Hey all, Ernie here with a bigger refresh than usual. In honor of the Game Genie’s 35th anniversary this month, here’s a deeply rewritten version of a 2015 Tedium piece on the device. Nearly every section has been completely rebuilt wholesale. Something happened very recently that makes this classic device relevant to the current moment. Can you guess what it is? Today in Tedium: July 1990, a full 35 years ago, was supposed to be the coming-out party for one of the best accessories ever created for the Nintendo Entertainment System. It made games easier, sure, but it also made them more interesting. It presented a new way of thinking about the games that you brought home. But Nintendo didn’t like it—and the company sued. That device eventually emerged, and despite the legal battle, it became a defining part of what made the NES great. I am of course talking about the Game Genie, whose legacy looms large today. Today’s Tedium ponders why the Game Genie proved such a defining piece of video game history. — Ernie @ Tedium
“We didn’t have a license to create Nintendo games so we found a way of bypassing Nintendo’s lock-out chip and released games that way. We had an idea of placing a switch on the cartridge to add extra lives, weapons, and things like that. Then we made the mental leap of saying that if we could do this with our own games, then maybe we could build an interface for other people’s games too. It was a game that morphed into an industry.” — David Darling, one of the founders of Codemasters, the British gaming company that first created the Game Genie in the late 1980s, discussing how the device came to be in a 2015 interview with the now-defunct GamesTM. 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. They eventually turned the hacky device concept into a $140 million cottage industry. For creating the Game Genie and helping develop the British gaming industry, David Darling, along with his brother Richard, were made Commanders of the Order of the British Empire back in 2008. See, even the queen noticed!
The appeals court case that legalized the Game Genie was recently used to claim that Anthropic’s LLMs are fair use The idea of a video game console like the Nintendo Entertainment System is that it’s a console, not a computer. In a perfect world, you’re not supposed to see the wires holding together the games. But the Game Genie exposed them to the world, in batches of six or eight characters, and that made the device both dangerous to Nintendo and extremely appealing to your average eight-year-old. Of course they were going to butt heads over it, and it feels like a situation that, one look at the legal battle between the two, has a lot of modern parallels. In fact, the legal battle between the two companies was recently cited in a landmark appeals court ruling involving the LLM provider Anthropic. Yes, we live in a world where we can directly compare Claude siphoning the whole of human knowledge with the six- or eight-character codes you put into your NES in 1991. The saga began in May 1990, when the device’s U.S. distributor, Lewis Galoob Toys, sued Nintendo, seeking declaratory relief against Nintendo, in hopes that a court could tell them the Game Genie was safe to sell. It was not clear if Galoob would win, and at first, they didn’t. (It should be noted that another way this story has relevance to the modern day is via trade. See, while the Game Genie was temporarily banned in the U.S. because of the lawsuit, it had gone on sale in Canada, where a separate legal battle quickly fell out of Nintendo’s hands. If you knew someone going to Toronto, it was presumably easy to get one across the border. It wasn’t like this device was contraband.) The early rounds of the case did not go Galoob’s way, with a preliminary injunction preventing the device from being sold. But like a quick-witted Micro Machines pitchman, Galoob ultimately got the last word in: The federal district court eventually favored Galoob’s stance, and when an appeals court decided to take the case on in 1992, it was bad for Nintendo. In his decision, Joseph Jerome Farris found that slight modifications of a derivative work were allowed, as long as the original form of copyright was kept intact. “The Game Genie merely enhances the audiovisual displays (or underlying data bytes) that originate in Nintendo game cartridges,“ the legal decision states. “The altered displays do not incorporate a portion of a copyrighted work in some concrete or permanent form.” The ruling created a pliable standard for derivative works. Very quickly, the ruling became an important one in the history of fair use. It also raised some legal precedent regarding whether Galoob could get money back for all those lost sales caused by the injunction. (Nintendo had to pay them damages!) Ever think, as a non-lawyer, that when a plaintiff or defendant loses a preliminary injunction, that’s a great sign they lost their case? Galoob is clear evidence that is not always the case. Almost immediately, the ruling was cited in a separate case that pierced the armor of the Sega Genesis’ first-party developer arrangement. It was a significant win for fair use in relation to emerging technology. But the ruling long outlived the relevance of its hardware. It is frequently cited both for its precedent related to bond damages for a victorious company that lost in preliminary rounds, as well as what it had to say about derivative copyright. A legal ruling referred to the Game Genie as a “nifty converter,” which feels like a phrase that we should permanently attach to the Game Genie’s legacy from here on out. Which is why, when the recent federal court ruling came about in Bartz v. Anthropic PBC, it cited Galoob. For those who haven’t closely kept an eye on the LLM case, the gist of the ruling was that Anthropic was found to be liable for stealing millions of books by downloading them online. However, had it gone to the trouble of buying those books, it would have been fair use as the use case was suitably transformative. Essentially, it erred by not buying legal copies of every book it used to build Claude. (It did buy and digitize some copies, and the case makes it sure feel like, if you know anything about the Internet Archive lawsuit, the Internet Archive should have just built an LLM instead of a digital lending library.) “That the accused is a commercial entity is indicative, not dispositive,” the Anthropic ruling states. “That the accused stands to benefit is likewise indicative. But what matters most is whether the format change exploits anything the Copyright Act reserves to the copyright owner. Anthropic already had purchased permanent library copies (print ones). It did not create new copies to share or sell outside.” This, per the ruling, parallels the way that Galoob hinged on the fact that the Game Genie was fair use because no additional copies of the cartridge were created by using the device. (The Anthropic case uses the phrase “nifty converter” to describe the Game Genie, which I’ll allow.) “As a result, Anthropic’s format-change from print library copies to digital library copies was transformative under fair use factor one,” the ruling continued. It’s a weird connection, but it’s one that absolutely makes sense. You may not love LLMs or love that this was one of the things that a key copyright case involving LLMs hinged on. But the Game Genie, as a device that transformed an existing work, is certainly what you want to point to if you’re trying to defend the existence of something like Claude.
Sponsored By Jack & Jill Jack & Jill—The world's first AI recruiters The job search is broken. Endless forms, ghosting recruiters, and spammy pitches aren’t just annoying—they’re a waste of time. Jack & Jill fix that. They’re AI recruiters—not chatbots, not job boards. Real AI agents that screen roles, interview candidates, and match people with companies. Jack helps candidates: Speak with him once
Get matched to top jobs
Skip the noise Jill helps companies: Source and screen talent
Shortlist only the best
Offers intros to the best candidates No cover letters. No ghosting. No agency fluff. Just real matches, fast. Thousands of people are already getting hired through Jack & Jill. Let AI do the boring parts—so humans can make better decisions. Are you looking for the perfect job or the best candidates? Speak to Jack & Jill.
$15M The amount Nintendo ended up having to pay Galoob for a year of lost sales due to their copyright infringement lawsuit against the company, according to a 1994 ruling on the case which found that the company lost this amount—or more—due to the fact that they couldn't sell the device at the height of the NES’ success. "While it is true that Galoob did not likely lose exactly 1.6 million sales of the Game Genie, it is reasonably certain it lost at least that amount," the 1994 Ninth Circuit ruling stated.
In case you want an explanation of how Game Genie codes actually function on a technical level, I recommend this relatively recent clip from Modern Vintage Gamer. Five of the Game Genie's many unusual quirks On the NES, the Game Genie gave an already quirky horizontal cartridge-loading mechanism a little extra trouble. The silicon on the device bent the console's pins, which eventually meant that if you used it too much, your console wouldn't work without it. The Game Boy version of the device was freaking huge, with a ton of extra plastic. And because the device stopped being made around the mid-1990s, that meant no newer versions came out, making it downright impractical to use with any Game Boy besides the original. It does work, as this dude using a Game Genie on a Gameboy Advance SP proves. The Super Nintendo version didn't work with games that had built-in performance-enhancing chips inside the cartridges, at least at first. Sucks if you're a Starfox fan. Unlike Nintendo, Sega backed the Game Genie, making Galoob an official licensee of the company. Sega, however, required the Genesis version of the Game Genie not to be compatible with games that had built-in save functions, such as Shining Force. On the Sega Game Gear, if you typed in the code "DEAD," the screen would bounce. Because honestly, why not?
... continue reading