Password Systems

Write it down. A password is the game’s state — where you are, what you carry, how many lives — packed into something short enough to copy from the screen and type back in later. Nothing is stored in the cartridge, so nothing in the cartridge has to cost more; the storage is a notebook. Nintendo Power’s advice on an early one, in 1988, is the whole player experience in a sentence: “When you get a password after visiting a treasure room, make sure that you write it down.”

Fast facts

• What it saves: whatever the designer chose to encode — level or room, weapons, energy tanks, credits, a checksum against typing errors.
• Forms: letters and digits (Metroid’s 24 characters; Super Hang-On’s 14); symbols (Castlevania II and its Game Boy sequel); a grid of dots (Mega Man II’s 5×5).
• Why: it costs nothing per cartridge. Battery backup was available from 1987, but as late as 1992 publishers were still picking one or the other game by game.
• The catch: a password that encodes state can be forged. Nintendo Power cracked Mega Man II’s grid in 1990, and Metroid’s JUSTIN BAILEY was a password nobody wrote.
• Where it ended: batteries got cheap, memory cards and flash arrived, and the notebook went away.

In the listings

By the time Nintendo Power launched in 1988 the feature was worth a mention in a preview: Capcom’s 1943 came “with high action and a new password feature”. Bubble Bobble’s “allows you to continue or stage select your favorite level”; in Legacy of the Wizard “Loias’ grandmother will give you passwords to save the game”. From 1991 the magazine’s game listing key recorded for every title whether it used “a battery or password to save game play data”, and the two ran side by side: “Jack Nicklaus Golf uses a password to save your position and True Golf Classics: Pebble Beach Golf Links employs a battery backup for saving data.” Konami’s Castlevania III combined them — “a password feature that enables you to begin at the last level you played”, plus “the lithium battery which customizes the passwords for each specific gameplayer” — and the Game Boy Castlevania II: Belmont’s Revenge brought back “Password symbols … like those used in Castlevania II for the NES”. On the Mega Drive, Super Hang-On took a fourteen-character string; a magazine tips page handed out one that set your credits “to $9,999,999,900”.

Mega Man’s grid

Capcom’s Mega Man 2 replaced characters with a picture: a 5×5 grid in which the player marks nine squares. Nintendo Power decoded it in May 1990 — “The code has been cracked!” — and its explanation doubles as a description of what any password is. “The top row of a valid password always has one mark and the position of that mark dictates the number of Energy Tanks that Mega Man will have. The positions of the other eight marks determine which weapons Mega Man will possess.” Each of the eight bosses has two candidate squares: “Enter the top position to obtain the weapon. The bottom position contains no weapon.” Nine dots, then, encode one five-way choice and eight yes-or-no bits, and once the mapping was printed a reader could compose any starting state they liked. The grid survived the move to Game Boy, where C&VG called it “a dotty way to pass”: “A grid appears, into which you enter dots.”

Metroid and JUSTIN BAILEY

Metroid is the case that shows what the technique cost. In Japan it was a 1986 Famicom Disk System game that saved to disk; in the West, as Retro Gamer put it, it “had a complex password system” instead — twenty-four characters over two lines, which the player reached by dying, or by a trick Nintendo Power was still printing in 1994 for anyone “trapped in the mazes of the original Metroid without any escape”: pause, then “press Up and A on Controller II” to reach the password screen.

A password that encodes state will accept any string whose checksum happens to work, and one of those strings spelled a name. Nintendo Power’s first mention, in 1991, is offhand — “JUSTIN BAILEY is the top half of a code that lets you begin with full missiles and six tanks” — and its 1997 retrospective gave the full recipe: “Enter ‘JUSTIN BAILEY’ as your password, with all dashes on the second line. You’ll start the game with 6 Energy Containers, 255 Missiles and the Wave Beam. In addition, Kraid and Ridley will be defeated, and Samus will exchange her armor for a spiffy new costume.” “Whoever Justin Bailey was,” the magazine wrote, “we can thank him.” The code travelled: an Italian tips supplement printed it in 1991, a British one in 1992. In 1999 a reader proposed that “a ‘bailey’ was slang for a bathing suit in the 1920s” and the editors answered “You’re probably right” — an explanation that has no more evidence behind it than the name has, and the fanzine account from 2004, that the only password the programmers put in deliberately was NARPASSWORD and “any other passwords including those that spell things … are purely coincidental”, is the likelier one. The point stands either way: in a system with no secret key, every valid password is a code, whether or not anyone meant it.

Why it lasted

The battery was on the market from 1987, but a cell, two diodes and a RAM chip are a cost on every cartridge, and a password is a cost on none. So publishers kept choosing per game, well into the 16-bit years, and a player’s notebook of codes was a normal part of owning a console. What ended it was not a better password but cheaper memory: batteries in more cartridges, then memory cards, then flash. The mechanism itself did not die — a string that encodes state and is checked on entry is the same thing as a cheat code, and the JUSTIN BAILEY lesson, that any password you can decode you can also compose, is what every later unlock code was designed against.

See also

• Metroid
• Mega Man 2
• Battery Backup — the alternative
• NES
• Cheat Codes