Given the game’s sassy tone, this could have just been the developers messing around. The ending, it seemed, would simultaneously congratulate and criticize players who unlocked the game’s “Pleasure Domes,” regardless of their performance. Last year, while Filner was working on Midway Arcade Origins - a compilation disc containing 31 classic arcade games from developer Midway - he ran into an issue with Total Carnage, the sort-of sequel to crude Running Man-style overhead shooter Smash TV. Then sometimes, 20-year-old trivia pops up and he can’t keep it to himself. Once he found a Japanese programmer’s phone number hidden in a game, but didn’t call because it was 20 years after the fact. He’s a mimic moonlighting as an archeologist, basically - looking to uncover bits of trivia in the code, while hoping they don’t make porting the game a bigger challenge. If I ran a game history trivia website, he’d be on speed dial. But a side bonus for Filner is that, every now and then, he gets a glimpse at something few of us have seen.
It’s a noble form of game preservation, spending his days converting other people’s games. Isolated from his employer, Backbone, by over 6,000 miles. Working from home in Wellington, New Zealand. For the past 16 years, Dan Filner has made a career of porting classic games to modern hardware.
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