Further research on the matter is needed.
Wikipedia lists the release date of Spitfire as being Decem– however that date is unsourced and just feels inaccurate (like it was taken from a site that doesn’t support unspecified date/month fields). Halo 2600’s author Ed Fries found an easter egg in the arcade game Starship 1, and he was able to pin down the release date (or rather, its first public appearance) for that game down to August 13, 1977. Q: Is this the first very first video game easter egg?Ī: Not sure. You can watch and listen to me input this code in this video: …and then that screen will disappear as quickly as it appeared (given the system’s draw rate, that’s enough time to read it). If successful, you will see this screen appear: (I have been unable to find any meaning to this sequence.) For those of you not counting at home, that’s 48 button presses, not counting the initial “3” from earlier. If you fail, you get sent back to the G? menu (also invisibly). The passcode is that weird-looking pattern at the end of the ROM. It jumps to a piece of code where you can enter a special passcode. Pressing “3” also appears to do nothing, but it actually does something (invisibly). In the case of Spitfire, pressing “1” starts a 2-player game and pressing “2” starts a 1-player game against the CPU. The modes are listed in the game’s instruction manual (this is a common (but not universal) design pattern for Channel F games).
The first thing the game does when turned on is ask you the timeless question: “G?” In response to this question, you are supposed to hit one of the 4 numbered buttons on the console itself to select a game mode. Being intrigued, took a look at a raw disassembly to investigate. Most of it looks like static (machine code usually does), but towards the end of the file (the right side of the image) you can see some graphics, several letters smooshed together, some empty space, and a rather weird looking pattern at the end. Here’s what spitfire looks like arranged in a bunch of vertical stripes: I found the easter egg several months back by going through various Channel F games and viewing them as raw, 1 bit-per-pixel images using YY-CHR and seeing if I could spot anything interesting.