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It was the summer of 1992. Nirvana dominated the airwaves, Batman Returns squatted resolutely in multiplexes all over the world and Alan Shearer became Britain's most expensive football player with a now laughable £3.6m transfer from Southampton to Blackburn. But to be honest, I had to look all this up on Wikipedia, because I really didn't notice it at the time. I was locked in a small office on a Leamington industrial estate testing Game Genie codes for the Game Boy.If you don't know what a Game Genie is, congratulations, you are very young. Designed by games publisher Codemasters and sold by US toy giant Galoob, it was a cheat cartridge that you slotted into the back of your console, before plugging in a game - it would then let you enter codes to get extra lives, or unlimited cash or other juicy benefits. It was a brilliant example of idiosyncratic British innovation, and typical for Codemasters at the time, a plucky irreverent company, run out of a barn in Southam by brothers Richard and David Darling. They were already making their own NES cartridges for titles like Dizzy and Micro Machines because Nintendo wouldn't give them a developer license. Then, one night they came up with a fantastic idea while brainstorming in David's Leamington flat, with engineer Ted Carron.
"With our NES games, we were thinking of adding switches on the cartridges for more lives or powerful weapons or extra speed," recalls David. "Then we just made a mental leap and thought, why don't we put the switches on an interface between the game and the console and then it could work on any game?
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