exodus Long story short(ish), take Gun Smoke, a famous game by a famous developer. It’s been available in mame, PS1, PS2, PS3 and X360 over the last 20yrs. The game has no real scoring mechanics, just shoot stuff to get score. The game has no loops, when you kill the last boss it’s over. Best score wins. Simple.
A generic 1cc of the game’s worth about 1mil. The Twin Galaxies world record is just over 2mil. Gamest magazine stopped recording scores for it in 1986. Why?
There’s a spot on one stage where there is a guaranteed extra life. Grab the 1up then suicide. You respawn 30 seconds before the 1up. Kill some enemies, grab the 1up, suicide, repeat. 9.999mil score in a few hours or so.
Info online in any language about the specifics of this prior to a couple of months ago, zero. The only reason this info exists today is that Gunsmoke was going to be in an online scoring tournament. Just for fun, no prizes. Someone taking part knew the game was banned from Gamest, knew they said it was for an infinite pattern but could find no info about what this pattern was (there’s several but they involve leeching enemies on boss screens which is much riskier) They worked this out within a couple of days, made a vid showing the problem and the game was removed from the tournament.
Apply this level of ‘thing’ is known of, or is easy to find out about if you look properly, but the specifics are not known, at least not online, to virtually every arcade game ever made. I’d estimate 80%+ have world records, scores, techniques and tricks that are not documented in English at all. I’ve played games all my life and have always been fascinated by the unknown elements and I guess I’ve spent a ton of time over the years gathering info from every available source. Now I just share it on Twitter (and here in the future) It’s just a case of the deeper you dig into something, the more you learn, and the more you learn, the more you can apply that knowledge elsewhere to see what works and what doesn’t.