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As a former gamedev, I think the author lacks imagination for the monotony, depravity, and sheer volume of player effort.

The most likely discoverer is some kids, more interested with wasting time than getting high scores, seeing who can survive the longest on a single quarter. Or maybe they wanted to troll others and hog a machine as long as possible.

I suppose it could be a bug found during development/QA, deemed not worth fixing, and then leaked by those with knowledge showing off, followed by viral spread. But just typing this out it sounds more complicated than kids being kids.

I would bet money that it is not a clever developer sneaking a cheat or Easter egg into the game.




This. I was 12 when this game came out and bottom-line any time you could stretch out your game on a coin-op, there was incentive to do so. Really the only competing incentive was to get a free man, so you could also increase your score, but if you were down to your last couple of quarters then this or something like the pattern where you leave the last little rocks in Asteroids while fighting ships, was something to do.


The only flaw I can find in this is that I would have expected the person finding this out to have left just one enemy on screen, not two. They're much not dangerous in pairs, in my experience on Galaga...


This reminds me that one of the tricks I used to use to identify which difficulty jumper the game was set to was to leave exactly 1 mothership on the first board. If it would try to capture your fighter after a few sweeps through, you knew it was on the easy jumper setting.




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