In 1999, game developer Mike Mika did what most people in love do: he found a grand, romantic way to propose. He just picked a method with a catastrophic flaw: it all depended on his girlfriend voluntarily playing a video game she had no interest in playing. Mika was the lead engineer on the Game Boy Color port of Klax, an Atari puzzle game, and a launch-window title for Nintendo’s new handheld. As he told WIRED, he realized he had a little spare room in the game’s memory and a girlfriend, Micki, who only liked puzzle games. The logic wrote itself. “She loves puzzle games, I’m doing a puzzle game now, so let me just put that out there, and she will find this thing in the game,” he recalled thinking. So, he hid a marriage proposal in the code of every commercial copy of Klax that shipped. The flaw in the plan He hid it well. Maybe too well. According to Kill Screen, unlocking the proposal required going to the password screen, entering a specific sequence, having the game reject it as invalid, and then entering it again nine more times. Ten times in total. Once done, a grainy black-and-white proposal finally appeared. Mika buried it that deep on purpose, convinced that some random player out in the world would stumble onto it before Micki did. He didn’t even tell Atari or Nintendo it was in there. The flaw in the plan revealed itself immediately: Micki would not play the game. “I leave the Game Boy out, I urge her to play it, and she never picks it up,” Mika laughed in the WIRED interview. He left it out. He nudged. He waited. She wouldn’t pick it up. This went on, he says, for years. The strangest part is that he never came up with a backup plan. By his own account, they already had a house together, a dog, and were basically common-law married. He was also in nonstop crunch at work, so he just let the world’s most elaborate proposal sit in a cartridge gathering dust rather than, say, asking her over dinner. “So do I propose to her normal, or I have this thing here that’s really cool, but I can’t get her to play it, ever?” he remembered wondering. The question is finally popped Salvation arrived four years later in 2003. An editor at Tips & Tricks Magazine was hunting for never-before-published secret codes to run in the magazine’s 100th issue and sent Mika an email. Mika had exactly one to offer. The magazine published a special section addressed to Micki by name; they printed the code and told her precisely what to do with it. Mika set the stage and then fled. He left the magazine and the queued up game out together one night and got out of the house. “I just kinda drove around a little bit,” he said. Micki came home, saw her own name in a magazine, entered the code, and found the proposal that had been sitting inside that cartridge for four years. She called him and said yes. She was, he admits, a little miffed it had taken four years, “but I swear I tried to get her to play it sooner.” For Mika, this turned out to be a recurring instinct. In 2013, he made headlines again when he hacked Donkey Kong so his young daughter could play as Pauline rescuing Mario. She had asked why the girl always had to be the one getting saved. “My daughter’s simple request touched a lot of people,” he said. “It’s changed the way I approach game design.” The post He hid a marriage proposal in a Game Boy game. It took his girlfriend 4 years to find it. appeared first on Upworthy.