We Beat Video Games Before the Internet. Here’s What It Actually Took.

Blow on the Cartridge, Keep Banging into the Wall

The TV was convex, with a layer of dust on the screen. Summer afternoon, the fan spinning, the cartridge hot in my hand. I was stuck on World 4 of Super Mario. I’d been down every pipe, stomped every Koopa, the flagpole was on the right, but I couldn’t clear the jump in the middle. I tried twenty times. On the twenty-first, I fell into the pit. Mom called me for dinner. I didn’t answer.

Back then I didn’t know what a walkthrough was. What I knew was: if you can’t get past it, try again. Try until your fingers hurt, try until the TV got hot, try until the cartridge lost contact, pull it out, blow on it, plug it back in. No one taught you to blow on the cartridge. Everyone did it. Like a ritual. When the ritual was done, you kept banging into the wall.

I

Old games weren’t complicated. Limited maps, limited items, limited things for NPCs to say. You ask someone, he says half a sentence. You ask a second time, he says the same thing. You ask a third time, he still says that. So you know: you won’t get anything more out of him. The rest is trial.

In The Legend of Zelda, you bumped into every wall. Burned every tree. Pushed every rock. Some walls blew open, revealing a cave. Some trees burned away and dropped a rupee. Some rocks, when pushed down, revealed stairs. You didn’t know which step was right, but you knew that if you tried every possibility, one path would eventually open.

In Pokémon, you talked to every person. Every Pokémon. Every sign. In the Pokémon Tower in Lavender Town, you couldn’t hit the ghosts. You didn’t know why. You tried every item, every move. Then someone said, go get the Silph Scope first. You went. You got it. You came back. You could hit them. In that moment, you stood in front of the TV, the controller cord dragging on the floor, the fan blowing on your back. You didn’t speak. You just kept pressing buttons.

Brute force is a dumb method. But dumb methods work. Time was the thing kids had most of. An afternoon, a summer vacation, stuck in one place. By the end, you weren’t playing the game; you were competing with it in patience. The game didn’t get tired. You did. But you slept, and the next day you turned it on again.

II

School was the intelligence station. Ten minutes between classes, a crowd around a desk. Whoever had beaten the game was a god. Whoever was stuck in the same place was a comrade.

“The second boss is weak to fire.”
“You sure?”
“My brother said so.”
“Has your brother beaten it?”
“No. He’s stuck on the third level.”

Information flew through the air. True and false mixed together, but every sentence was worth hearing. Because there was nowhere else to hear it. Someone copied passwords onto an eraser. Someone turned hidden item locations into a rhyme. Someone drew maze routes on the back of a notebook. The bell rang, the notebook closed. The teacher came in, chalk clicked on the blackboard. We sat below, still walking the maze in our heads.

When I was in middle school, my family hadn’t bought a Super Famicom. I often went to classmates’ houses to play. A good friend lent me his for two stretches. We talked at school about how to beat things. We talked until the bell rang and still didn’t want to leave. Someone wrote the contents down. The handwriting was crooked. The paper was torn from a notebook. The edge was still rough. He wrote: “Third level, go left first, then up, stop when you see the torch.” Below it he drew an arrow. The arrow pointed to a square. Inside the square he wrote “hidden door.” That piece of paper was passed to me. I read it once, then again. I folded it and put it in my pocket. On the way home, my hand in my pocket, I pinched that piece of paper.

III

Paper and pen were our save files.

Maze games were the worst. No auto-map. One wrong step and you were back at the start. So we drew maps. Graph paper, the back of notebooks, scrap paper, the blank margins of textbooks. Treasure chests as circles. Bosses as X’s. Dead ends as arrows. Hidden passages as dotted lines. The good ones looked like engineering drawings. The bad ones looked like ghost scribbles. As long as you could read them yourself, it was fine.

Passwords were copied by hand. In the FC era, many games had no battery save; you continued with passwords. A string of letters and numbers. One wrong character and you’d wasted everything. Some people copied them onto erasers. Some into pencil cases. Some onto their palms. During a test, their palms sweated, and the password smeared. At home, facing the TV, they entered it once. Wrong. Again. Still wrong. The little character on the screen stood at the starting point, waiting. You looked at him; he didn’t move. You put down the controller and went to wash your hands. Water ran over your palm, and the characters were gone.

A dead battery was worse. Yesterday you were still in the final maze. Today you turned it on, and there was only blankness. You pressed the controller. No response. You pulled out the cartridge, blew on it, plugged it back in. Still blank. You sat there, fingers on the controller, not moving. The TV hummed. Birds called outside the window. Your mom asked what was wrong. You said nothing. You turned off the TV.

IV

The console rental shop was another world. A few yuan an hour. The owner sat by the door, selling soda, fixing controllers, and giving walkthrough advice on the side. When you got stuck, you asked him. He might just take the controller and beat it for you. You stood beside him watching, like watching magic. As he played he said, “Jump here, crouch here, wait three seconds here.” You nodded desperately. You went home and tried it yourself, and forgot again. Next time you came back and asked again. The owner was impatient, but he still helped you.

In Hong Kong back then, almost everyone played floppy disks. Few people could afford legitimate copies. The shop owner sold disks and doubled as a walkthrough master. You asked him which games were good. Whether anyone had made a walkthrough for a certain game. He pulled a stack of handwritten photocopies from a drawer. The paper was thin, the writing blue, the copies a little blurry. For popular titles, the walkthrough notebooks circulated among players. By the end they were missing pages, curled at the edges, stained with grease. No one minded. Because they were scarce. Scarce things get treated like treasure.

Later there were magazines. Electronic Gaming Software, Practical Game Console Techniques, Handheld King. Like martial arts manuals. You bought one at a newsstand, flipped to the walkthrough pages, and your heart raced. Those few pages. You wanted to memorize them. Walkthrough books were read to pieces and taped with clear tape. Photocopies missing pages still circulated. Some people cut out walkthroughs and pasted them into notebooks, making their own manuals. Looking back, those notebooks were personal wikis. Just without hyperlinks, only glue and scissors.

V

Rumors were intelligence too. Someone said if you stood in a certain spot for three seconds and pressed Select, a hidden level would appear. You tried it. Fake. Someone said there was a hidden item in a certain patch of grass. You tried it. Still fake. But the next time someone said it, you tried again. Because what if it was true? There was so little information that every clue was worth a gamble.

Blow on the cartridge and it would read. Hold the controller at an angle and you could jump higher. Turn the TV color down and the boss would get stupid. Now it all looks like superstition. Back then it was like ritual. Ritual made you feel safe. If you couldn’t win, it wasn’t a skill problem. It was that the ritual wasn’t done right.

If you really couldn’t get past it, you used cheat codes. Trainers, invincibility codes, infinite lives. No shame. Some people borrowed someone else’s save, skipped the boss, and went straight to the ending. Years later, they might have forgotten what the ending was. But they still remembered the boss they never beat. And they remembered spending an entire summer trying to beat it.

Cheat codes were a compromise and an exit. Not everyone had to be hardcore. It’s a game. As long as you’re happy. The joy of beating it yourself is more unforgettable. That’s it.

VI

Games now are different.

Take Path of Exile. It’s been out for more than ten years. Long-time fans have watched it progress and naturally adapted. Someone like me, who started in 2018 but always plays for a while and then leaves, finds it hard. You can’t freely respec. The currency types are complicated. It relies heavily on trading. A newcomer who wants to figure it out purely alone and farm their own items might spend an entire season and still not have a character leveled properly. That kind of complexity is something dozens of old games combined couldn’t reach.

Warframe is the same. Evergreen games keep adding content for their core audience. The more content, the thicker the systems. The harder it is for newcomers. The problem is size, not quality. Games keep getting bigger. So big that not checking a guide feels like going to work.

Now when you get stuck, your first reaction is to alt-tab and search. Videos, wikis, forums, Bilibili columns. Type in a keyword and answers fill the screen. Sometimes it’s not to copy homework directly. Just to reference someone else’s approach and get inspiration. Versions update so fast and so often that the old way of exchanging intelligence can’t keep up.

I don’t miss the hardship of having no walkthroughs. Checking guides now is convenient. But sometimes I think of that piece of paper torn from a notebook. The password on the eraser. The hand of the rental shop owner taking the controller. The tone of my classmate saying “Don’t lose it.” Information travels fast through fiber optic cables. People were crowded close around a desk.

VII

A few days ago, I opened an emulator. Played an old game. Got stuck in a maze. Tried for ten minutes. Alt-tabbed out and searched for a walkthrough. Found it. Followed it. Beat it. The pixel character stood at the endpoint. No cheering. No clapping. No classmate beside me saying, “See? I told you to turn left.” I closed the emulator. The screen went black. A car passed outside, its lights sweeping across the ceiling. The water cup was empty. Tomorrow I still had to go to work.

I sat in the chair, not moving. The controller was on the desk, its cord looped once around. Like that cord from childhood. Only now no one called me for dinner. And no one tore a page from a notebook. I picked up the water cup and went to the kitchen to fill it. The water was cold. I took a sip. Went back to my room. The computer screen was black. The fan was spinning. Summer was almost over.