Was this NES add-on a blessing or what? Sure, Nintendo wasn’t too happy that Galoob was making a cartridge that plugs into their game cartridges but the gamers didn’t care. It was a godsend!
FINALLY I could get some serious work done on the various games that plagued me. Many NES games were incredibly tough and it was nice to have the Genie around to help give me the advantage. Invincibility, super jumps, unlimited ammo, infinite lives, level select, one hit kills and so on were the kind codes I was looking for.
That famous screen.
The cartridge came with a book filled with codes to all kinds of games, but because new codes were discovered and new games were released on a continuous basis, you could subscribe to a quarterly newsletter featuring new codes.
Galoob would later make Genies for Sega’s Game Gear & Genesis and the SNES and Game Boy before finally calling it a day, but the spirit of cheating until you win lived on in to the 32-bit era and beyond with Action Replay, GameShark and Code Breaker.
oh man i wished so bad to get one of thoughs when it came out.
I love the ridiculously bad “games” they show (since they probably couldn’t afford the licensing fees to show actual games). I still have an original Game Genie from a few years back. The Game Genie was the only way a friend & I ever beat the NES version of Silkworm – that game was relentlessly punishing.