SEBRING

• HIDDEN MESSAGE: According to programmer Owen Rubin, “There were billboards along the road with phony advertisements, but when you went fast, I would change one billboard to have my name and the name of the hardware engineer go by. It went by fast, and unless you knew where to hit the brakes to make it stop, you would never see it.  Or so I thought.  Now remember, names in games, a bad thing at the time. Well, Gene Lipkin, our  VP of Sales was playing the game, and all of a sudden I hear him yell out, ‘Owen, did I just see your name go by?’ I played dumb. He then slams on the breaks and RIGHT in front of his face is a billboard with my name and the electrical engineer’s name on it, VERY large, in the center of the screen. Needless to say, he was not amused.”.  {Owen Rubin}

• According to programmer Owen Rubin, “This game only used two ROM chips for the game on the board, and if you put them in the wrong sockets on the board and turned it on, the machine makes an explosion sound, and the screen says, ‘The ROMS are in backwards, dummy.’ But if you hit the self test switch, it still runs correctly, but says ‘ROMS: KO’ instead of the usual message ‘ROMS: OK’. Mike Albaugh and I worked long and hard on creating this position independent self-test which HAD to work correctly. No other game ever did this.  {Owen Rubin}