It’s Halloween Week on Unsung, where we’re sharing scary, spooky, and creepy stories. This is my memory of the first bug that freaked me out, and perhaps the first bug I ever remember witnessing.

N.Y.C. The Big Apple walked so that Grand Theft Auto could drive.

Well, not really. But the 1984’s awkwardly-titled game for 8-bit computers could be seen as a spiritual predecessor of the first GTA. Your job was to drive and walk around New York City. If you crashed into another car, your car would be towed. If you ran out of fuel, you had to use the subway – or go on foot. If you then fell under another car, you ended up in a hospital.

These were the map mechanics. The overarching narrative was as complex as 1984 allowed: You were supposed to dip into various areas and buildings, and complete different minigames hiding within each. The post office hid a clone of Frogger, Central Park was a facsimile of Qix, and the subway offered shades of Mario:

There were twelve areas, and I believe you had to visit and finish all of them to win the game. (You can watch this walkthrough to see someone doing it all.)

The minigames themselves were hard, and driving in New York appropriately stressful, but what added to the pressure were three clocks ticking along. One was the fuel gauge in your car. The second was cash in your pocket – running out meant automatic game over. The last one? A literal clock, rendered in the upper right corner. You only had one in-game day to accomplish everything.

I am not sure how popular NYCTBA was. Its reception felt mixed. Here are two modern reviews from Atarimania, clearly written from two different coasts:

The most aggravating game unleashed on the [Atari] platforms that I can think of. Horrid controls and collision detection/​responses, pathetic graphics, annoying sounds.

This game is more than merely the sum of its parts: The many little arcade games are embedded into a very dynamic and amusing traffic simulation, which combines the numerous, fairly challenging tasks to a very satisfying whole.

Personally, I was fascinated with it, and the GTA connection above came to me not just from the vehicular carnage, or the top-down view used by GTA before it embraced the third dimension. NYCTBA also tried to be cinematic; at the beginning of the game placing you just outside New York City, so you could actually start by driving into it. In your mind’s eye, you could imagine a classic Hollywood shot revealing the city’s skyline – but realized with the limited production value the computer’s eight whole bits provided.

And that one decision happened to come with the first bug I ever remember encountering as a little kid.

Upon game launch, the only thing you were meant to do was to drive right into the city to begin your adventure. Even moving your joystick left had the car moving right toward the buildings.

But the game’s author didn’t predict you could do another thing: Wait. Specifically, wait for over 13 minutes with your car idling, watching your fuel meter go all the way to zero.

At that point, the game declares YOU ARE OUT OF GAS in a classic Atari font, followed by a familiar routine – the car disappears, and the player is ejected to continue the journey on foot.

Except now, you can walk left.

And what is going on to the left is truly frightening. The road ends and you encounter another city… a nightmare city of sorts, with cars changing shapes, driving into the buildings, and crashing into each other.

Get run over by one of these mangled cars, and things get worse – you travel forever over a surreal 8-bit nightmare world, with random disconnected streets, to a land in the middle of nowhere. It’s a creepy mirror world, an endless universe filled with broken cities where the rules of time and space don’t apply, landscapes echoing with sounds of car collisions that never seem to cease.

(I uploaded the entire experience, with sound, to YouTube.)

This freaked me out so much as a kid I remember waiting for many days until trying it for the second time.

Many years later, I have an inkling how this bug came to be – the programmer didn’t remap left movement to right for walking, because you were not supposed to be able to walk on the game’s initial road – and I could probably fire off an assisted emulator to understand the rest fully. Was it some overflow somewhere? Some memory corruption? Some version of Pac-Man’s kill screen? I could probably even learn stuff from it.

But I think I want to leave this alone, this strange memory of a rare bug in a forgotten game. In my head, it still feels like a fireside story, something that no one would believe actually happened, a mind-bending anomaly that frightened me some two decades before I myself got to visit The Big Apple.

To play the game yourself, go to Atarimania and click the Download button to get the ATR file, then go to this browser-based Atari 800 emulator, click on the hamburger menu, click on Boot Image, and point to the ATR file. Then, press F4 (start) – or press ⌘K, and search for Start. Then, use arrow keys to move around. Left Shift is your solitary fire button. If you press space to pause, just move the joystick again.