The Swiss Cheese model, pt. 3

After two more serious posts in this series, I wanted to stop somewhere a bit more lighthearted and inconsequential. “Here’a a fun thing you can try,” begins this 13-minute video from Retro Game Mechanics: The premise of the parlor trick the video describes is a bit convoluted: Get your Nintendo Entertainment system, put in the Mario cartridge, and power it on, without powering it off, grab the cartridge and replace it with the Tennis cartridge, start the game, wait until the music stops, then move around for a bit, take that cartridge out and put Mario back in, press A+Start and you will see that you will start at a random “invalid” level that doesn’t exist, which should not be possible. I’ll let you watch the video for a nice explanation, but this I think is a good example of the Swiss Cheese model: A+Start is real feature that allows you to continue the new game at the last level you finished (as opposed to Start, which always goes to Level 1). The NES allows you to take the…