Back in the day it was difficult to get credit for making video games. Actually it's not that much better nowadays - outside of maybe Cliffy B, how many names of people in the games industry do you actually know off the top of your head - but at least the countless number of computer geniuses it takes to code, design and produce a finished triple A title will have their name appear in an end credits crawl, like a movie. People working at the very beginning of the form had no such luck, and had to contend themselves with weird little tricks to leave their mark. In fact Atari especially were infamous for not allowing people to credit games to themselves, leading to things like the hidden area in Adventure where creator Warren Robinett hid his name as an Easter Egg. Dedicated players found that one pretty quickly, mind; it took 26 years for a similar feature was uncovered in the Atari 400 and 800 ports of that classic arcade title Donkey Kong (before Nintendo were a console name). Programmer Landon Dyer coded in a very specific set of actions - which included purposefully killing off Mario - that revealed his initials on the game's menu screen.
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/
