Of course the big question that is on everyone’s mind is: Where did these come from? As of this moment, I haven’t been able to find that answer, but I would guess that they were either uploaded by an ex-Midway employee who had them laying around, or someone discovered a box of old floppies. Most of these games were done in Assembly (even Cruis’n USA), but I don’t have the knowledge to compile them and check them out. Looking several pages in, most of the other sources posted are of older MS-DOS games (including stuff like Doom and Prince of Persia), but there are some sources for several arcade ports to the Atari 7800. Stargate (Sequel to Defender, not a game of the movie/TV show).Frenzy (Sequel to Berzerk…although neither title was done by Williams/Midway).

Open Ice (This was released as 2-on-2 Open Ice Challenge).Roadkill (Unsure what this is: The original Xbox game or some other name for an earlier Midway title?).Uploaded by “HistoricalSource,” it is unknown exactly where these came from (from the research I have done so far), but one can find sources for the following games (in addition to various others that aren’t arcade titles): Such is the case with the recent appearance of the source codes for several Midway arcade games from the 80s & the 90s onto the developer repository website known as GitHub.

But in an internet world, sometimes things find their way into the public domain. Because of that, it’s rare that such information is made public, particularly in the case of well-known retro titles.

When it comes to games developed at major corporations, the coders and other designers sign confidentiality agreements that gives the company instead of the individual game maker the rights to the creation. Without that, all of the art, game design, sounds and other things can’t behave the way they need to for everything to work. What makes the games we know and love, tick? The source code. This might be something that I normally leave for a Newsbytes, but given how absurdly slow arcade news has been this month, I think it’s fine to stretch things out with certain items – like this one! Thanks to Arcade Repair Tips for bringing it to my attention.

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