Gamers of a certain age: How did you learn about the Adventure easter egg?

More or less this for me as well, except it was the school bus and my buddy and I didn’t get enough details, so we ended up obsessively walking against every boundary wall with various objects in hand, trying to find the supposed secret room. Sounds pathetic now but we were pretty excited to discover the rumor was true :)

When there were more than two objects on the screen other than the player, they would blink on and off. Probably some sort of memory optimization in those primitive 4k days. But in any case when carrying an object through that part of the maze and a dragon/bat came by it would blink when it shouldn’t due to the hidden “pixel object”. A little exploration with the bridge would find the secret room.

Oh, of course. It’s all so obvious.

Gamers can be an obsessive bunch after all.

Player or missile graphic multiplexing. You got two player sprites and one ball sprite on the VCS. Multiple sprites meant multiplexing (reusing) those sprites for separate objects on different scanlines. Best example of sloppy VCS multiplexing: 2600 Pac-Man and its flicker ghosts.

There’re a couple of citations on the web that says Pac Man 2600 is not that sloppy:
Wired’s review of Racing The Beam book, 2-3 paragraphs from the bottom.
Wikipedia Pac Man 2600 Development section.

And the 2600 specs are…really really pathetic. I’m sure all fridges made today have more RAM than the 2600.

I guess we’re drifting off topic, but I was surprised to learn many years later how terrible that Pac-Man port was. I remember how absolutely stoked I was to be able to play Pac-Man at home on my 2600.

Hmmm? No. Wired is engaging in a bit of revisionist history there for dramatic effect.

The technical limitations of the Atari 2600 don’t change the fact that it was a terrible hack rush-job. What they released as Pac-Man was literally a prototype version that the programmer put together as a proof of concept. Ms. Pac-Man, a port that was given a proper development cycle on the same 2600 hardware, is miles ahead of the Pac-Man release.

Compare: this with this

Wow, I stand corrected. Ms. Pac-Man fixed quite a number of problems, large and small. And even though it cannot overcome the blinking problem (whenever 1 scan line needs to show 3+ player sprites, it seems), at least the sprite is stable when the scan line only deals with 1 or 2 sprite, unlike Pac-Man.

Back on topic: I read about the easter egg, but don’t remember owning Adventure, so I must have just seen it on TV later. In fact, I don’t remember owning a 2600 ever. One of my friend must have had it, because I remember playing Combat several times. Also remember when department stores used to setup demo stations of these consoles and various handhelds along a whole wall?

I have a vague memory of finding the Easter egg described in a magazine – maybe even the official Atari Age magazine, but my memory isn’t that clear.

A friend of mine told me about it. I used to sit around timing myself to try to break personal bests for unlocking it.