The Game Genie was originally meant to do much more than help you beat Battletoads
For a kid in the early ‘90s, knowing somebody with a Game Genie was tantamount to knowing a character from the movie Hackers. Somehow, this awkward-looking chunk of plastic billed as a “video game enhancer” could give you infinite lives, better weapons, or let you skip levels altogether. It was essentially magic, and everybody wanted one. But, as a new piece from Tedium explains, the designers of the Game Genie didn’t initially create the hardware to make playing Super Mario Bros. more fun. Instead, the “plug through”-type cart was originally used to bypass the NES’ lockout mechanism so users could play unlicensed games.
As Tedium writes, Codemasters was one of the most popular UK game developers in the late 1980s. Founded by Richard and David Darling, the company specialized in affordable titles for 8-bit systems like the Commodore 64 and the ZX Spectrum, which were more popular in the UK than the new Nintendo systems. As their popularity grew, the Darlings teamed up with another pair of brothers, the Oliver twins, and expanded their company, launching new and successful titles like Ghost Hunters and a line of games starring Dizzy, “a cartoon character based on an egg.” Still, they’d yet to make their mark in America, where the NES was king.