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Comment by whartung | Hacker News Reader

My friend, in the office next door, was a respected saucer hunter back in the day.

Saucer hunting was, essentially, the degenerate game play that base Asteroids reduced down to when you were playing for score.

The game was to leave a last, single, small rock floating about, and wait for the fast, 1000 point saucers to show up.

The trick was that the saucers were very fast, and very accurate. So the solution was to essentially hold down the thrust button, and race from bottom to top (since the ship rolled over the edges, rather than bounced off).

When a saucer showed up, you had to quickly react, point the ship in the right direction, just a bit off axis, and blast the saucer with a stream of bullets.

I was never particularly good at that myself, but my friend was. That's how you got on the high score boards in the local arcades back in the day.

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This is called "lurking". You can only do it on older versions of the game, because arcade operators complained that people were playing too much on one credit, which forced Atari to make an update. Eventually, it became best practice from arcade game designers to ensure turnover.

Interestingly though, years later they had to similarly release an update to Gauntlet Legends for just about the same reason.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asteroids_(video_game)#Lurking...

Arcade operators began to complain about losing revenue due to this exploit. In response, Atari issued a patched EPROM and, due to the impact of this exploit, Atari (and other companies) changed their development and testing policies to try to prevent future games from having such exploits.

  >  because arcade operators complained that people were playing too much on one credit,

My friends and I were all over those tricks for Tempest. For those unaware, in the Atari game Tempest, if you ended with the game with specific scores, different things would happen. The most notorious, was it would grant 40 credits to the game.

Other scores did other things, including opening all of the levels to the end game (that was a fun week when that leaked, all of the high score boards all over town were wrecked).

But the 40 credit one was, I mean, freakin jackpot.

I remember when the operator at the student union at college cranked the game to its hardest difficulty. Didn't matter. That poor guy was lucky to get $2 a week from that machine. We'd crack it open every morning and just keep it that way all day long.

>> Other scores did other things, including opening all of the levels to the end game (that was a fun week when that leaked, all of the high score boards all over town were wrecked).

Kind of crazy to think one of the coolest things back in the day was battling other unknown or sometimes known teenagers for the highest scores on video games in arcades. I remember being really good at Pengo at one of the local pizza joints that my cousins loved going to. I remember saving as many quarters as possible as an 11 year old to make sure I could hold that high score until we came back a few weeks later.

>if you ended with the game with specific scores, different things would happen. The most notorious, was it would grant 40 credits to the game.

I must thank you for that nugget as a HS friend and I inherited the 40 game jackpot a couple times and had no idea how. Any memory of what some of those specific scores were?

Yea, I stumbled upon those as well. It was like "I can have the last piece of pizza" moment, looking around, nobody is missing this, "well, ok...".

As I recall it as a score over 170,000 and ended with a 17. That gave you the 40 credits.

The level skip was 46, but it was tricky.

If you did the 17 trick, then that happened right away.

The 46 trick, you had to wait for once complete cycle of attract mode. You know that it worked because whatever level it was playing in attract mode, when it continued to the next level, the level was wrong. Like, it would start playing the circle, and then jump to the clover, rather than the square.

But, we "never" let that happen, because if you let it go through attract mode, you'd lose all of your level progress. So, we didn't let it do that. That's why it was trick to find what 46 did (and, trust me, we tried them all! lol).

Others are mentioned on the wikipedia page, where it mentions "some ROMs were shipped with glitches". Glitches!? HA! no, likely these were put it perhaps for debugging, but that's not clear. I think it was the coders pulling one over on management, personally. Whatever they were, they were consciously done. These weren't "glitches" or bugs.

From what I understand the tempest bug was accidentally introduced at the last second because the Atari logo was slightly off-center and when Dave Theurer (the creator) adjusted it, it introduced some subtle bugs into the game related to interactions with the anti-piracy code which was based on strict positional placement of objects.

Quote from him:

If players got something like 179,480 points, the game would crank a 40 into the coin counter. It would do other weird things, too, like double the vector generator multipliers so everything would be twice as big, but nobody wanted that. They just wanted to get the 40 free credits, so the kids figured out how to do it.

> Interestingly though, years later they had to similarly release an update to Gauntlet Legends for just about the same reason.

Useless tech point, but Gauntlet Legends was actually "new" enough to keep the game data on an IDE HDD. 1979 vs 1998 was a massively long time in technology terms, interesting to see some of the non-technical issues persisted.

Does anyone know what the patch did?

Geez I hated those little bastards. They were so small and stupid good at leading their shot to hit me no matter how fast I was going.

That speech is literally xenophobia ;-)

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