The Game Genie looked like magic to kids in the early 1990s, but it was a hardware hack that ended up shaping copyright law. This episode starts with Codemasters founder David Darling being turned away by Nintendo at CES, the company reverse engineering the 10NES lockout chip to ship Treasure Island Dizzy with a physical lives dial, and toy distributor Lewis Galoob’s son being mesmerized by a Mario who could jump abnormally high.

The hosts explain how the pass-through device intercepted memory requests and swapped hexadecimal values in real time, why Galoob sold quarterly code-booklet subscriptions, and how kids blindly entering codes were essentially doing random poke debugging. They then cover the physical toll on NES pins, the SNES incompatibility with Super FX games like Star Fox, the Game Boy bending problem, the Genesis version’s accidental region unlocking, the Galoob v. Nintendo ruling that temporary changes are not derivative works, Nintendo’s checksum counterattack, Codemasters’ ultimatum to Sega, and the unreleased Game Genie 2 prototype still held by Richard Aplin.

• How Codemasters faked the 10NES security handshake and got an unlicensed game running
• Hexadecimal addresses explained: what actually happened when you typed a Game Genie code
• Why the device bent NES pins and could not handle SNES cartridges with enhancement chips
• The dry-erase mustache argument: how the court decided the Game Genie did not infringe copyright
• ROM checksums, fake math, and the arms race that followed Nintendo’s courtroom loss