Game Genie Retrospective: The Best NES Accessory Ever Was Unlicensed

Summary

Hey all, Ernie here with a bigger refresh than usual. In honor of the Game Genie’s 35th anniversary this month, here’s a deeply rewritten version of a 2015 Tedium piece on the device. Nearly every section has been completely rebuilt wholesale. Something happened very recently that makes this classic device relevant to the current moment. Can you guess what it is?Today in Tedium: July 1990, a full 35 years ago, was supposed to be the coming-out party for one of the best accessories ever created for the Nintendo Entertainment System. It made games easier, sure, but it also made them more interesting. It presented a new way of thinking about the games that you brought home. But Nintendo didn’t like it—and the company sued. That device eventually emerged, and despite the legal battle, it became a defining part of what made the NES great. I am of course talking about the Game Genie, whose legacy looms large today. Today’s Tedium ponders why the Game Genie proved such a defining piece of video game history. — Ernie @ Tedium“We didn’t have a license to create Nintendo games so we found a way of bypassing Nintendo’s lock-out chip and released games that way. We had an idea of placing a switch on the cartridge to add extra lives, weapons, and things like that. Then we made the mental leap of saying that if we could do this with our own games, then maybe we could build an interface for other people’s games too. It was a game that morphed into an industry.”— David Darling, one of the founders of Codemasters, the British gaming company that first created the Game Genie in the late 1980s, discussing how the device came to be in a 2015 interview with the now-defunct GamesTM. Darling, who produced dozens of games over the years—most notably the Dizzy series—eventually licensed the idea to Galoob, a major American toy company that started selling the NES version of the device in mid-1990. They eventually turned the hacky device concept into a $140 million cottage industry. For crea...