His subsequent NES dev kits were altogether more compact. Ted had made a rather 'Heath Robinson' system which consisted of a PC connected to a Commodore 64 connected to a box full of wires and electronics, all hooked up to a consumer NES.
"I converted Treasure Island Dizzy using Codies' homemade dev system.
Andrew Graham, in the same EDGE article on Micro Machines, humorously describes how in April 1989 he first encountered Carron's genius. Reverse-engineering the NES, cracking the security, building Codemasters' in-house NES development kit, and ultimately designing Game Genie itself was all down to Carron's technical expertise. This defiant seed, planted due to Nintendo's apathy towards Codemasters, would ultimately cost Nintendo millions of dollars, and it was all down to Ted Carron. We thought that to achieve this you'd have to give the game loads of options, so people could make it as hard or as easy as they liked We tried to come up with a game concept that would appeal to absolutely everybody. The hardest part was finding a way around the protection on the NES, so our games would not be treated as 'counterfeit'." "We produced our own development systems and games. "At the time it wasn't easy to get a licence and we didn't need one, so we went ahead without it," states brother Richard, interviewed by EDGE magazine on the making of Micro Machines. After that, we just saw doing it without them as a challenge." "To be honest, when we went to CES, we tried to talk to Nintendo about doing games for them, but they gave us the cold shoulder because we hadn't booked an appointment. When we came back we were thinking 'right, we've got to somehow get into this'." Of course, to develop for the NES required an expensive license from Nintendo and, in that same Super Play interview, David reveals the Japanese giant wasn't interested. He also flew to Taiwan to work on production/debugging of the ASIC for the NES Genie."Ī 1993 Super Play interview with David confirms it was at the later Vegas show where they made their decision, "I went with Richard and a guy here called Ted Carron to one of the Las Vegas Computer Entertainment Shows, where we realised just how big Nintendo was over there. David started a small mobile games shop, Kwalee, and obviously knows the early days, litigation, Nintendo stuff, and might be happy to talk, now so much water is under the bridge Ted Carron was part of the early team and still in Leamington Spa, he married a Darling Graham Rigby now lives in Australia and did a lot of code-finding Jon Menzies wrote a lot of software at Codemasters Andrew Graham wrote the NES ROM software for Game Genie as well as other stuff, some NES games, lock chip work and so on. "People significantly involved in the NES one were David, Richard, and Jim Darling, the Codemasters family. I did a really sweet 'Game Genie 2' for the SNES, but it never launched due to market conditions."Īplin then pointed us in the direction of colleagues. I arrived at Codies just after the NES version launched in the US, and did several other formats Game Boy, Game Gear, and so on. "I did several versions of Game Genie, but not the very first NES one. For good measure, we've also included quotes from Andrew Graham, creator of Codemasters' Micro Machines game.Īplin was easy to track down, given his detailed and fascinating 2009 interview on regarding Game Genie. To tell the full, amazing story of this unassuming device, we've also supplemented their answers with quotations from other sources, including input from the siblings who founded Codemasters, the company behind the Game Genie: brothers David and Richard, and father Jim Darling. To fully document the Game Genie saga, we interviewed four key people: Ted Carron, Graham Rigby, Jonathan Menzies, and Richard Aplin. So we thought, that's interesting, but we ignored it Generally, people weren't excited about it. There was this little Japanese company, Nintendo, which had this funny little console.
Unlike Game Genie, however, none incurred the wrath of Nintendo, with a $15 million lawsuit ensuing. By the time Game Genie (initially) launched in 1990 the concept of cheat devices was already well established. Plus, there were other lesser-known plug-in devices. These allowed not just cheats but also backing up games. There were also the Multiface peripherals for various computers, by British company Romantic Robot. Game Genie was not the first Datel produced Action Replay cartridges for the C64 and other computers as early as 1985. Things get especially interesting when looking at the history of physical cheat devices that interface with game-playing hardware.
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