Power Drift Easter Egg

Monday, November 12, 2012

Power Drift Easter Egg

Ding Ding Round Two! This time, we're pulling Power Drift apart. A crazy game, with some amusing secret messages, that I don't think have ever been revealed.... After 20 years, it's surely time to see what the developers were smoking.

As I realised during my OutRun work, AM2's titles contain weird and wonderful content. Power Drift it no exception, and I soon found text about elephants and various smells by examining the memory in MAME.

Then it was a case of tracing through tons of code to figure out how it was used. To complicate matters, there was a nasty red herring. If you enter SEX on the high-score table, you will see the message DANGER DANGER!

I thought I'd solved the puzzle, as searching for the string 'SEX' in memory revealed the following location:

You'll notice that the first three characters spell SEX, followed by various other letters. I recognised some of these initials as belonging to the AM2 development team, so I presumed entering the other names would invoke the other messages. Unfortunately, this wasn't quite correct. The fragment of code I'd uncovered that used the above table didn't seem to be called when I entered a name.

Instead, I found a manual check against 'SEX' hard coded elsewhere. Here is some of my commented disassembly:

What was going on? By examining the code, I realised that if you held BRAKE and pressed START when entering a special name, a separate function would execute. Bingo, this was the section that read the larger initial table. And now, we can display messages regarding elephants written in somewhat dubious English:

Not only that, but for each special name entered, you generally receive a different message dependent on which gear you are in. Here are some others, that amused me: