Topaz the Rabbit talks about a big problem with big video games for early consoles – how do you make it so you don’t have to beat the whole thing in one sitting? A video take on an earlier post, The Game State That Lasted Seven Days.

Thanks to Tyrel Souza, @ijimkoz, and @tiegz (ティグさん) for their helpful feedback, and to everyone else who took the time to watch it while it was in production!

I realized I messed up the bit diagrams for the Metroid and Kid Icarus passwords in the video. Oops! The corrected Metroid bit diagram is in the Spaces in Metroid passwords video.

References

• https://nerdlypleasures.blogspot.com/2015/06/types-of-nes-passwords.html
• https://www.romhacking.net/documents/87/
• http://www.mmhp.net/Passwords/MM3/
• https://zelda.fandom.com/wiki/Items_in_The_Legend_of_Zelda
• https://web.archive.org/web/20191219221055/http://www.nintendolife.com/news/2010/11/feature_slipped_disk_the_history_of_the_famicom_disk_system
• https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/nes/519689-metroid/faqs/39232
• https://www.geocities.ws/passgens/pages/Kid_Icarus.htm
• https://www.kidicaruswiki.org/wiki/Password

Code

• LoZ fake password generator (https://gist.github.com/johnbintz/92b940a61682de59f82f9dedc3920b6e)

Music & SFX

• Chipper Doodle - Kevin MacLeod (https://incompetech.com/music/royalty-free/?keywords=Chipper+doodle) - CC-BY 3.0
• Crash - bone666138 (https://freesound.org/people/bone666138/sounds/198876/) - CC-BY 3.0

Changelog

• 2021-07-11: Initial post.
• 2021-08-04: Note about error in video and link to video w/ correction.
• 2023-07-13: Moved to MakerTube