Under the Microscope: Andretti Racing

In this edition:

Andretti Racing on Saturn has some well-known Easter eggs that involve putting in special player names.
I found eight more! These show pictures of the development staff, their family members, and — in one case — a cartoon alien.
Interestingly, the PlayStation version of this game has an entirely different set of Easter egg pictures.

Details are below…

The Easter eggs

It’s well-known that this game uses special names for cheat effects. For example, you can unlock extra cars with special names:

GO BEARS! enables all of the stock cars
GO BRUINS! enables all of the Indy cars
PRESSSTART enables the “Press Start” car (on the Saturn version)

The Saturn version has a few additional cheat effects: (1) the name WYRED turns on wireframe mode, and (2) the name PHATCARS makes all of the cars wider.

Left: Wireframe mode. Right: Wide cars mode.

The Saturn-exclusive name get checked by the function at 0605b170 (NTSC-U version). The code does this:

Compares your player name to PHATCARS
Compares your player name to WYRED
Compares your player name to PRESSTART

That checks out, but then the game loops through eight more names:

0608216c "MARCO" 0608217a "GARY T" 06082188 "G S" 06082196 "DAVE K" 060821a4 "ALIEN" 060821b2 "WENDY STEIN" 060821c0 "ERIC CORTEZ" 060821ce "HOWIE RIDER"

What do those do? It took me a while to figure it out, but what they do is alter the Starting grid screen that appears before a race starts. Normally it shows your player name next to a driver in a racing helmet:

The standard pre-race screen

But when you use one of the special names you get a different pictures:

Left: Eric C on the pre-race screen. Right: Howie R.

Presumably most of these people worked on the game, but it’s hard to locate them in the credits. Wendy Stein is listed on Mobygames as being on the art team.

Left: Wendy S. on the pre-race screen. Right: Dave K.

The Marco name has a picture of a young child. One of the developer’s kids, maybe? I’ll omit the picture, although this person is probably 40 by now. The Alien name gives you a picture of a cartoon alien:

Alien on the pre-race screen.

The PlayStation version has a different list of special names — 33 of them:

Some of them are also identifiable in the game credits, like Jim Larsen and Sergio Lobato:

Left: Jim L. on the pre-race screen. Right: Sergio L.

Others are more obscure:

Left: Pam S. on the pre-race screen. Right: Yvonne H.

Outro

If you’re in contact with anybody who worked on this game, send them this article! I’d love to know about how this set of Easter eggs came to be. Did someone walk around the office asking for pictures to use?

I’ll be back next week with more long-lost Saturn hacks and cheats. Check out the archive here at SHIRO! for more in the meantime, or subscribe to my Rings of Saturn blog on Substack for more retro game reverse engineering adventures.

Bo Bayles

Rings of Saturn: 32bits.substack.com