Memorizing an entire book of Game Genie codes.

Wait a minute... that might help with friend codes >.>

I almost beat metal slug 3 at an arcade with 1 credit... ALMOST!! >:(

Pokemon, a whole lot of pokemon

Doing the first Sonic level in a matter of seconds by taking the up and over route...awesome.

Uh wow...I don't know about 1up hording but I do know that potion hording is absolutely necessary in preparing for Dracula in Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin. I'm not just talking about hording towards the end of the game, you have to horde at the very beginning. PoR's Dracula has got to be the absolute hardest ever made for the series.

Memorizing the Konami Code to use in Contra... I was 5... And kinda dumb...

How about writing or memorizing a bunch of long, very loooooooong PASSWORDS?

Pounding on the top of my NES to get the sound to stop skipping or the video to stabilize.

... was that just me?

I wish I had any kind of skill back in the MS-DOS days... But as mossberg: said, I did know most of the pokemons when there were about 100 of them.

Batch Files.

I can tap any button on a controller really really fast. Can't remember my presses per second, but yeah, I pwned at Mario Party. (and yes, I just used "pwned", deal with it)

If only they had Tecmo Bowl tournaments like they do Madden....I may be $50k richer!

I could do the 1st level on the Master System version of Sonic in 28 seconds!

No one could beat me!! NO ONE!!! I'm sure someone will claim to have done better, but i want proof!

tweaking PS2 lasers to get the disc to read. turned that into a fine art

I am an expect shot with a super scope

@phinehas: That reminds me, the old Track and Field biro trick. You could break light speed with that thing.

Moving units one-by-one in early RTS games. THAT is war. And war is hell.

I was the boot disk MASTER. I must have had at least 20 of them to run F15 Strike Eagle III, Falcon 4.0, Tie Fighter, X-Wing, etc, etc.

@Rickster: aw crap, did I do it right?

"Trying to grab every single extra life to use on difficult final boss"
Played Devil May Cry recently?

I can earn 200% accuracy in Galaga. That has to count for something...

Pressing pause, turning the TV off, going to school, coming home, turning the TV on, and unpausing.

Also, turning my original Playstation upside down so it would read discs.

sitting down and marathoning a game from the beginning in order to beat it because save technology hadn't been invented yet. Hell, I still do play games for long stretches of time, but not from the beginning, and not because I can't save. Those were the days, eh?

Turning the original Playstation upside-down to get it to read discs! Why that worked, I'll never know. . . . My guess it getting the laser closer to the disc?

@ruffstik They only thing with that is only one person can be the Raiders and have Bo Jackson and they might as well hand them the 50k before it even started :)

Man, I loved playing the original Heroes of Might and Magic but since DOS has gone the way of the dodo I can't play it anymore.

Plus I do remember blowing into cartridges quite a bit

How about arranging sofas so that you can get 4 people around one 14 inch TV? That took some serious skill, but apparently now that we have huge TVs and wireless controllers, no-one makes 4 player games anymore. *snif*.

oh and guessing passwords for games like alien 3 and daedalian opus

Painstakingly walking E.T. to the center of the &*#*^* pit so he doesn't get *&()*# stuck on the *(^#*& side walls and fall back down for like the *(^#&* seventieth *(^#&() time.

C/: A:
A/: run

Then enjoy BattleChess bliss.

- sticking my finger in the middle of a 5 1/2in floppy and rotating it to get the floppy to work.

speaking of those floppies...

- stacking up on drinks and snacks so I could install a game that came with 25 floppy disks...

- going out and purchasing graph paper so I could map out a dungeon in a game...this was before that thing called "auto-mapping".

- deciding whether to spend my money on a monitor with that new VGA technology or Monochrome...

- being able to decipher game sounds being played on the on-board PC speakers...in midi...or game speech (basically beeps and longer beeps) being played.

That's all I can remember...yep, I'm old... Heh!

I was a master at Ninja Gaiden 2, I recall. I had perfect the first 6 levels, I could get through each board without dying once, and then there was a part that was (I believe) on level 7, where there was a double-extra-life in a pit, you had to kill yourself to get it, so it was really just one free life. I would jump in that pit and get the life like 50 times so I could rack up my lives in preparation for the final boss which would come shortly, because I never did figure out how to beat that boss without dying a shitload of times. But when you died, you just respawned right there and the boss's health was still down as low as it was when you died. So I probably beat that game about a million times. It was definitely my favorite Genesis game for a long long time.

I had crazy DOS skills, too.

argh brain think quicker: also im the king of finding household items to stick in the earth prong socket of a UK plug to make american plugs fit

"Load"-ing instead of "Chain"-ing Acorn Electron games so you could edit the code before running it!

Playing Stryker's Run and thinking that game graphics couldn't get any better, because it almost looked like REAL LIFE!

Learning the best way to prevent Commodore 64 games from failing to load. Does anybody else remember loading games from cassette tapes? You had to wait through this spacey loading screen with loud modem sounds for up to 10 minutes to load some off the wall platformer based on some BBC kids show. Man my games used to fail to load so much. So I guess great patience is no longer needed so much as a gamer anymore too.

memorizing locations and methods of warping in the first three Super Mario Bros. games.

playing FPS games solely with the keyboard. (Ah, Doom and Wolfenstein 3d)

using HJKL as arrow keys, or having the arrow keys lined up in a similar fashion.

tuning the screw on my Sinclair spectrum+ tape player to make Ghost n Goblins load

And the almight IDDQD, obviuolsy...

@Amuro1X: That was the best! Alex the kid in Miracle World was a killer for that Scissor Paper Stone always had me! It took me ages before I thought about writing down the the order they kept doing it in. I loved that game!

beat marvel vs capcom 2 with 1 credit.
got 20 levels into ms. pac man arcade..
i think it was 20 levels..hrmm..
i can last a long time with Lei on Survival mode on Tekken 3..
i can knock out piston hurrican in 5'50..
my super punch out 'record' was more than 100 wins 0 loses..
i cleared level 18 height 4 game mode B on NES Tetris..
i got 101% game clear on Donkey Kong Country and also Donkey Kong 64..
On GBA Super Mario Advance 4 (Super Mario Bros 3.) I maxed out the score to all 9s.
..o.o..i just listed a few of my gaming achievements that i've never listed out before XD...la la la la..but hey i've got a lot of them..

@Sparx: DOSBOX man DOSBOX! check it out!![www.dosbox.com]

Learnt how to play Nebulus on the C64 without getting hit once.

Still have that skill.

@GothPunk: The best thing about tapes is that on the C64 if you had a bad readyou could just rewind it a bit and press play again, and it would sort it out!

Speaking of tapes,
I know piracy was rife on the C64, but it never crossed my mind that you could copy them on my twin deck! I must have been a stupid kid!

My friend was pretty good at "disc swapping", in order to get copied ps1 and dreamcast games to work, which involved, well, swapping a loader disc and pressing down a button on the inside of the machine to make it think the cd tray was closed. This was before he got his mod chip installed.

Track and Field alternate button bashing. I once saw a bloke place a folded up piece of paper across both buttons and then move a coin rapidly backwards and forwards along its length. Genius.

Also using strimmer wire to get free credits on fruit machines.

I don't know about you guys but I still blow. Sometimes that is, with my DS. Because for some reason some of the older carts I have(like Mario 64 DS, thought these instances are rare they still happened)don't get recognized until I give them a nice little puff. It's nothing like blowing the Nes carts though.

@Father ColdCuts Lv. 10 Priest: Sweet jebus i remember that. Stupid game of chance every three levels. I played that game so many times just to get the order of that down. Something in my young mind wouldnt let me just give up...

@ElijahDProphet: Oh yes. Getting MSCDEX to load (it had to be loaded into High Memory didnt it?), mous driver etc using black arts Batch files. They were good times.
By good, i mean shit. But, it was a good computer education if nothing else

Getting into fights on the playground over that? Where is the argument, everyone knows Sonic is 10 times better than Mario! I always thought that was common knowledge...

Super Mario Bros. 3 in like 10 min, that was fun. Man, I remember we use'ta have to balance the system, both the NES and later the genesis, upside down with my cousin's shoe. And switching to No Blood mode quickly in Mortal Kombat if Tia MaryAnn was coming downstairs. And Rampage marathons, man, I remember those games that didn't save, and you needed the codes. Oh, and flipping those huge floppys on the school computer.

Way to cash in on the Nostalgia factor, Kotaku. Really puts how far gaming has come into perspective. Let's do this once a year or so.

How about bouncing Peter's puppies from one side of the map to the other in Earthworm Jim 2? I haven't used that little ability in a while.

The only skill I picked up that's still relevant was in Road Avenger for the Mega CD. Man, that whole game was a QTE!

up up down down left right left right b a start. unless you were freakishly good at contra, that code was the only way you could even dream of beating the game.

Having to hold the reset button when I turn off my game to make sure it saves correctly.

Using a single button on my controller.

Putting a quarter on the edge of the machine to indicate "I got next"

A PS controller without analog sticks.

Green and yellow display colors.

4 batteries in my game boy.

Co-op game play.

Daikatana is going to be awesome.

/\ /\ \/ \/ B A B A

4 mario power ups. Mushroom, Fire flower, star power, Extra Life.

Can it run doom?

Masochistic levels of platforming to beat wizards and warriors.... 1 mile of small wooden pegs! aahhh!! Why did I put up with that!?

In 2nd grade I learned how to boot my dad's PC from a disk and manually load VVESA graphics drivers at the prompt just to play Mechwarrior 2. Then you'd have to reboot the whole PC to do anything else.

There's also the time my brother and I would get super pissed at each other for backing each other up against the wall and tripping the other to death in MK for the SNES. And the numerous hours we spent searching for the creepy Asteroid-with-a-face in Starfox to get to the alternate dimension level.

How about not freaking out about cars popping out of the screen when you played Rad Racer with '80s 3D glasses?

Ok, not really.

@Marion517: Yes, yes. Once a year sounds fantastic!