The mysterious origins of an uncrackable video game

[tempogain]

The mysterious origins of an uncrackable video game

[yyy]

During their research, Aycock and Copplestone were able to interview one of the people involved in the game’s production, Steve Sidley.

He too remembered being confused by the table at the time. “I couldn’t unscramble it,” he told the researchers. And he claimed it had been the work of a programmer who developed it while not entirely sober: “He told me it came upon him when he was drunk and whacked out of his brain.” Aycock tried to contact the programmer in question but got no response.

I love it!

This is why hoarding is good. Ignore Marie K and keep thousands of notebooks lying around!

And then there’s this one:

It is not just code that digital archaeologists comb through. In 1983, Atari buried 700,000 cartridges of video games at a landfill site in Alamogordo, New Mexico. It was a historic event in video game history – widely rumoured and discredited by some as an urban myth.

The titles the firm chose to bury had been widely panned and were proving impossible to sell. One, ET the Extra-Terrestrial, has been lampooned as the worst video game ever.

For more than three decades, the cartridges lay there, degrading. But in 2014, Andrew Reinhard and colleagues went on a dig at the site. The burial was not, in fact, an urban myth – Reinhard dug up 1,300 cartridges. Hundreds of the ET games were sold on Ebay, for a total of about $108,000 (£83,500).

I thought they had already acknowledged it (after initially denying it back in the day). In any case, it makes me wonder how much it would have cost to store them in a warehouse for a few decades…

[olm]

Good story on there, but very misleading title: “cracking a Video game” clearly refers to circumventing some kind of copy protection. Instead, the article is about reverse engineering the maze creation algorithm used in this game.

The authors seem to be unable to make any sense of one “mildly genious” step in there, which ensures reliably navigable mazes being created procedurally. The code piece involves a small matrix of pre-defined values, which was allegedly created while drunk. These specific values work well for the task, but it seems hard to explain how they were chosen.

[tempogain]

@olm

“cracking a Video game” clearly refers to circumventing some kind of copy protection.

Only to people familiar with video game culture.

[olm]

Hmmm… What does it mean to a layman, then? Maybe cracking code (as in breaking a cypher)… yeah you’re right, likely that the author used it in such a way, while oblivious that for anyone interested in video games it has a distinct meaning.

Either way, thanks a lot for digging up that article!