I grew up loving arcades. It was basically the thing I looked forward to more than anything else and when I was quite young it was the primary reason why I pursued having a job that paid very little and is probably illegal to have kids doing these days. It was a paper route, by the way, and it paid about $50 a month.
I used to love going to the local Dairy Queen because since we didn't have a proper arcade in my neighborhood, the 5 or 6 games they would keep in their dining area kind of dictated what I ended up being exposed to. One of those games was Smash TV and it was a pretty simplistic shoot-em-up game that was designed to just eat your quarters as fast as possible yet remain entertaining enough that you would continue to play.
The idea behind the game was that you were on a game show and had to fight your way through various rooms and eventually face bosses on each level. I don't remember if the the levels had one correct way of getting through them or not, it didn't appear that this was the case and it might have been procedurally generated. What an I say, I was 8 years old so it didn't really matter.
As you might expect you would face a boss here and there and then there would be a cutscene consisting mostly of stills where the game show host was speaking to the studio audience that was meant to be watching you. The premise wasn't important. What was important was the non stop action and at least for the time, the killer graphics, awesome weapons and fantastic sound.
This was a quarter eater at it's finest since the game didn't really appear to have an ending that I could determine and if there was one, we never got to the end of it. According to the wiki it did have an ending where you were granted your freedom after gathering enough keys to make that possible but then I guess the game would just start over and be more difficult. Like I said, I never made it to this point because since my income at the time was less than $2 a day, I was kind of frugal as to how much I would put into it.
The game was made unique by having two joysticks, one that would control the direction that you moved and the other controlled which direction you were firing. You basically just fired as fast as you could all the time but it was still pretty damn difficult. I liken it to a far more advanced version of the Atari classic Berserk.
At only one point did this easter egg or bug ever happen to me, but I entered a room and the "host" started shouting something along the lines of "millions of prizes" over and over again and a bunch of items appeared on the screen and also my credits / lives I had remaining jumped up by 20 or 30. It was a long time ago so I don't really know what was going on but all of a sudden I found myself with $6 worth of extended play and for a kid as young as I was, this was like winning the lottery.
Despite having all these credits dropped on me at once, I still didn't manage to finish the game, which leads me to believe that the game is designed to force you to drop a week's salary (as a child anyway) into it in order to be able to finish it.
I searched for that room dozens of times again in the future from that day forward and I NEVER found it ever again. Perhaps there was a series of things that had to be done in order to trigger it and since we didn't have the internet back then, there was no way to look up how it was meant to be done. I simply by random chance encountered a glitch or super-secret feature that was in the game and was never able to replicate it again.
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I'm pretty sure that this game was at least in part inspired by the 1987 film The Running Man
While I never purchased a home console port of this game, it holds a special place in my heart not just because it was a fantastic game for the time period and very innovative as far as the controls were concerned but because I discovered something by accident in the game that as far as I know not very many people ever found.
I'm yet to find another person that did this but I am quite certain that I did not dream it. The ladies at Dairy Queen can attest to my enthusiasm because I was hootin and hollering like an overly excited 8-year old would do after getting all hopped up on ice cream.
It's a simple memory, but it is one of my fondest gaming memories of my life. Arcades truly were the best and I hope that one day they can make a reemergence for younger people to experience.