BlueSkyRangers

From the website...

: Once upon a time, as the 1980s were dawning, Atari more or less had the video game market to itself. Then Mattel Toys introduced Intellivision -- Intelligent Television! The first Intellivision games, produced by an outside software firm, were so successful that Mattel started a new company -- Mattel Electronics -- to develop games in-house. A staff of young, creative, and pretty damn good-looking programmers was hired. For fear that Atari would try to lure them away, Mattel insisted that their identities be kept anonymous; they were referred to in publicity as The Blue Sky Rangers.

: At this site you will find the exclusive, sometimes funny, sometimes bizarre inside story of how these games were developed. Plus, original catalog descriptions, technical information, updates on the programmers, and much more!

: After Chris Markle, who was working on the official Winter Olympics cartridge, left Mattel Electronics, no one was assigned to continue it. Midway through 1983, Marketing suddenly realized they had spent millions of dollars to obtain the Winter Olympics license, but didn't have a Winter Olympics cartridge [...]

: Astrosmash started out as a clone of the arcade game Asteroids, called Meteor!. The game wasn't very big, so John Sohl used the extra room in the cartridge to come up with a variation called Avalanche using the same graphics and sound effects. At the last minute, afraid of a lawsuit from Atari, the Mattel lawyers killed the Asteroids-like Meteor!. Rather than risk introducing bugs by deleting code, John simply put a branch around the opening-screen menu straight into the Avalanche! variation, which was released under the name Astrosmash [...]

: John simply branched around the code for the Asteroids version of the game; the code is still in the cartridge. Verrrry rarely, when there's a glitch hitting RESET, the Asteroids version will show up on screen. (This would be a dandy Easter egg if it were intentional or reliably repeatable, but it's neither.)

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