From what I understand the tempest bug was accidentally introduced at the last second because the Atari logo was slightly off-center and when Dave Theurer (the

From what I understand the tempest bug was accidentally introduced at the last second because the Atari logo was slightly off-center and when Dave Theurer (the creator) adjusted it, it introduced some subtle bugs into the game related to interactions with the anti-piracy code which was based on strict positional placement of objects. Quote from him: If players got something like 179,480 points, the game would crank a 40 into the coin counter. It would do other weird things, too, like double the vector generator multipliers so everything would be twice as big, but nobody wanted that. They just wanted to get the 40 free credits, so the kids figured out how to do it.