
It was a runner-up for Electronic Gaming Monthly Template:'s Best Peripheral of 1996 (behind the Saturn analog controller).

It was originally released for the Sega Saturn and Sony PlayStation consoles in January 1996. The cartridges also acted as memory cards, with equal or greater storage capacity to the consoles' first party memory cards.

Codes could be entered, but unlike the Game Genie, codes were saved in the onboard flash memory and could be accessed later rather than having to be reentered. When the original GameShark was released, it came with 4,000 preloaded codes.
