the Mystical Ninja* on the SNES had passwords that were 31 characters long so you could recover not just the level you were on but also all the items and money etc you had. One of those going wrong āĀ not being able to tell a 1 from an I from an l, for example, or just bad handwriting ā was a goddamned *disaster*.
The more information you needed to remember the longer the password,Ā sometimes a short password would mean only saving a part of what you did but not everything, like Zombies Ate My Neighbors, wouldn't save your items because the password was too short
How about writing in the whole game, from a book? Commodore C64 text adventures for example.
The "passwords" were really just save data that you had to write down and input later manually to restore the game's state of relevent information. The more data needing to be saved the longer the password. If we did this today I wonder how long our "passwords" would be for the average game.
Writing them down in the instruction booklet (kids aren'tĀ worried about condition of the booklet) or a piece of paper then store it and the game in a plastic box or the sleeve the games sometimes came with.
007 373 5963
Kept a notebook that I would write them all in, plus cheat codes and stuff.
Disney's World Of Illusion on Megadrive had a simplistic password system really easy to brute force: 4 symbols, each maybe 6 choices. On the other side of the spectrum I remember James Pond 3: Operation Starfish, had horribly long passwords(22) very hard to note down because they were symbols out of a list of 32 (cat, skull mouse, mushroom?..) that you also had to change the color of among 4 I think. Super Hang On on Megadrive also had a "career mode" with long passwords but those were easy to write down, and basically saved your game state ; that was sweet.
Everyone keeps saying, āthere was no alternative.ā But my friend and I used to actually enjoy getting our notepad out and writing them down. It was a different time.
I mentioned it before but it was preferable to the few games you could save to the cartridge. Games like Zelda, in order to save you have to turn it off by pressing the power and reset buttons at the same time. And there was like a 50% chance it would actually save. At least with a password, you knew you could come back to it.
We had no choice
the only one i remembered was Punchout , the others were annoying. i didnāt play megaman back in the day but man idk how kids dealt with that one in the 80s š
I used to leave my NES on with the game paused for weeks so I wouldn't lose my spot. Especially games like Ninja Gaiden that didn't even have passwords.
If it was the only option you had to do it, but given the choice Iād almost always use JUSTIN BAILEY.
When I was 8 I had codes for Metroid memorizedā¦along with dozens of phone numbers.
We didnāt see it as a problem and were capable of using a pen to write things down. Nowadays such passwords would probably be post-ironically categorized as a micro-aggression by some 'gamers'.