Popular Mechanics (South Africa)
Cracking the chip: How hacking the NES made it even better
IN 1985, American video games languished in a wasteland. The gaming giant Atari had just folded in a wave of terrible and unplayably buggy third-party games. In its final throes, the company physically dumped millions of cartridges in the Chihuahuan Desert in New Mexico. Afterwards, Atari was split up and sold off to competitors.
But that autumn, an 8-bit phoenix rose from these cartridge ashes: the Nintendo Entertainment System (or NES). Soon, the NES would be in one of every three households in America.
In an effort to avoid Atari’s fate, the Nintendo corporation kept a tight grip on what games you could play on their system, so each console came with a top-secret lockout chip, a first for the gaming industry. Nintendo called it the 10NES.
It worked like this: Every NES cartridge needed a paired chip that used an encrypted code to communicate with the 10NES gatekeeper. Without that paired chip, the console would refuse to boot up your game – and Nintendo had a monopoly on manufacturing and licensing these coveted cartridges.
But Nintendo asked third-party game developers for more than just royalties to access the lucrative cartridges. The company demanded games free of vice and adult content. Nintendo branded itself familyfriendly, and required that games on the NES match these values. No crude language, sexual content, and booze- or drug-related imagery were allowed.
Nintendo’s rules would cause game designers to cover the topless statues in Castlevania III, to rename Vodka Drunkenski in Punch-Out!! to Soda Popinski, and to change blood to sweat in Mortal Kombat.
For three prudish years, game developers tried to reverse-engineer and crack the 10NES’s code. It never worked.
But in 1988, Tengen, a defunct Atari offshoot company, hatched a plan. First, it tricked the US Patent Office into giving up the internal specs of the 10NES chip (Tengen falsely claimed these specs fell under a copyright dispute) and used the stolen plans to make their own chip copy called the Rabbit.
Almost simultaneously, a second gaming company – called Color Dreams – discovered another way to work around the chip and installed its third-party games with a circuit that bypassed the 10NES with an armed robber’s approach. At the right moment, Color Dreams’s chip would jolt the 10NES with a brief zap of electricity, sneaking past its fried defences before the chip could shut the bootleg game down. The rewired Rabbit chip and jolting circuits ushered in a new wave of games that brought sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll back into US video games. Soon there were NES games with nudity (Peek-A-Boo Poker and Hot Slots), alcohol (Master Chu and the Drunkard Hu), and absolutely terrible game mechanics, like the unfinished Cheetahmen II and Little Red Hood.
Today, retro-minded developers are still using these workarounds to create new games for the NES. ‘Cracking the 10NES [paved the way] so folks like me could come along and start making new NES games again,’ says Greg Caldwell, director of Retrotainment Games. Caldwell says he buys cartridge hardware from a company that custom-designed its own version of Tengen’s Rabbit chip.
‘I personally like the story of the voltage spike, brute-force method,’ Caldwell says. But the circuit-frying solution ‘isn’t very elegant or practical today’.
Thirty-five years after the console’s launch, Caldwell’s newest mystery/ adventure NES game Full Quiet will arrive later this year. And his studio isn’t alone.
‘The popularity of new NES games is actually increasing again. There’s certainly a movement of digging into this retro hardware, and seeing what you can squeeze out of these old consoles,’ Caldwell says. ‘These old machines are the fossil record of where we came from.’