Lost games #3 coke wins

ost games #3 coke wins

Right after the feckin longwinded epic of yesterday, I'm going to try and
keep things short .

..the next in the list of games that never was is "coke wins".
Now back in the mid eighties a lot of US food companies used Atari 2600 games as promotional items.It never really caught on in Europe, (I think a Colgate "cavity defenders" game was the only one used here). But stateside you
couldnt move for promo carts for drinks , sweets , even dog food.
Now there was a legend that some bright spark in a marketing department of
Coca Cola had an idea for one of these, and commisioned a few software bods
to write up a space invaders clone ,except with the invaders removed , the
letters P,E,P,S and I attacking instead , and a spinning pepsi logo replacing
the mother ship.Named "Coke Wins" the story goes, it made it to the manafacturing stage before someone thought to talk to a lawyer.The guy from
marketing still spends his days cleaning the toilets in head office ,Atlanta, according to the legends.

Like all lost games a few copies got on the black market, and you'd see them
on ebay from time to time,suposedly the real thing.
This story gets a mention in the otherwise credible book "joystick nation"
and I've seen a few screenshots (like the one above).

So for the interests of Retro- metro I did a bit of searching (well OK five minutes in yahoo, but hey!)
The truth is the game >was< actually made, but not for general release...the game was really just for a hundred or so sales reps,
knocked together for a conference..just a little in-house humour , not intended for public consumption..and it was originally called "Pepsi invaders" (original title eh?I bet they were burning the midnight oil on that one..) Unfortunatly it >did< leak to the general public , so its quite possible mr marketing is probably polishing the porcelain for his crimes to this day...
..anyway its quite rare today,if you see it at a jumble sale or whatever you might want to snap it up as you can get a few hundred quid for it....
Now I'm off ..I need to work on my new FPS, "Apple invaders" :)

more info

http://www.digitpress.com/archives/arc00084.htm
http://www.angelfire.com/tv2/atari2600/games/cokewins.html
I think the rom is available on one of those sites...
you can play it via the "Stella" emu at zophar.net

random thoughts

......random thought #1

I've discovered I really like that Evanessence song off the Daredevil movie soundtrack.This confuses me as I'm not an overweight 14 year old goth chick..

random thought #2
Santa , please bring me something from this shop , especially one of these tees

random thought #3
Why do so many songs get mislabeled on filesharing programs like kazaa , is it because people are evil in a pathetic way, or just f %cking dumb?...

random thought #4
Lemmings:, 2 minutes to learn , 2 hours for the fun to wear off and the obsession to start , 2 weeks before you see the little f~ckers in your sleep

random thought #5
I've been a fan of Will Ferrell since I heard his farking mental portayal of Neil Diamond as a lecherous drug crazed muderous lover of "hard-cowah-bearlah-leehgal porno" on a cd somewhere(worth a kazaa for the mp3 by the way).
On the other hand I refuse point blank to watch any film where the tag line features the ubersacherine phrase "this holiday season".This leaves me in a quandry as Elf has both .Probably toss a coin so

random thought #6
Thankfully theres people out there more anal about their games than I am ,
Ocremix has old c64 and arcade game music remixed and rebuilt for the psx generation...gasp at the timeless beauty of the Last ninjaII music, gape at the pointlessness of the ragga "paperboy" tune,be astonished at the bit in the r-type music that sounds like "bring me back to life" by Evanessence ,which is where I came in .....