Did you know that McDonald's has developed a Nintendo DS game? This game is not at all like the others, since it has disappeared from nature for years, before a Frenchman put his hand on it. Except that there is a problem. The game is locked by a password. It takes several years to be able to have images of this famous game, which is not really a game like the others, by the way. It's the story of 1038, and at the base, he's just a Nintendo enthusiast. He collects DS consoles in all the limited editions, and also DS games. And at the end of 2015, he comes across a console that he does not have on a Japanese online reselling site, a bit like Le Bon Coin Japonais, if you will. And it's someone who sells dozens of McDonald's consoles for 20 euros a piece. It looks like this, a Nintendo DS, like any other light Nintendo DS, with a big M on it from McDonald's. Except that he arrives a little too late on the link, and he can't get it. The story continues two years later, in 2017, on Yahoo Auction, and there he finds the console available, and he buys it for a little less than 200 euros. So he is very happy, he has the console, except that he realizes that with this console, there is a cartridge with a small M, an EDCP cartridge, and he had to get it for 120 euros. At that moment, he says to himself, what is this story? And so he does a little research. And the first time we hear about this McDonald's game, Nintendo DS, it was in 2009, in a Bloomberg report, where he presents a partnership between Nintendo and McDonald's, where McDonald's in Japan will equip thousands of Nintendo DS collaborators with a game, but in fact it's not a game, it's a training to learn how to make burgers in McDonald's. But it's a playful training, that is to say that it's a little game with your pen, you act as if you were making burgers, but you don't need to be in a McDonald's. And so we estimate the manufacture of these DS and these games that go with them, between 8,000 and 10,000 copies. So in the end, there were two different games. There was the blue game, which was for newcomers, the new employees of McDonald's to learn, and the red game for those who were already there. It's a bit like level 2. It's like Pokemon. There was a blue McDonald's, a red McDonald's. Except that in the meantime, this program ended. We will learn later that this program ended in 2014. And so, overall, all these copies of games and Nintendo DS have been banned. Especially because it was necessary to potentially protect some manufacturing secrets, in any case the partnership that had been between Nintendo and McDonald's. And so the goal was not that it was too much in nature, we suppose. So suddenly, our 1038, he says to himself, it's incredible, I would love to access this game. And reveal to the world what is hidden inside this game. Except that the problem is that when he puts the cartridge of the game in the Nintendo DS, he is asked for a password. He exports the game to be able to emulate it on his computer, so to be able to do password tests, to try to see a little how the game works from the inside, so examine the hexadecimal code of the game. He's a Nintendo enthusiast. So he knows how to do that, but he's not a computer scientist either. And besides, he can't do it. And in fact, he has an idea, it's... In fact, he has a problem, it's that he didn't buy the Nintendo DS and the game at the same time. And so he says to himself, potentially if I buy some Nintendo DS from McDonald's, there will be one where there will be the password. And so he's going to start buying a dozen of McDonald's consoles, to hope to have a password that works. And it doesn't work. In fact, it turns out that he won't find the password in a console. And so he stops. But he says to himself, he's going to try to get help from the community. So he publishes a little video of the screens to which he has access. So there, the first screens. So you'll see, it's completely in Japanese. Obviously. Ah, it's a delirium! It's a bit lunar. And in fact, quite quickly, we still ask him for a password. And in addition to publishing this video, he posts a little bottle at the sea on December 28, 2018, on the Obscure Gamer forum. And so he posts a message like, I'm looking for a Nintendo Reverse Engineer, someone who knows a lot about it. Except that everyone answers him, if you want us to help you, publish the game's machine code. And his answer is that he refuses. Because in fact, the law is the law, that he has already had to deal with cases like that, and that in fact, it's always illegal to do that. But he has another reason. It's that in fact, he's on the, what do you call it, on the list of trusted personnel of Nintendo Europe. And so, in fact, he helps them set up stands in salons. He has access to exclusives, to prototypes. Thanks to this little face-to-face he has with Nintendo Europe, he doesn't want to lose at all. Honestly, I understand him a lot. And so, he refuses to do that. And he respects the will, in the end, of Nintendo and of McDonald's. Then follows a small crossing of the desert where nothing advances. And even worse than that, there is a YouTuber, BlameItOnGeorge, who makes a video on this case. And following this video, not very pleasing to him, he takes waves of harassment and insults, saying, publish the ROM, what are you doing? You're the only one who has access to this game. He's the chosen one. He's the chosen one, and everyone is a little at war against him because he doesn't want to publish the ROM. So it's a little hot. All the more infuriating that he comes across an ad where the game is unlocked. So that is to say that someone posts an ad of the Nintendo DS and the game, and there are screenshots that he has no access to and then he has the password. So it makes him even more... He reacts a lot. Until one day, when everything will change. There is a friend of his who tells him, tomorrow I see the DSi France of McDonald's. That's funny. Because in my work, we are one of their suppliers, and so we have a meeting tomorrow for an important project. And suddenly he says, you see someone from McDonald's, I have to do something. He writes in 2D a small A4 sheet, he provides a Nintendo, just to know where it comes from. What can we do with it? And so... And it works? It works. The DSi France says to himself, what is this? He goes to the offices, he finds a Japanese-speaking collaborator who can translate everything. And so very quickly, he sends a message to McDonald's Japan. And so in fact, he finds himself in email chains of McDonald's all over the world, except in the United States. The USA are put aside. But overall, there are people from England who answer, there are people from Australia, there are people from Japan who answer. And so everyone says to themselves, we're going to help you, man. Well, he doesn't have the password, unfortunately, because in fact it's a too complicated system to generate a password behind. Probably a generation of keys that McDonald's Japan no longer has access to, because I remind you that the service is no longer used. But he is provided with the user manual of the manager. And in the manual, he is explained how to get the password. Aha! It's starting to feel good. Except that, problem, the password is generated based on the console, so the Nintendo DS, and the manager. And he doesn't have a manager on hand. He can't do anything. He doesn't have a manager number with him. And so in fact, he's stuck. He reads the whole manual, and there's a screen that changes everything. In fact, on one screen, he sees the architecture of the McDonald's team. And so it's very simple. It's a team member number, a manager number, and a team member name. And he says to himself, it's funny, it's a pattern that I saw when I analyzed the machine code of the game for days and days. What? He had seen patterns like that come back. But basically, I recognize this pattern of numbers. I saw it in the code 10 weeks ago. Yes, he had seen something in clear like that. And he says to himself, OK, I have to be able to correlate between the two. And so there, he's going to get on the screen, where he can type a code, to type all the letters of the keyboard on his emulator to see the changes live on the machine code. He does this for a whole day. Thanks to this, he manages to make his alphabet, basically, between what he types on the keyboard and what happens in the game code. It's as if one was in French, the other was in Japanese. And so he had to make his whole alphabet to have the A, we do it like that, the B, we do it like that, the C, we do it like that. And so, using the manual, he understands which password he has to enter according to the manager. And after several attempts, he manages to enter the password. He's the first person in the world to have published, in a video of one or two hours, the entirety of the gameplay of the game. So let's remember that the game came out in 2011. So these are graphics from 2011. What I love is the energy rush in order to get what is ultimately a rather bad Nintendo game. So, bad game, it seems that the development still cost 2.2 million. So here we are, we're really on... On a game, make your burger, not crazy! And 20 days after this video was published, the American YouTuber Nick Robinson, very famous, published a video. He also bought a Nintendo DS, except that he bought it for $2,800. He went to Japan to get it back, except that he had the game with him. And in fact, he had the password in the console. So he didn't even do all this crazy stuff, and he decides to publish the ROM. And then, the drama, everyone says, here it is, 10.38, he should have published it, he's disgusted, he got in front of it and everything. Except that in fact, 10.38, he is very happy, because his biggest fear was that the game's machine code would appear online without knowing where it comes from, and so Nintendo could have potentially accused him, knowing that he knew they had the cartridge. And there, Nick Robinson publishes a video with several million views, where he clearly says, I give you the game. And so, since then, the ROM of the game is available. Here we will see a little trick on eBay. How much does the game and the video cost now? There you go, $3,650 for the Nintendo DS and the two games. We are at this stage of rarity. It's the kind of uselessness that remains no less exciting. If you liked this video, I strongly advise you to go see our interview with the hacker who drove Microsoft crazy. Who we could also call the biggest sick person we've ever met on this set. It's about reverse engineering. The guy was a big sick person. It was in this video.