I've gotten hundreds of emails since that post in 2012 with people who knew about the cheat in 1982, citing specific events that could not have been misconstrued.
Of course, I haven't revised the blog post to add all of them, but the one that I probably should have added was one person who noted that their mall got their first arcade the month before Christmas in 1982 and he visited it several times a week. Just after Christmas, they imported a Galaga game - and the same day they got it, the owner of the arcade told the patrons about the cheat as a sales feature (even made up a hand drawn sign of how it worked).
Perhaps it was clever marketing on the part of Midway and Namco.
I've gotten hundreds of emails since that post in 2012 with people who knew about the cheat in 1982, citing specific events that could not have been misconstrued.
Of course, I haven't revised the blog post to add all of them, but the one that I probably should have added was one person who noted that their mall got their first arcade the month before Christmas in 1982 and he visited it several times a week. Just after Christmas, they imported a Galaga game - and the same day they got it, the owner of the arcade told the patrons about the cheat as a sales feature (even made up a hand drawn sign of how it worked).
Perhaps it was clever marketing on the part of Midway and Namco.