| " | I must uneasy make, lest too light winning make the prize light. | " |
–William Shakespeare, from The Tempest
| ||
Description[]
Tempest is an arcade game by Atari, originally designed and programmed by Dave Theurer. Released in October 1981, it was fairly popular and had several ports and sequels. The game is also notable for being one of the first video games with a selectable level of difficulty (determined by the initial starting level). The game is a tube shooter, a type of shoot 'em up where the environment is fixed and viewed from a three-dimensional perspective.
Ready Player One History[]
In Halliday's Easter Egg Hunt, the first part of the Third Gate requires an avatar to surpass James Halliday's score of 728,329 points in order to proceed to the Flicksync of Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
Behind the scenes[]
The Revision 1 (1980) version of the ROM contained a bug (sometimes said to be a test feature accidentally left in) allowing the player to gain 40 free credits. To perform this trick, a player must end the game on a score in the form XXYYZZ, where XX is 17 or greater (so the easiest way to do this is probably to start on level 22, which grants a 170,000 point bonus for completion), YY is between 29 and 60, and ZZ is 06, 11, 12, 16, 17, or 18. The 40 credits are then clocked up after the player enters his or her initials and the machine has cycled through its logo display.
There are other values for ZZ which do other things, but those are outside the scope of this article.
Note that the advice given to Parzival by Art3mis was wrong, and would not have given any extra credits, as in the score achieved (189,412) YY is 94, outside the 29–60 range.