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That cartridge wasn’t New Super Mario Bros . It wasn’t Mario Kart DS . It was —specifically, the 2010 edition.

We all knew it was "cheating." But back then, the line was blurry. We weren't trying to break the game's challenge; we were trying to break the grind . Nobody had time to train a Dratini to level 55. We had homework. We had Club Penguin . Action Replayy was a time machine. Looking back, Action Replayy 2010 was a precursor to modding. It taught a generation of kids how code works—even if it was just copy-pasting strings like 94000130 FCFF0000 62111880 00000000 from a forum post written by a user named "CheaterKing69."

You felt like a god.

Action Replayy didn't just cheat the game. It cheated boredom. And in the winter of 2010, curled up under a blanket with a DS light blinking red, that was the most powerful feeling in the world.