Battlezone had an interesting bug that may have been able to actually damage the hardware.
If you timed it right, you could arrange to be on your last tank, with a shot from the enemy tank on its way to you, when a guided missile would be sent. If you then let the shot from the enemy tank kill you before the missile reached you, the game would end.
It would then go into attract mode and show some pre-scripted gameplay to lure in players.
Just one little problem...since your game ended before the guided missile reached you, the guided missile was not destroyed. It continued on in the attract mode game where it would happily kill the demo tank.
Apparently, the demo code was not at all ready for the demo tank to get killed early before the script called for it, and the game would then crash.
When we made this happen on the Battlezone a friend of ours owned, with his permission and with him watching, the crash evidently set the video system to some mode that exceeded the specs of the CRT and it fried things.
I have no idea how consistent this result is, because the owner made us promise to not do any further experiments after he fixed the game.
If you timed it right, you could arrange to be on your last tank, with a shot from the enemy tank on its way to you, when a guided missile would be sent. If you then let the shot from the enemy tank kill you before the missile reached you, the game would end.
It would then go into attract mode and show some pre-scripted gameplay to lure in players.
Just one little problem...since your game ended before the guided missile reached you, the guided missile was not destroyed. It continued on in the attract mode game where it would happily kill the demo tank.
Apparently, the demo code was not at all ready for the demo tank to get killed early before the script called for it, and the game would then crash.
When we made this happen on the Battlezone a friend of ours owned, with his permission and with him watching, the crash evidently set the video system to some mode that exceeded the specs of the CRT and it fried things.
I have no idea how consistent this result is, because the owner made us promise to not do any further experiments after he fixed the game.