I finally got my hands on a Flipper Zero. If you haven’t heard of it, it’s a noob-friendly version of the kind of penetration testing tools that security experts use to test the safety of systems. It packs a wide range of antennas, including RFID, sub-GHz radios, and NFC, which allows it to scan, analyze, and speak to everyday wireless devices that most of us don’t think much about.
While others have used their Flipper Zeros to test their car or hotel’s security or to make ATMs spit out cash, I had much loftier goals in mind. I got mine a few weeks before Tears of the Kingdom came out. As most Nintendo fans know, the collectible Amiibos figurines aren’t just toys. They can be used to get special rewards in games—like Link’s legendary horse Epona—and you can’t earn those rewards any other way. That’s fun for fans who can buy the figurines, but a bummer for anyone who doesn’t want to chase down collectibles just to get a special horse.
This is where my Flipper Zero comes in. I've been using it to score as many legendary horses as I can.
Whitehat Hacking?
Amiibos have NFC tags in their base—specifically, NTAG215 tags that allow someone to write around 500 bytes of data. While that data is write-only, it’s not really under lock and key. Unlike, say, the NFC chip in your credit card, which has more robust security, an Amiibo can easily be read and copied.
This has led to community-driven projects around exchanging Amiibo codes. Since it’s easy to scan Amiibos, and the data they store is so small, a single 4-GB SD card could store millions of Amiibo codes. That’s a little overkill, considering there are only a couple hundred Amiibo figures in total, plus a few hundred Amiibo card codes. A complete collection of every Amiibo in existence fits into just a couple of megabytes.
Most of them aren’t very relevant to Tears of the Kingdom, but every single one will spawn at least a few generic consumable items, like meal ingredients. Zelda-themed Amiibos, of which there are 26, have better rewards, including weapons, shields, paraglider fabrics, and unique armor sets that are either exclusive to the Amiibos that spawn them or are relatively difficult to earn in game.
Each Amiibo can only be used once per day, but this limit also applies to each unique Amiibo. If you happened to have two of the same Amiibo—say, the Link figurine from Super Smash Bros. that can sometimes spawn Epona—you can use each one every day. Of course, buying multiple figures just to double your chances of spawning a horse costs a lot more than simply waiting a day. Community code collections, however, make it much easier—and cheaper—to try multiple times.
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This has been possible for years with Breath of the Wild; it just required a little more work. Most phones have NFC readers and can scan data, but they can’t emulate those NFC tags. Instead, the process usually required buying NFC tags and manually writing the Amiibo codes to scan them later. The Flipper Zero, on the other hand, can scan, save, and emulate Amiibo codes easily, and it can store the hundreds of Amiibo codes out there on a single SD card.
Arguably, this raises some interesting ethical questions. On the one hand, the items in Tears of the Kingdom are meant to be rewards for owning Amiibos. On the other hand, most of those figures have been out of production for years, and Nintendo earned money for each one of them sold. It could be argued that Amiibo code-sharing is a “circulating the tapes” way to keep digital information and the video game content they provide access to alive.
Cheat Code Renaissance
For me, the Flipper Zero has brought back an aspect of gaming that I’d thought was long lost: the art of cheat codes. In the ’80s and ’90s, cheat codes that were either built into games or made possible via accessories like the GameShark let players modify games as they see fit. Want to play with a million extra lives? Can do. Want to skip the grind to earn cash in an RPG? Have all the money you want.
This freedom let players create the kind of experiences they wanted to have while allowing developers to express creative visions that they couldn’t otherwise. Cheat codes, in other words, were another form of artistic expression. There’s no reason Doom had to ship with a god-mode cheat code built in, but it did. Players who found it, and used it, got to have a special experience.
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Community mods and console hacking are the natural evolution of this art form, but they’re often much more limited than the cheat codes of the past. They’re also typically bound to PC gaming, where modifying the code of games is easier than it is on consoles. But using slightly less-than-official methods to tweak a game has its charms.
In my case, I’ve been loving Tears of the Kingdom. But one thing I don’t love is grinding for basic resources. I’d much rather spend my time finding every lightroot in the Depths or hunting down each of the 1,000 korok seeds in the game. If I had to stop periodically to hunt animals for cooking ingredients or to farm rupees, I’d have less fun.
Is my experience what the developers intended? Not exactly. Nintendo doesn’t expect most players to have 26 different Zelda-themed Amiibos they can scan every day—sometimes twice a day if they have extras—to get a treasure trove of weapons, extra armor they can sell, and piles of animal meat. But they did account for some players who do. The game doesn’t break just because I’m one of the ones enjoying that experience.
I also get to have something few other players do: a stable full of Eponas. Between scanning Amiibos nearly every day and the fact that I have a couple of unique codes with a chance of spawning Epona, I’ve accumulated a few identical versions of the legendary horse. Does this change the game much? Not any more than having one. You can only take one Epona out at a time. But I love having them, regardless.
I wouldn’t exactly recommend buying a Flipper Zero for this purpose. You could buy several Amiibos for the cost of a Flipper, assuming you can get even your hands on one. But I couldn’t be happier with my decision to bring back a comfy corner of game hacking, complete with a stable full of horses. I wish more games embraced the possibility of players messing around, rather than patching out every overly complicated exploit. It’s fun to make a game my own.