Game Genie

Game Genie

The Game Genie was a line video game cheating devices. The Game Genie temporarily modifies game data, allowing the player to cheat, manipulate various aspects of games, and sometimes access unused assets and functions. 

The Game Genie’s technical functions were surprisingly basic when examined from a computer science perspective. Each game cartridge set up a series of locations within the memory where various pieces of information were stored—the number of lives you had left, the level you began on, the items you had, or even cooler things like the height your character could jump. Sometimes these locations in memory contained simple numbers. By finding these locations (almost always through trial and error—because game developers don’t share that information), Game Genie users could then insert new numbers into them. So by finding “How Many Lives Left” in Super Mario Bros., you could switch the standard number of lives (three) with a much bigger number, and play the game with effectively infinite lives.

The Game Genie thus used two important pieces of information to make an important effect occur within the game: The location of a variable, and the content of that variable. So to create a Game Genie “code” (their simplified alphabetical interface for inputting memory locations and values to pop into them), an enterprising gamer could find the location, then experiment with possible contents to pop in there—lots of contents could just crash the game, but ultimately you could hit on something usable. By putting those two pieces of information together, you got a code.