GameShark Pro for the N64 was basically magic back in the day—this little cartridge let you break your favorite games wide open. You pop it in first, boot up your actual game, and suddenly you’ve got a menu full of cheats: infinite lives, level skips, weird character mods, you name it. I remember using it to screw around in GoldenEye, turning Oddjob into a giant or giving myself all weapons right from the start. Messy? Absolutely. Hilarious? Oh yeah.

Some codes were glitchy (don’t even get me started on the ones that crashed Ocarina of Time), but when they worked, it felt like you’d hacked the game itself. Not for purists, obviously—just for when you wanted to turn Mario Kart into absolute chaos. Half the fun was testing random codes to see what’d happen.

Still have mine buried in a drawer somewhere, probably next to a crumpled cheat code booklet with scribbled notes like "DON’T USE THIS ONE."