Owned By Square

One Christmas I got a snes and FF II with it. At the time I also had a game genie. I inputted a code to have Dragoon do insane damage with his jump attack. I was warned that it is possible that using a genie could cause permanent damage to the game. I was cocky, I used the code. Everything was going smooth until one encounter where I used the jump attack. Dragoon jumped up but never came down. I reset the game and tried again. Same result. I tried returning it to the store where it was purchased, but they didn't have any copies left. Not knowing what to do, I decided to pull a swifty and mailed Square a scathing letter telling them what happened. I didn't tell them about using the genie. I told them how disappointed I was with this glitch and how unprofessional this was of them. I put the game in a box along with the letter and shipped it to them in the hopes of getting a new copy. I included my phone number so that they could contact me when they received it and examined it. About a few weeks later I received a call from Square. The guy on the phone said that he was sorry to hear about the trouble I was having. I was ready to just unload on him about how unprofessional it was of them, and how inconvenient it was for me as a customer having a defective title. As I was about to speak, he interrupted me and said: "I'll bet that you didn't think that we would know that you used a game genie on it. I'm sorry, we can't help you." I was speechless.

I actually had no idea a game genie could permanently damage a game. Kinda makes me leery of ever using it again.

I don't have any Square specific stories, but when I was young I wrote to Nintendo Power a few times to get some help on games. If was very early 90s before you could just look things up on the internet. One specific time, I wrote in for help trying to figure out a maze-like part of the NES Metal Gear. It was a part in the woods with four paths, and you had to go in a certain order to get where you were going (basically the same as the maze in original Legend of Zelda). I figured it out as I was waiting on a reply, but when it finally came, the answer they gave me was wrong! I double-checked to be sure, then wrote them back telling them all about it :p They never sent a reply to that letter.

It's always amusing when devs kind of know you're going to cheat with a game. I believe there are a few hidden weapons in FFIV and The After Years that were dummied out. If you hack the game to put them in your inventory, their description pretty much says "You must be an elite hacker to have this!".

The MegaTen devs occasionally put in game-ending bugs into their games that activate when it realizes it's being played on an emulator.

No real interesting story, but at times I don't catch what companies produce what game, movie, TV series, Anime, etc., The other day I started watching Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood and noticed that Square Enix had a hand in making it. I know they had a few games out on the PS 2. That's my 2 cents at least...