Before the internet was a welcoming place for pre-teens, we relied on two sources for gaming tips – magazine walkthroughs that were often spread across multiple issues, and hearsay from kids at school. Everyone ‘knew’ how to get Lara Croft naked, how to catch Mew…all because a friend of a friend of someone’s older brother read online about some secret cheat. These kinds of cheats spread like wildfire, and there were always very specific, yet very different tactics to completing them. We had memorised button combinations for level select codes, and the exact sequence of events needed to run into Missing No. But nine times out of ten, these very specific cheats turned out to be a complete waste of time. How many of us tried to get to that weird looking truck near the S.S. Anne?

There is of course, some truth to a few of these cheats. Encountering a certain trainer with a particular Pokémon in Pokémon Red/Blue that corresponds to the hexadecimal for Mew can trick the game into loading a random encounter with a wild one. It is stuff like this that I hadn’t really understood until I started to play around with hex values in emulators – since there was no risk of corrupting a cartridge this way. Even now, I only have a limited understanding of how the values correspond to one another, but it’s amazing that someone was curious enough to crack the game back then and work it all out. As a kid with no programming knowledge, it just seemed like a magical coincidence that a certain chain of events could trigger this kind of pay-off. Continue reading