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.

- William Herkewitz

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 l ike 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 family-friendly, 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.