See, even the queen noticed!įor manchildren of a certain age, the Game Genie was an important bedrock of their cultural growth, playing a similar role for gamers that The Beastie Boys' Paul's Boutique did for vinyl-heads. For creating the Game Genie and helping develop the British gaming industry, Darling and his brother Richard were made Commanders of the Order of the British Empire back in 2008. They eventually turned the hacky device concept into a $140 million cottage industry. Darling, who produced dozens of games over the years-most notably the Fantastic 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.
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. It was a game that morphed into an industry.' 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. We had an idea of placing a switch on the cartridge to add extra lives, weapons and things like that. '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.
