SoylentNews

"exec" writes:

It all started with a soon to be released project I am working on called "Fixing Gran Trak 10" about the first car racing arcade video game from 1974. I had completed the electrical repairs and was trying to interview as many people as possible who were involved with making the game. One of the interviews was with Ron Milner. Ron's an interesting guy. He was an engineer and inventor at Atari's secret think tank in the mountains – Cyan Engineering from 1973 to 1985. Besides coin-op work he was co-inventor of the Atari 2600 video game system and even helped prototype the animations for the robots at Chuck E Cheese. At the end of our conversation we were chatting about other stuff when he asked:

"Did you ever get a Starship 1 game?"

I said "I know that game! I would love to have one in my collection. I remember playing it when I was a kid."

Ron explained how he designed an "axial coil" around the neck of the CRT which would cause the stars to rotate when the player turned the control yoke. A pretty neat trick. Unfortunately that feature was cut to save money in the production version of the game.

Ron continued, "That was the first and only game that I ever programmed and I think it was maybe one of the first games with a backdoor in it. I didn't tell people about this, even within Atari, for at least 30 years, but I had some code in there that if you did a certain sequence of controls it would say 'Hi Ron!' and give you 10 free games."

I was kind of stunned. If this was true it would certainly predate the earliest video game Easter egg that I knew of...

https://edfries.wordpress.com/2017/03/22/chasing-the-first-arcade-easter-egg/

-- submitted from IRC

Original Submission