Some of you older gamers may remember Game Genie. If you don’t, the second paragraph is for you. Anyway, it seems that soon, there will be a Game Genie for the PS4, allowing games to be cracked and modified.

The first talk of Game Genie was before NES game, Treasure Island Dizzy. The cartridge for this game had a little knob, and when you turned it, you could adjust the amount of lives that you had. In the end, this knob did nothing (besides tricking people into buying it). Game genie eventually did develop it, with the help of Codemasters, into a fully functional cheating device. Then it slowly faded into Forget Land.

Skip forward to 2012. Hyperkin, a four person company, creates its own version of Game Genie, this time for PlayStation 3 and the Nintendo DS. This product wasn’t very popular due to the fact that you could only use it on games that the small team themselves had already worked to exploit because of all of the layers of encryption that had to be bypassed.

Skip to now. Chris Gallizzi, Hyperkin product manager claims that Game Genie can have its big comeback, via a flaw in the PS4’s security. Here is what he said:

The key to the PlayStation 4 is the Vita, and the Vita is not as secure as people think. By syncing the Vita to the PS4, we are then able to pick up a hidden Wi-Fi signal to detect a backdoor entry to the system. From there, we’re able to access the raw game files, like trophy data and partially encrypted game saves. It still needs work, but the ultimate goal is to be able to mod a game file or the actual PUP files while the game is running–similar to DEX modding for the PS3, which allows real-time memory hacks. What this technology would allow us to do is actually modify the game data, similar to how the original Game Genie functioned. From there we could do things like jumping over a whole level in a single bound or explore the game coding and find hidden stuff that was never fully deleted, stuff that’s not seen in save data but is actually within game code.

This is some cool stuff that could happen. And its success would be sweet as nectar. Here’s what I’m wondering, what about the other way around? Could the same things work on the Vita?

So far, the work that has been done on the PS4 has been on the games Battlefield 4 and Tomb Raider, although neither are currently stable.

This may upset some of you, but Gallizzi has vowed not to work on MMOs and games with online support. He thinks that this will mess with the fun and create unfair advantages for some players. In fact, when Borderlands 2 was first released, Gallizzi’s team was able to boost the players’ level up to level 127. It didn’t take long for Gearbox to patch it up.

There are a handful of companies working in the field of game hacks, including Hyperkin and Datel. Hobbyist hackers’ attempts at exploiting these companies’ products have usually failed. You might remember Datel’s PSP 3000 Pandora battery (which turned out to be vaporware) or the action replay on the PSP (which hackers never – publicly – figured out). A game genie on the PS4 could be something interesting to look into for PS4 hackers, but it could very well lead to nothing interesting.

That’s all for now from me, The Jay Doctor. Use the comments, they are the one place that belongs to you. Also, feel free to follow both Wololo and I on Twitter if you want to stay in the know.

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Source: GameSpot