Mega Man Music and Game Genie: Nostalgic and Hellish

Time for a little bit of story. When I was a kid, I used Game Genie. Call me a cheat if you like, but NES games were tough, and sometimes it was nice to have a crutch. But on top of that, it was just a lot of fun to goof around with the games and see what weird stuff would happen. You could make practically new (but usually unplayable) games out of your NES collection. And it was just fun to use; I still fondly remember the strange “bloink” noise when selecting letters for a code.

So a lot of the time, I played Mega Man with a Game Genie, gaining tricks like moon jumping and a super shot (which was really just all three shots firing at once). But because it was basically an intuitive way of hex editing, there were a lot of side effects too. In many cases, the audio would get a bit messed up. Funnily enough, I actually got pretty used to even (even the horrible squeals). It was so much so that, when I eventually got back into Mega Man in the later 90s and repurchased my collection, it was a little jarring to hear the true audio for a time!

Skip to today, and I come across this playlist by JoeRallyChampionship. It contains both the original and Game Genie altered music to Mega Man (like what you hear above). And in a strange, almost perverse way… listening to it is rather nostalgic! Especially the Wily stages; they gained an even more eerie and inhuman kind of sound. Makes sense since Dr. Wily turned out to be an alien, after all.

Do you think you could stand listening to game music run through a Game Genie? And do you have any memories of hearing the music like this when you played it? I’m interested to know.