You may remember the little man with a big stomach for dots and ghosts...or the brave frog who redefined jaywalking... But recently an Atari game donated to Brantford's personal computer museum baffled the curator himself.
Syd Bolton said he wasn't familiar with the game at all. "The first thing I did was look it up on Google and when I didn't find anything there, I knew we had actually discovered a treasure". said Bolton.
Canada is the third largest producer of video games in the world, with plenty of avid gamers, but no one anticipated a find like this.
Museum volunteer Adam White said, "I thought I'd seen everything and as soon as I saw this cartridge I knew it wasn't anything that had been discovered yet.
Known as Extra Terrestrials the game was made in Burlington Ontario by Skill Screen games twenty-eight-years ago the museum says only about a hundred copies were ever sold and this is the only one that's been found.
The museum only received the cartridge, no box or instructions so they've spent a good amount of time trying to figure out how to play the game. Syd Bolton said in an age when technology changes so rapidly finding something like this is the equivalent of finding an ancient artifact.
On top of being a rare Canadian find the game is also a relic of a time when anyone who had the knowledge and money could make a game for a mainstream console like the Atari. Bolton said a find like this will never happen again.
"Everything is licensed, everything is controlled so all the games that come out we're aware of them and even if the game never ships we at least know about it." said Bolton, who is looking to find out more about this discovery. He and the programmer behind extra terrestrial game have made first contact.
