Friends, this should give you a little boost at the end of your day – because 8-Bit Show and Tell has located a Commodore 64 program hidden within Prodigal’s 1984 album entitled Electric Eye. I was just goofing around on YouTube when I came across this video – which was originally uploaded back on October 19th of this year. Since I have been known to talk about my love of the Commdore 64 computer of my youth – the title of the video caught my attention pretty quickly. And seriously, how absolutely amazing is it that in this day and age we can still be surprised by little Easter eggs from 35 years ago? As Robin will demonstrate on the video itself the program was hidden in the runout groove on the B side of Electric Eye – which you can plainly see in this article image header has a “C-64” scratched into said groove. Probably one of the reasons that not a lot of people know about the program is because it needed to be played on your turntable where you could record the hidden program on a cassette tape to upload it on your C64… that is a little bit of work. As the video will show – sometimes using older technology takes a couple of tries – or even totally different equipment in some cases.
I will have to in the near future share an article about the Mattel Electronics Aquarius computer that we obtained at the arcade – in fact I talked just a bit about it in the Night Stalker podcast earlier today. Robin was able to make contact with one of the surviving members of Prodigal by the way – which was a Christian rock group, active from 1975 until 1986 – to ask how and why this 35 year-old computer program was included on the Electric Eye album.
The discovery of what amounts to a simple message from Prodigal 35 years later might not be the most groundbreaking thing you’ll see today… but I thought it was special enough that I had to share it. Watching this particular 8-Bit Show and Tell video will in addition show you how to hack your turntable to disable the auto return if you need to!
Information Society had a track called 300,8,n,1 or something to that effect on one of their CD’s. A fun easter egg message to extract.
The Stranglers had a Sinclair ZX-81 adventure game at the end of one of their cassette singles.