What we had...was this! The Game Genie, by Galoob. A strange interposter that sat between your NES Cartridges and the Nintendo "control deck", and intercepted the communications between the NES and the cartridge with specific values or mathmatical alterations - see, digital equipment like your PC, or a Nintendo, does not work on black magic at all, but rather it works on MATHMATICS! This little "strap on" of digital proportions gave us kids some bit of control over our games mechanics, gameplay, aesthetics, and somtimes (and most often for me) drawing strange, weird, "ill" effects from the game, causing utmost hilarity for amusement beyond just "playing" the thing in the usual way? While the commercials touted "Run Faster, Fight Harder, Live Forever" or somesuch....for me it was more like "Want to turn Mario into a midget dinosaur that throws Pumpkins and sounds like a cat in a blender?" or "Ever wanted to fight the Dragonlord with a slime for a head?" or "Ever wanted to turn Alex Trebec into the $500 Man?". Well, some of this and more is possible with the Game Genie.

2000, the origins of my Game Genie are kind of dubious but let's' just say they have to do with someone's relationship failing and me losing touch with the original owner as a result. Anyway, I was in a metal band, we got a P.A. system, I also was in Video Productions class in high school, and it was supposed to be my last year (class of 2001).

At that time, since I was what you'd call a 17 year old "secret nerd" or "loser" depending on your point of view, with nothing better to do outside of the band but sit in my room and mess with old computers and Nintendo stuff when I did not have money for guitar mods/builds, recording demos for the band, and was not hustling my rear trying to find odd jobs to get into to fund my guitar insanity and try and buy myself a vehicle. Anyway, I wound up getting my hands on a Game Genie around that time and started messing with it at home for fun. During that time, I also had just built my first internet connected computer - Creeping Net 1 - a 486 DX-33 running Windows 3.1 with AOL on it, and having internet at home really opened the doors to my mad discovery of crazy game genie codes.

It all started with a file I found called "mario.txt" - a plaintext file some guy had compiled of all the strange game genie codes for Super Mario Bros. 1/2/3 he could dig out of the game on his own, and I started messing with them, and then inspired by this file, I started creating some of my own, later even creating more for other games. This was where the whole "corruption" thing with me got started, I was not the first, but I was one of the first on YouTube to do it years later.

But YouTube was NOT My first video I'd ever made. Actually, the first VIDEO I ever made was when the Jehova's Witnesses gave us some god-awful "Christ Compells You" VHS or something like that, and it was a really cheap crappy VHS tape inside a blank cardboard case. At the same time, I was in Coach Moon's video productions class at OHS, so I was learning a bit. Unfortunatley I did not have Video Toaster and an Amiga - but what I DID have was a P.A. system, a VCR and TV, a Discman, and some ingenuity. So one night, I got a wild hair, and decided to do the following...

1. Bring the P.A. System, Discman, NES, Game Genie, and Mic w/ Mic Stand to the Livingroom
2. Wire in the NES video to the VCR via composite
3. Wire in a mic on a stand into Channel 1 of P.A. mixer
4. Wire in my Discman to channel 8 (had RCA Inputs)
5. Wire in the NES to channel 7 (had RCA Inputs)
6. put Van-Halen's "Balance" in the Discman
7. Put the cheesy "Chistian" tape into the VCR with the write protect tab hole taped over
8. Check my levels
9. Hit Record on the VCR and begin one of the most agonizingly cringey things I ever did in my life - starting with Super Mario Bros......and fittingly, "The Seventh Seal"!

What ensued, was what I consider the ORIGINAL "Game Genie Krazy Kodez" video - 17 year old Creepingnet babbling into a Peavey PV-1 Mic and XR684 mixer with Van-Halen's Balance CD as interlude music, and running a Nintendo through more reverb than should be legal to make it sound like this was recorded in some creepy empty room. What also ensued was the cringiest mess of a socially awkward 17 year old kid babbling incessantly over game genie codes with long spats of laughter and awful attempts at MST3K'ing the situation. I turn red just thinking about dragging this tape to Lithium rehearsal one weekend to show it off just to get the response of "Don't ever show that to anyone...that is the most horrid cringey thing ever made!" - or words to that effect. So it lives in a sock drawer in Opelika now, or a landfill. So if you ever find a white VHS tape, I'd like that one back, as well as if anyone at AUM finds Lithium's 2003 halloween show at AUM, I want to digitize that as well! Anyway, I resigned myself to contributing code-lists as trcctldy@aol.com online for awhile, before moving to mFire for my ISP for the remainder of my "Crap-a-bama" days.

So skip ahead to 2006, I'm a budding youtuber of 23 years old, living on my own for the first time, and I just found a Dazzle Snazzi PCI capture card, put it in a old Compaq 2626 Pentium II grade PC from a thrift shop, and decided to recreate the whole setup, minus my cringey voiceover, on a computer, to become one of the first "corruption video guys" on Youtube - same NES, same Game Genie, same cartridges, just now older, wiser, and ready to show my boredom-induced insanity to the whole wide world via the internet. Later that Card was moved to the GEM PIII proper and THAT was used to record the later videos (sans running the NES through my Behringer V-Amp guitar effects processor for that creepy "Abandoned" vibe to the NES sound via plate reverb).

It was during this time I also discovered that a lot of NES Game Genie codes you found online were WRONG, because they were compiled by some person using NESticle - which was an old NES EMulator for DOS - it would work one way on NESticle, another way on an actual NES. So a lot of stuff I was trying on my real Nintendo was not working in an emulator, and vice-versa. So that's another thing I wanted to clear up here.....NES Game Genie codes on actual hardware versus emulation was never always accurate. Until we could rename gamegenie.nes to gg.rom and use it with FCEUx for accurate Game Genie emulation, we could not accurately reproduce the effects of a real Game Genie using a emulator - you had to have the real McCoy Nintendo and a real-McCoy Galoob/Codemasters GameGenie cheat device. Another inaccuracy is emulation, even to this day, allows for far more codes than the paltry three the Game Genie gives you.

Today, I'm quite surprised that I'm actually occsaionally referenced to be a part of a "scene" of "YouTubers" who created these kinds of videos, especially considering these were some of the most low-effort videos I made. I just threw the NES into my DV capture card, and played the games while adding pre-planned codes before recording. Then I'd upload the whole sonic and visual cacauphony to the internet for other's to enjoy the sheer hilarity of NES games gone totally awry. It was good, quick, easy content, that would garner hilarious comments, thus providing some fun interaction with other people in the now dwindling "YouTube Community" - because it's "Corporate Tube" ever since the Algorithm decided it hates me because I won't shill more Squarespace, Dr. Dish-Tosser-Soap, the 500 LBS of Transient Poop guy and NordVPN.