Get the latest tech news
Game Genie Retrospective: The Best NES Accessory Ever Was Unlicensed
For an unlicensed game accessory, the Game Genie sure casts a long shadow. It reshaped the games we already owned—and had a profound effect on copyright law.
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. When HTML, PHP, and JavaScript became the lingua franca of the internet a decade later, a lot of those coders probably cut their coding-mindset teeth not on BASIC, but on Game Genie codes. The idea that you can make weird photos, or have Claude or OpenAI recite to you bawdy poetry, or attempt to build you a theoretical web server for you based in the long-dead QBasic programming language, scratches the same sort of itch.
Or read this on Hacker News
