This link’s five years old, and itself came five years after Iwata, beloved programmer president of Nintendo, suddenly passed away. Early in Iwata’s former employer HAL Laboratory’s history, they made games for Commodore 8-bit microcomputers. I myself own a C64 cartridge of HAL’s Pinball Spectacular, a variation upon Namco’s arcade pinball/Breakout mixture Gee Bee. It’s known that Iwata made at least one game for the VIC-20, a Galaxian clone called Star Battle.
It was known that there’s unused text in the cartridge ROM of Star Battle identifying Iwata as its author. Robin of 8-Bit Show And Tell had a look at the code in a monitor (27 minutes), and discovered that there’s a section that would have printed the credit from Iwata and HAL Laboratory to the screen but for the flag that would have triggered its display not being set. A change of a single byte from 0 to 1, and Iwata’s name gets printed to the screen in flashing colors!
While examining the code, Robin discovered a place where it reads the states of the two Shift keys and the Commodore key, and loads a 1 if they’re all pressed at once, but then throws the value away without doing anything with it. He speculates that this was the trigger for the easter egg showing Iwata’s name and HAL Laboratory, but for some reason was removed before release. Robin figured out a way to restore the egg by changing just a few bytes, and lo, in the modified version it works!
I remember the title screen for Pinball Spectacular on the C64 has a credit for HAL Laboratory. Whether Iwata coded it too is, I fear, lost to the ages. But how weird is it that the future president of Nintendo, the interviewer of all those Iwata Asks articles, originator of the Nintendo Directs and long time programmer for HAL got his start coding those little cartridges for Commodore. They just don’t make them like that any more.
