TURTLE POWER
HOW DID THE INTERVIEW PROCESS WIND UP IMPACTING VCTR-SCTR?
■ You’d think that Digital Eclipse would know just about everything about turtles after helping to return the teenage ninja variety to our screens this year, but a one-of-a-kind Asteroids game proved them wrong, as Dan Amrich recalls. “When
Owen Rubin – creator of Atari coin-ops like Space Duel and Major Havoc – visited our studio for his on-camera interview, we showed him our progress on VCTR-SCTR. When he saw the first level, inspired by Asteroids, he shouted, ‘You gotta change the UFOS into turtles!’ We had no idea what that meant,” he explains.
“Turns out the whole coin-op team went out to a bar one night that featured turtle races and, inspired, quickly created a prototype for a turtle-racing game.
Using a microphone, players would use it to encourage their digital turtles to cross the finish line first. Too soft and the turtle wouldn’t move, too loud and they’d get freaked out and not move,” Dan continues. “Management saw this and hated it, promising them that turtles were now forbidden from any Atari games.” Of course, Atari’s programmers saw this as an opportunity for some mischief. “Around this same time, Atari manufactured its 50,000th Asteroids cabinet, which featured special gold accents on the control panel, side art and marquee. Since the turtle ban was still fresh, the coin-op crew created a custom board for the golden Asteroids machine that occasionally turned the UFO into… a turtle,” Dan continues. The machine had originally been stationed at Atari headquarters, but its current whereabouts were unknown. “Midway eventually acquired the Atari Games coin-op division, and Warner Bros later acquired Midway,” Dan explains. “By complete luck, a few weeks after we learned about it, a friend at Netherrealm Studios – the devs behind Mortal Kombat and Injustice – mentioned that they had an Asteroids machine in their break room, and it was gold! Sure enough, its markings match the one from Atari HQ, but unfortunately the board inside is no longer the custom turtle hack, and that code may now be lost forever. But at least now we know what happened to this unusual footnote to Atari’s arcade success, and it’s safe with developers who appreciate it.”