Guru Meditation Trivia Contest

The nice folks over at Touch Arcade invited me to drop in and discuss my game Guru Meditation on their forum. To spur conversation, I decided to run a little trivia contest. I figured I’d point the rest of you to it.

Here’s how it works: the first person to correctly answer any single question gets an iTunes redemption code for Guru Meditation for iPhone/iPod Touch. Note that questions 1, 3, and 4 have already been answered correctly over on the forum, which leaves 2 and 5. In addition, for anyone who answers all five questions correctly in one go, I’m giving away both a redemption code and a signed copy of Racing the Beam, the book Nick Montfort and I wrote about the Atari VCS.

Answer by sending me a private message on the Touch Arcade forum, or if you want to go for all five, I suppose you can email me. Please don’t post answers in the comments.

Here are the questions. They are tricky!

1. It’s widely believed that the first easter egg in a videogame was Warren Robinett’s signature in Adventure for Atari VCS (1979). But there is actually an earlier example. What is it?
2. The “Guru Meditation” Amiga error message is legendary, at least for those who remember it. As such it’s been reused in a number of contexts beyond the Amiga. Most recently, a newspaper used “Guru Meditation” to accompany errors on its website. What is the name of the newspaper?
3. Along with many silicon valley innovators of the 1970s, Steve Jobs was something of a hippie. There is an indirect relationship between Jobs’s technohippiedom and the name of the company he co-founded. What is it?
4. The Atari VCS is capable of displaying two sprites at a time, each in a single color. Early programmers accomplished multi-color characters by changing the sprite color registers between television scanlines. However, each line of a sprite could only appear in one color. In the documentation for Guru Meditation for iPhone, I explain that all of the iPhone-specific screens could be rendered on the Atari. But the thumbs in the how-to screen have two colors on a single line. The same is true of the joystick on the Atari version’s selection screen.

   How does one accomplish this effect on the Atari?

5. The Amiga personal computer boasted many influential innovations in graphics and sound, and it was used in a variety of multimedia contexts. But what was the original purpose the machine was designed to serve?

Update: I’ve posted the answers.