Game Genie

The Game Genie came from Codemasters, the British studio the Darling brothers ran out of Banbury. They had never taken a Nintendo licence, and the work they'd done reverse-engineering the NES lockout to publish unlicensed games gave them the knowledge to build something else: a cartridge that sat between the game and the machine. The idea had a charmingly crude ancestor — a physical knob on their own Treasure Island Dizzy cartridge that let you dial in extra lives. Richard and David Darling filed the patent with Edward Carron in May 1990. Camerica took Canada; Codemasters brought it to Lewis Galoob Toys for the United States, where it was announced in May 1990.

The court described how it worked better than any marketing copy did: the Game Genie "blocks the value for a single data byte sent by the game cartridge to the central processing unit and replaces it with a new value." It never touched the cartridge, it altered up to three things at a time, and the moment you switched off, everything reverted. The Ninth Circuit, revisiting it years later in Micro Star v. FormGen, put it more bluntly: the Game Genie was "dumb," merely "a window into the computer program." Over a billion codes were possible. You got a booklet in the box, you could pay to have fresh code books mailed to you every quarter, and magazines printed codes in their back pages.

Nintendo went to war over it, and the story is usually told backwards. Galoob sued first, on 17 May 1990, asking a court to declare the thing legal. Nintendo responded with its own action and won a preliminary injunction that July — which killed the Game Genie's entire first holiday season in the US while Camerica went on selling it in Canada. The injunction stood about a year. On 12 July 1991 Judge Fern Smith ruled for Galoob, and on 21 May 1992 the Ninth Circuit affirmed.

What the court actually held is narrower and more interesting than the version that gets repeated. The Game Genie did not create a "derivative work," because a derivative work "must incorporate a protected work in some concrete or permanent form" — and an altered screen that vanishes when the power goes off is not that. The court went out of its way to say fixation was not the test it was applying. It added, in the alternative, that even if the displays were derivative works, a player messing about at home was making non-commercial use and Nintendo had shown no market harm — but that fair-use passage was later described by the Ninth Circuit itself as dicta. So the Game Genie case is not, despite what you will read almost everywhere, the case that established reverse engineering as fair use. That is Sega v. Accolade, a different fight entirely.

Then came the bill. To get its injunction, Nintendo had posted a bond — first $100,000, raised to $5 million, and finally to $15 million. When Galoob won, the district court worked out what the blocked year had cost: 1.6 million units never sold, $15,138,048 in lost profits, plus interest and the cost of restarting the line. Because the damage exceeded the bond, Galoob took the entire $15 million, and in February 1994 the Ninth Circuit affirmed that too. Nintendo had spent a year and a fortune making the Game Genie more famous than it could have managed alone.

Here is the part that undoes the way everyone remembers this device. It was never a Nintendo product and never Nintendo-only: it shipped for the NES, the Super NES, the Game Boy, the Sega Genesis in 1992, and the Game Gear. And Sega — the company nobody associates with it — gave the Genesis version its official approval while Nintendo was still in court trying to have the thing killed. Sega wasn't being gracious about it, mind: that deal only came together after Codemasters privately threatened a lawsuit of its own, warning it would "open [the] floodgates." Calling it "the Nintendo one" names the device after the platform holder who fought hardest to destroy it. The memory survives that way precisely because of the lawsuit: the NES version came first, and it was the one the case was about. The device itself faded fast — Galoob's Game Genie business collapsed within a couple of years of the win, a more powerful Game Genie 2 for the Super NES got as far as a prototype and no further, and no version was ever made for the Nintendo 64 or anything since. By 1996 the GameShark had taken the job.