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Thlammed My Penith In The Car Door

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Trash Blog

Steve: 1

Secret Service: 0

For those who don’t know, Steve Jackson Games was raided by the Secret Service in 1990, and all copies of the then-upcoming GURPS Cyberpunk were confiscated. Though this was bad for the company financially (they were set back months on a major project, and had to do layoffs), it did lend a certain air of pizazz to their product.

They ended up suing the government, and won. This was the first high-profile case for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which successfully sued on behalf of the company, winning around $300,000 in the case.

The full story is here: http://www.sjgames.com/SS/

GURPS Cyberpunk still bears a proud label on the cover that this is "The book that was seized by the US Secret Service!"

When no input is made on the title screen of Super Mario 64 for an extended time, a series of short gameplay demos will play. The game contains an extremely short unused demo input sequence that is not assigned to any level, but if assigned to the Cool, Cool Mountain demo header, reveals why it was cut short.

Watching the demo shows Mario run up against a sign and then stop before the demo abruptly ends. This suggests that the programmer tasked to record the demo either wanted to read the sign (a famously finicky action in this game, as Mario can only read signs when he is in very particular states and facing angles), or jump over it, and failed to do the desired action. Mario's stopping seems to be a result of the programmer stopping all input in order to discard the demo and attempt to record it again.

Why this failed attempt was left in the game's data is unknown.