This might be the earliest example of a video game hoax, which spread before the days of message boards, edited YouTube videos or even magazines that mainly traded in April Fool's jokes. Battlezone was an arcade game from back in the eighties heyday, when kids had no choice but to leave their house and actually socialise with people if they wanted to play video games. Ugh. Sounds terrible. The graphical capabilities of the time weren't quite up to the standards of today's Modern Warfares, with the battlefield rendered in vector lines on a black background, like Asteroids or the old Star Wars arcade game. One of the great triumphs of these old games is that players would fill in the blanks - it certainly wasn't an accurate recreation of a mountainous landscape on which you drove a tank and shot down UFOs whilst a volcano erupted in the background, but those green lines gave enough of a sketch that your brain would make up the difference. An altered version of the game even ended up being used by the U.S. Army as targeting training for gunners. Some players went a little further with this "filling in the blanks" jag, however, and that's how this particular urban legend was born. For years there was a rumour that you could actually drive your tank up into the perpetually erupting volcano in the background, in which you'd find a castle you could explore to your heart's content. It was absolute gubbins but people fell for it, hogging the cabinet for hours as they attempted to drive the vast distance to actually "reach" the volcano. Arcade owners bugged Atari about this lost profit until they released an update for the game where driving for too long without shooting any enemies say a targeted missile sent after you.
Tom Baker is the Comics Editor at WhatCulture! He's heard all the Doctor Who jokes, but not many about Randall and Hopkirk. He also blogs at http://communibearsilostate.wordpress.com/
