This submission is for the Atari 2600 game Pepsi Invaders, an actual first party game that was not made for retail purposes.
As the story goes, 125 carts were made, all of which were given to Coca Cola executives at some event in the 80s. Most of them have probably been trashed or lost to the annals of time, making this one of the rarest and most sought after games on the console, pricing in at $1k or more.
It's probably also the first instance of an officially developed first party ROMhack, as they plastered some stuff on top pf the old Space Invaders code. There's a 3 minute time limit which is meaningless as you can't really game over in the game.
There are two main differences in this version:
First, you can only have one bullet on screen at a time and can immediately fire once you kill something. In vanilla Space Invaders you can use a trick to have two shots on screen at once making this version different and inherently slower.
Second, the difficulty switches do nothing, so you can't use the trick to get bigger and skew your hitbox to the right by switching difficulty before shooting.
This makes the routing scheme a bit different from vanilla. I basically try to maximize shot time while setting up for the final shot well in advance. I leave the top left P for that purpose, plus it also serves to get the enemies down more quickly since they'll hit the "wall" more often if both outside columns are intact.
Basically I set up an endgame scenario where I can blast the last 3-4 enemies and immediately fire off the game winning shot. This was a tight window to make happen.
Memory: I somehow looked at the thumbnail and read pepis. Claiming.
Memory: Tried improving for like 15 minutes and did not succeed so optimization is good enough.
I am extremely disappointed that the "Coke Wins" wasn't actually part of the game's title despite some sites listing it as such. The title is correct as it was submitted but god do I wish "Pepsi Invaders - Coke Wins" was the actual name of the game. Otherwise decent TAS of a space invaders clone. Accepting.
