Engage Ridley Motherfucker

... is a sentence that crashes the original Nintendo Entertainment System game Metroid. How? Well, it all originates from the game's password system.

Before the days of harddrive storage, memory cards, or even battery saves, video games would track player progress by generating long strings of text that corresponded to game data meant for players to write down when they were done playing, and enter on the main menu when they decided to next play the game. Metroid, however, doesn't do any legwork to ensure that the password you're entering correlates to player data that is, y'know, actually possible. Because of this, over the years players have been entering random passwords to get weird, unintended effects in the game. Some of the more famous passwords discovered for the game include 000000 000020 000000 000020 which puts the player at the start of the game without Samus' Zero Suit, CONTIN UE_MY_ GAMEMI NIBOSS, which starts the game with 200 missiles and most upgrades unlocked, and mMuiS1 II6-GE Jls?h0 m00WRM, which starts the player suitless near the end of the game, bound for the best ending. Some kid named Justin Bailey even discovered that his name puts the suitless player halfway through the game with 255 missiles and a bunch of upgrades.

While all of these passwords produce results that aren't achievable through normal gameplay, they all leave the game in a playable state. What were to happen, however, if you input a password corresponding to values that overflow such as ENGAGE RIDLEY MOTHER FUCKER? Well, the game crashes, obviously. However, being that this glitch was never fixed in the many rereleases of thes title, it has a unique effect depending on which version of the game you're playing.

On the original print of the game for the Nintendo Entertainment System, the game completely crashes forcing a restart. That's boring, though. What if we input the code on the 3-pin reprint of the game? The game doesn't crash! But it's also not playable, either... The game spawns the player at the beginning of the game without the Zero Suit, but a screen-wide graphical glitch prevents the game from scrolling left or right, essentially permenantly trapping you in the very beginning of the game.

In the 2004 "Classic NES Titles" rerelease of the game for the Gameboy Advance, the unlockable rom in Metroid Prime for the Gamecube, and the Wii and Wii U virtual console releases of the game, entering the infamous code simply resets the game to the title screen. Whatever they were doing for these releases seemed to be the least "damaging" versions of the glitch. Then, when the game was rereleased for the 3DS virtual console, the code had its arguably most "dangerous" version of a crash, hardlocking the 3DS system and requiring the power button to be held down for multiple systems in order to recover. For the longest time there was a myth going around that entering the code on the 3DS would permenantly brick the system, as people seemingly falsely equated a hardlock to a brick. In a 2016 firmware patch, the effect of the glitch was reduced to simply crashing the emulator, something that could be fixed by simply returning to the 3DS menu and closing the program.

Entering the code on the NES Classic Edition version of the game will hard crash the console with the error "C7: An error has occurred. If the problem persists, please make a note of the error code and visit support.nintendo.com.", requiring the player to hold the power button down in order to turn it off

Finally, the Nintendo Online release for the Switch simply boots you back to the application's main menu with the popup "An error has occurred within the game." ... Boring.