[FatActor]

I don't see how that could have been accidentally discovered. It is so esoteric and time consuming, that even if someone owned an arcade and could set the machine to free play, what kind of thought process from historical hacks prior to 1982 would have inspired that kind of a search space? Much like easter eggs in early Microsoft Office products from ca. 1990, I can't imagine. Like maybe trying to run down a shot counter might have been on the agenda, but those two specific aliens just cinch it for me. Now, as to whether it is a bug or not.

Looking at the forensics of the original ROM at the provided URL[0], the fix is nontrivial. It looks like a bug, IMHO. But if it is a bug, who stumbled upon it? I would think that if the author put that in there to get the high score all the time, it certainly is obfuscated enough, but he would run the risk of being discovered. Perhaps the cheat is obfuscated in order to sneak it through code review and not be fired by Namco?

What really supports the bug theory is that the flight pattern of the far left bees has to be altered to account for their location on the screen. This REALLY feels like a bug, because when I'm trying to alter a corner case in code, I can rarely see the second-order consequences without code coverage/fuzzing. This is a total code smell IMHO.

But again, how would someone even exploit this flaw without the ROM. Which leads me back to the intentional cheat by the programmer.

I'm legit ambivalent about this. But if I was pushed, I'd have to say it was an intentional cheat slipped into the code, because programmers were just too good back then.

TEAM CHEAT FTW.

[0] https://www.computerarcheology.com/Arcade/Galaga/

[raldi]

I completely disagree; it's easy to imagine someone in the first few days of the game's availability deciding for fun that instead of beating the first level, they were going to see how long they could keep it going. At that point, the natural thing to do is kill all but one enemy, and eventually it would stop shooting, which would be very attention-grabbing.

Then of course word would spread and investigations would begin as to how to reproduce and optimize the phenomenon.

[PaulHoule]

I remember books like

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4045527-the-complete-gui...

reccomending that you practice playing games dodging not shooting and seeing how long you can live to build up your skill.

[johnnymorgan]

Yup, gamers are gamers is the simplest answer.

I've said that same phrase about so many games and I'm still amazed at people's ability to track these things down.

[WithinReason]

Or just to see if they ever "run out of shots"

[pixl97]

This is something I like to bring up to programmers/designers in context of application security. And that is any assumptions on how the user is going to use said program you come up with will be broken. If you say "No one will do ______" you will likely be incorrect.

[lupire]

Stopping when there are 2 enemies left is a bit weird. As is picking those 2 specifically.

[hgsgm]

I would be quite surprised to learn that arcade games written in assembler had "code review".

[CoastalCoder]

Or Jira tickets.

Sigh...

[justinlloyd]

> sneak it through code review

The ** is code review? Most places didn't even have version control. Version control in most game development studios was "let me copy my source files on to another 5+1/4 floppy just in case disaster happens."

If lucky to have access to a mini computer with a hard drive then you kept separate directories for backups of your code. And you got cussed out by the high priest of IT because your backups were taking up more than 500KB of drive space. Maybe you got SCCS that would happily destroy your work regularly if you breathed wrong. If your company was rich it had a fully paid up copy of RCS runing on the Perkin-Elmer mini computer with 1MB of RAM and a 200MB HDD hooked up to a data station that looked like it was stolen off the set of Silent Running along with a 32kbps serial cable to your ICE box plugged in to the arcade board. And you got cussed out by the high priest of IT because now your RCS directory was bigger than your backup directory. And then inevitably someone wasn't paying attention one day and did an 'rm -rf *' on the wrong directory and the version control repository for your project got erased.

Code merging on non-UNIX development was usually "give me your floppy and I'll re-type bits of code you changed in that text file into my text file and then I'll give you back a fresh copy of the file to work with." If you were both smart about it, you worked in separate files and just had one or two common files that you played hot potato with, which was the fashion back in the day. Or you had a nifty little tool that would concatenate all the files together and then deleted duplicate lines and kept only the last version of changed lines because we believed we were too manly to use real development tools but the real reason was the company was too tight fisted to pay for them. "Hard drives are for the weak and why do you programmers need the high quality DS/DD floppies from Fujitsu anyway!?! Look, I've got this little gadget I bought for you that'll punch a notch in the other corner so you can just flip the disc over and use the other side too."

> and not be fired by Namco?

Nobody would have gotten fired over that even if they had purposely put it in there. The QA team would have found it, severity would have been decided, and it would have probably be pushed to "eh, there's not enough bytes in the ROM to patch it, it doesn't crash the machine and we've just burned enough PROMs on the gang programmer that the cost of pulling the PROMs off of arcade boards, junking a few thousand ICs and doing over is too great." It is almost certain that someone on the QA team found the bug, wrote it up, it was discussed, and then WNF'd, and then a little later on, news about it leaked out.

This also assumes of course they had a QA team and it wasn't just Bob who took a smoke break between running his bare hand over the live wiring looms feeling for shorts and exposed wiring to kill a few burbling aliens.

[onpensionsterm]

>you got cussed out by the high priest of IT because your backups were taking up more than 500KB of drive space.

IT becoming upset when the things people need to do to get work done deviates from their IT model?

Some things never change.

[FatActor]

That's an interesting historical perspective of a code review from 50 years ago. Especially where you state that the Q&A team would review the code and decide to patch it or not. Did I used the wrong term from the 21st century? Clearly I was hypothesizing. I'm disappointed you couldn't just inform us without being so snarky.

[johnnymorgan]

> hooked up to a data station that looked like it was stolen off the set of Silent Running

I'm dying laughing at this, your prose is amazing an so brough me back to my childhood growing up around these nerds ;)

Love it!

[saberdancer]

It's quite different incentive when you play for free - why waste your time dodging shots when you can fight but if you were playing in an arcade, some players might try and prolong the experience and enjoy the challenge of evading shots.

[vgb2k18]

>why waste your time dodging shots when you can fight but if you were playing in an arcade

A kid pushed his last coin into the slot, 30 minutes until his parents come to collect him; he will prolong this game for as long as he can.