I'm writing a long article on it, and have been interviewing long term and key members of the community for about a year now on the side in anticipation of the article. Part of the research on the article has been saving many, many pages I've gone to. Hence why I was asking about Area51 the other day, heh.
A long article chronicling the community's history? I like the sound of that! Are you planning to compile the saved pages and release them in some form?
Consider myself interested too. Please make a topic, or make it public somewhere, when you got it, I really want to read it!
I've got that issue, here's a scan. This was from issue 43, June 1993, so the game had been out for around half a year.
Action replay? I though it was all about the Game Geine back then. I haven't heard about AR until 1998 or so when a friend had one for an N64.
The Game Genie was primarily sold in North America. I'm not sure if it had a presence outside the US & Canada. The Action Replay brand had been around in the UK since the late 1980's, and predates Game Genie. Those devices didn't make their way to the US until the mid-90's where they were licensed by Interact under the GameShark brand name. After the deal between InterAct and Datel (makers of Action Replay) soured, then Datel started an office in the US and sold their products in the US directly under the Action Replay name. The AR was the better of the two devices. Game Genie only had the ability to mask ROM addresses, whereas Action Replay codes could modify memory as well.
The Action Replay Pro had it's own cheat finder menu. I remember finding Hidden Palace myself when I was just pratting around with the device, I managed to find the address for which level you played and just incremented the value to see what I'd find. I remember finding the palettes for the player sprites in Streets of Rage II around a similar time, that code got published in one mag (might've been Mean Machines or Sega Zone.) I can't remember if I ever sent the Sonic 2 level code anywhere though... Seemed such an easy thing to search and find for yourself if you owned an Action Replay.
Perfect! Mistaken about Lomas then. His name seemed to be synonymous with AR stuff at the time. Would love to get my hands on Sega Power stuff from that era again. I recall them (OR maybe another mag) mocking up a screenshot of "Streets of Rage 3" with a 3 player mode at one point (it was just a screenshot of 2 with a life counter added to one of the enemies lifebars IIRC). My local Ritz video actually had an Action Replay for rent around that time and I remember having some fun messing around with HPZ in debug. I remember looking for the boss in Act 2! Lemme guess.....one was the "Terminator" palette? That was the second thing I tried out after HPZ...!
Mind blown! I never knew this! Thanks for sharing this nugget of knowledge. I had just naively assumed GG was the better product as it was built into GENS. I also didn't discover debug mode (and what it meant) until 1998, even though I saw it in action in 1991. I thought it meant a "no badniks" mode, since so many of them are based off of insects/bugs. :specialed:
To add to the above, the first Action Replays were for the Commodore 64 way back in 1986: (this is the 4th revision of the c64 AR)
I remember videogame shows on UK TV (Bad Influence sticks out as one of them in my head) back in the day were all about the Game Genie. I remember seeing it show up a few times which is why I ended up getting one. I can't remember any publicity about Action Replay aside from maybe some magazine mentions..
Both did circulate by the time of the Mega Drive being on general sale though. While I had neither in the day, I've got both in my own collection now (a couple of different ARs, actually).
I remember Action Replay being all the rage on the PS1, most of the magazines I bought (Power, Powerstation, a few others) had a dedicated page in the cheats section and it was all AR stuff. I didn't really hear about Game Genie until I was emulating, honestly. Maybe just looking in different places.
