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Comment by whartung | Hacker News Reader

  >  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.

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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.

>> 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.

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