GameShark

» see gameshark.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

A GameShark code was twelve characters of hexadecimal that you entered by hand with a controller, one character at a time, off a printed page. The first eight were an address in the console's memory and the last four were what you wanted sitting there instead. Nobody explained it that way at the time. You knew that typing it correctly gave you ninety-nine lives and typing it wrong froze the machine on the loading screen, and that was the whole of the theory anyone needed.

The hardware came out of Datel, in England, which had been building cheat devices since the Action Replay cartridges of the eight-bit years. In 1996 an American accessory company called InterAct, run by Todd Hays, took the North American rights and put its own brand on the box. GameShark reached the Saturn and the PlayStation in January 1996, then the Nintendo 64 that August. The N64 unit had a side effect nobody had asked for. It defeated the region lockout, so a Japanese cartridge ran on an American console.

The first cartridge shipped with around four thousand codes already loaded and enough flash memory to work as a save device when you were not cheating. That was the commercial trick underneath it. You were not buying a cheat, you were buying a memory card that happened to cheat, which is a much easier thing to hand to a parent at a checkout. By 2002 the brand was turning thirty million dollars a year.

This was a shelf product and the shelf was in an American toy store. Consoles in Turkey came in as expensive imports and mostly stayed in the houses that could absorb the price. The default machine here was a PC and the default place to play was a cafe with twenty of them in a row running Counter-Strike, and nothing in that room had a cartridge slot. The codes printed in the back of a magazine, the accessory aisle at Walmart, the argument with a friend about whether using it counted: all of it belongs to a childhood on the other side of an ocean from mine.

~ the record ~

~ where the codes came from ~

Codes were found, not issued. Somebody with a way to freeze a running game would change one byte, watch what happened on screen, and write down the address that had done it. There was no documentation for any of this. The map of what lived where inside a console's memory got assembled by strangers, one address at a time, and published for nothing. Magazines ran code pages every issue and gameshark.com carried a searchable database of the results.

None of it was legal in the way the console makers preferred, and all of it was tolerated. Nintendo had already taken the question to court against Galoob over the Game Genie and lost in 1992, which is the reason the category existed at all. Past that ruling the manufacturers worked out that a cheat device sells more copies of a hard game than it costs them, and they stopped fighting it until the hardware itself gave them a better answer.

~ who ended up with the brand ~

InterAct sat inside Recoton, a consumer electronics company carrying more than 200 million dollars of debt. Recoton closed its video and computer game operations on 30 September 2002 and sold GameShark to Mad Catz for five million dollars, announced on 23 January 2003, months ahead of its own bankruptcy filing. Five million for a brand that had turned thirty million in revenue the previous year is what a fire sale looks like written down.

Datel did not come with it. Mad Catz sourced from a company called Fire instead, under a deal committing it to buy five million dollars of product a year, and on 9 December 2005 it paid two million dollars to get out of that commitment. Its president called the market a declining one, which it was. Consoles were getting harder to reach into and save files were moving onto hard drives where a pass-through cartridge could not follow.

~ the shark that came back ~

Nothing shipped with the name on it in the United States after 2012, and gameshark.com stopped resolving. The code databases moved to fan sites, where they still sit, maintained by roughly the same kind of person who wrote them in the first place.

In January 2024 Todd Hays turned up at CES with the name bolted onto something called AI Shark, announced through Altec Lansing Ventures: controllers and keyboards that run a model to give you hints while you play. It is the same promise aimed at a different decade. The old product handed you the number ninety-nine and let you skip the part you were stuck on. The new one offers advice.

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