Hello fellow gamers:
I'm sure that we have all heard about purported Easter Eggs, closely guarded secrets and more in games which turned out to be rumours only.
To be honest I have only personally heard of a few although I know from personal research that there are many out there. Here are the few that come immediately to mind...
This was a load of hoo-hah for two reasons...(A) the game rolls at 99,999,999 which at the time I heard the rumour was not yet known to us, and (B) it is physically impossible to hit that ship fifty times in a given stage, try as you may.
Tempest (1981 Arcade) - this one I heard back in my high school days. We never were good enough to get more than a few stages past 81, the green or light green circle stage. One gamer claimed he did and that subsequent stage colours were white, orange, purple and finally rainbow, an amalgam of colours. Many years later when Laszlo Takacs came on the scene I realized that the game stayed on the green colour for the rest of the game, but for 20 years or so after high school it made for an interesting discussion point amongst my gaming friends.
However, over the years two anecdotes come to mind. The first has to do with something former TG senior referee and worldwide MAME editor Mark Longridge once told me. His research uncovered a little known variation of the game which may/may not have ever been released to the US and which, allegedly, allowed gaming past that point. I never was able to further verify these findings. Second, a gamer once claimed to have a way to do this, and the trick involved usage of the second player. The theory was that the second player's actions somehow made the game's "count" of the dots go past the point for player one to clear a stage, and the way it was explained to me was that in a 3+1 game you could clear one split screen while in a 5+1 game you could clear three. Never saw this done but it always sticks out in my mind when discussing the game.