How to use your GameShark for good - not evil

The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, like Super Mario 64, was full of great GameShark exploits. Make things bigger, make things smaller, make things more crazier. A basic example is levitation, which was a common hack in 3D games of the time.

Above: “Hey, there’s my house. Oh right, I’m mute.”

But levitating is just the beginning in Ocarina of Time, and giant chickens are somewhere around the middle – see all of the absurdity below:

FINAL FIN-TASY VII

Here’s where things get a little out-of-hand. Want to turn FFVII into a work of contemporarily modern color vomit? Look no further than “800E5634 0003.”

F-ZERO X AND OTHERS

Another taste of the madness the GameShark delivers, this time in F-Zero X, Super Smash Bros., and Mario Kart 64. The F-Zero X clips are the result of “812C4984 2222” which is another way of saying “uber-super-ultra-incredi-fast mode,” which you would know if you spoke N64 like we do.

At this point in this article, the memories should be flooding back... the hours spent scouring lists of numbers and changing one digit at a time in a quest to find the one code that would make you cooler than your friends, and all the frustration when the damn thing stopped bloody working (which was often). Those were more innocent times.

The modern experiences closest to the one the GameShark offered (not including handhelds, which are still sometimes hackable), are finding existing in-game glitches, or modding PC games – but that’s so much less fun, because either it’s a design flaw, or it’s encouraged by developers. It was a billion tanks of blood-thirsty sharks more fun when we were doing things the developers never could have expected or intended, as in this one last hack from Super Mario 64:

Aug 5, 2009

Bite the bait and join us as we feast on all things shark

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