I
N 1985, AMERICAN VIDEO
games languished in a waste-
land. 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. After-
ward, Atari was split up and sold
off to competitors.But that fall, 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 com-
pany 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 imag-
ery were allowed.
Nintendo’s rules would cause
game designers to cover the top-
less 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 engi-
neer and crack the 10NES’s
code. It never worked.
But in 1988, Tengen, a
defunct Atari offshoot com-A closer look
at the 10NES
chip, the
family-friendly
gatekeeper
forthe NES.LAKOTAGAMBILL10 May/June 2020// BY WILLIAM HERKEWITZ //3
Games
& ToysCracking
the Chip:
How Hacking
the NES
Made It
Even Better