The Game Genie’s Great Gift 🎮
It was more than just a way to cheat. The Game Genie was a gateway to remix culture that we’re seeing amplified with ChatGPT.
Hey all! Here’s another edition of Lesser Tedium, a version of Tedium that is like the ultimate cheat code. Want more content like this? Subscribe over this way.
Also, a quick programming note: I wrote a long-form piece for Motherboard that you’ll definitely want to check out. It’s about the NABU Network and its surprising modern revival—thanks in part to a retro “barn find.”
In many ways, the Game Genie broke through gamer culture in ways very similar to the reasons that people use tools like ChatGPT—not for its intended use case, but to see if they can break it.
Developed in the late 1980s by the British firm Codemasters and sold in the U.S. by the toy company Galoob, the device in its various forms became a $140 million juggernaut, something that players used to make it easy to survive another round of Battletoads or make it past jumps that otherwise might have seemed impossible.
The Game Genie, of course, was a pass-through tool that essentially modified address registers of 8-bit and 16-bit video games. It was not the first tool of its type—that honor goes to the Action Replay, an earlier device which also had the ability to save states into memory. (That inspired a weird device for the Nintendo 64.)
But the Game Genie, in many ways, was an early harbinger of what was to come with internet culture, particularly around remixes. The device was at the center of a 1992 appeals court ruling that found, essentially, that modifications of a piece of software were allowed as long as the original copyright was kept intact.
“The Game Genie merely enhances the audiovisual displays (or underlying data bytes) that originate in Nintendo game cartridges,” the Ninth Circuit court ruling in Lewis Galoob Toys vs. Nintendo of America states. “The altered displays do not incorporate a portion of a copyrighted work in some concrete or permanent form.”
In a world where so much of our software relies on slight changes and modifications—remixes, if you will—this was a big deal. It allowed for changes to the way things were built. If this decision hadn’t been made, imagine the number of things we’d have out there that couldn’t be remixed.
In many ways, the Game Genie did for software what the sampler did for music—it created new ways of thinking about the things we already owned.
We are now seeing some of the more extreme variations of that with large language models, which are taking this mindset even further.
But they just aren’t as fun as messing with a Game Genie.
» Wanna learn more? Check out my 2015 piece discussing the Game Genie, as well as David Buck’s 2018 take on Codemasters. The Game Genie is one of my favorite devices ever.