Lost In Translation/Major Havoc

About The Game
Major Havoc is an arcade video game.

You are Major Havoc, leader of a brave band of clones. All from one, one from all, fighting for humanity...

Eons ago the evil Vaxxian Empire overran the galaxy Most of your ancestors were enslaved and taken to the Vaxxian homeworld. Only a few scientists escaped.

The small band of scientists cloned you, Major Havoc, to fly your Catastrofighter through a wormhole in space, leading your clone army against the dreaded Vaxxian robots to free your people by destroying the enemy reactor.

Additional Technical Information
Players : 2

Control : dial

Buttons : 2

=> [A] FIRE/JUMP, [B] SHIELD

Trivia
Released in November 1983.

Gameplay innovation at its finest. A game that would have done greater numbers had anyone cared in 1984. Only 500-600 dedicated machines were manufactured. If Owen had done Major Havoc in a raster version, which was suggested, it would have sold ten times as many. But unfortunately... the operators were getting very angry at vector games for failing all the time.

Mark Cerny came in the middle of the design, adding one of the space waves (the flying fish) and the last 4 base ship mazes. He also added some objects to the mazes (such as the gun and floating boots) and helped clean up old items that never got shipped.

The original name for the game was "Tollian Web", from the Star Trek episode The Tholian Web - an episode that also provided the inspiration for the unreleased "Ms. Gorf". Later titles included "Alpha One" and "Major Rex Havoc" (which was dropped when Atari discovered an underground comic with a similar name).

Ettore Ciaffi holds the official record for this game with 1,940,078 points.

A hack of this game is called "Major Havoc Return to Vax".

A Major Havoc unit appears in the 1983 movie 'WarGames'.

Updates
Rev. 3 : Eliminates the finger bug in Rev. 2.

Scoring
Oxygen bonus for exiting maze is 100 points times the number of oxygen counts left.

In space, faster completion of each wave awards more bonus points at end of wave.

Clearing all of the bricks in the breakout game awards an extra life.

Warp Codes
It's possible to warp to higher levels in Major Havoc from the start of the game by using certain codes. This is useful to not only be able to get through the game more quickly, but each warp also gives a fairly hefty bonus for carrying it out. This is done by playing the mini-Breakout game at the bottom right-hand corner of the screen when the game starts. The game will have a phrase such as, 'Enter Red Warp 00' at the bottom of the screen. What you do is use the controls to 'dial in' the first digit of the appropriate code given below, then press fire to serve the ball and repeat as necessary. The codes are :
 * Red code - 23,250,000 points, Level 4.
 * Yellow code - 46,600,000 points, Level 9.
 * Green code - 824,700,000 points, Level 10.
 * Aqua code - 315,950,000 points, Level 13.

Note that you can only enter the codes in the order they're given - it's not possible to enter, say, the red warp code followed directly by the aqua warp code.

Staff

 * Designed & Programmed By:
 * Owen Rubin
 * Mark Cerny

Ports

 * Consoles :
 * Sony PlayStation 2 (2004, "Atari Anthology")
 * Microsoft XBOX (2004, "Atari Anthology")


 * Computers :
 * PC [MS Windows, CD-ROM] (2003, "Atari - 80 Classic Games in One!")