The Game Genie was really cool when you think about it. It was like hex editing/game corrupting at the consumer level, without a need for technical knowledge.
The device came with a book that contained codes for your typical cheating things, like infinite lives and whatnot. But it also encouraged you to experiment by “programming” your own codes too. It was fun just plugging in a random string of letters and seeing what happens.
During my (I guess) “NES obsession” period from like 2003 I loved visiting random cobbled together sites dedicated to Game Genie codes people randomly typed in and submitted. I still have the big yellow notepad I used to write down any interesting-sounding codes I came across to try.
A lot of these sites didn’t really have any standards of usefulness. They seemed to accept just about anything, as long as it did something. Stuff like “jump and the game will freeze” was a fairly common sight.
And a lot of descriptions for corruption codes were incredibly cryptic and vague, enough to pique your interest. Here’s some examples from my notepad for The Legend of Zelda:
- KAAAAA — Weird tattoo place
- GAAAAP — Hippie Mode
- STINGA — I wanna leave!!
- SOKEAA — Door Haven Polka Mode
- VULXXX — Very groovy
- POPNYE+POPAAA — Ultimate combo for fun!
- PLAAAA — go right, walk up steps, wait a few seconds, let the fun begin!!!
Like what does any of this even mean?? The only way to find out was to just try them out for yourself!
But one of my favorite codes was for Super Mario Bros, “EONTEY”, which was “Mario drives an invisible car”.
Oh…
Anyway the Game Genie was a cool device that provides interesting and fun uses beyond just the game cheating aspect. ~The End~