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 acci ...