I spent the vast majority of my junior high free time in front of a scratchy television connected to a Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) console. (Try not to act too surprised.) Many of the more involved Nintendo games either had battery-backed RAM on the cartridge PCB for saving games or employed a password system. The game would issue a password at various junctures in the game that you were expected to copy down accurately so that you could resume your game at a later time. Password lengths were commensurate with the complexity of the game and the amount of information required to represent a game’s state. For example, some games obviously had a table of plaintext 4- or 5-character passwords since the only information being saved was which of the game’s 8 levels the player has just passed. On the other end of the spectrum, the most complex password system I ever encountered was for Wall Street Kid, the groundbreaking stock market sim for the NES. It was a variable length password (at least 50 characters was nominal, if memory serves) with just about every letter of the English alphabet, upper and lower case, numbers, and various other symbols. I don’t think I ever successfully copied down a password for that game.
Wall Street Kid
