I first made money coding as a middle-schooler

With my GameBoy

Sort of. Back in the late 90’s, there was a device that you stick your cartridge into. Then, prior to booting up, a different screen would appear to enter special codes, rigging your game for insane advantages. Outrageous amount of lives, super powers, or the object of my desire at the time: any Pokemon you wanted.

This was before Google, so the sources for the codes were either difficult to find via dial-up AOL internet, or limited and expensive from glossy game magazines. Already well-versed in the art of scrapiness, I had everything to fill it the blanks: my prized GameShark, and lots of time.

For hours I entered 6 digit codes — sometimes random, sometimes with guidance from my best gleaned sources — and played until I noticed a difference in the game. It may have been a battle, or buying an item at a shop, before I could identify the anomaly. I would find the change, and then repeat this process over and over again, tweaking the working code character by character to fine-tune exactly what I needed.

It was tedious, and essentially doing a sort of algebra a couple years before I knew what it was. Looking back now, it is obvious that this machine simply replaced variables throughout the video game’s code, in a charmingly analog manner. All the hard work paid off. With my game loaded up with all the best super-powered Pokemon, I went to school and sold the creatures to friends for their lunch money.