Game Plan Inc., formerly located in Addison, Illinois, was one of the many smaller manufacturers who dove into the video-game market in the early '80s, when the videogame fad was booming and the players' appetites seemed insatiable.  Game Plan, which also made a handful of pinball and slot machines during the company's short existence (1978-1985), developed few if any of their own videogame ideas in-house; most of their titles were ideas licensed from the bigger, more established companies like Centuri (who were only too happy to let someone else take the risk of trying to market the "B-list" ideas they didn't think were good enough to develop themselves), or from smaller foreign-market companies who wanted to get into the U.S. market without having to do the actual manufacturing and shipping.  Unfortunately, like many other second-string manufacturers, they not only lacked the resources to compete against the established industry giants like Williams, Bally/Midway, and Atari, they were entering a market which was quickly becoming flooded with titles from all of the other second-tier manufacturers trying to cash in on the videogame fad; the company's sales were modest at best (though the exact sales figures are currently unknown), and Game Plan ceased operations in 1985.  Many of the machines that were sold were later junked or converted; as a result, relatively few of these machines survive intact.  At the moment, I'm one of only two members of the Video Arcade Preservation Society who claims to own a complete MEGATACK machine.

The exact lineage of MEGATACK is a bit of a mystery; KLOV credits the game to a company called "Taiyo System", but the title screen on the game itself, as well as the operator's manual (or at least my copy of it), credits it as having been licensed from Centuri.  On the other hand KILLER COMET, which not only runs on the same hardware but shares several fairly obvious and distinctive game-play characteristics, is credited by both KLOV and the game materials as being from Centuri.

MEGATACK was the eighth game added to my collection, via a direct purchase from a collector in California (and my first experience with shipping a game cross-country... and oy vey, what a fiasco that turned out to be!) for the princely sum of $100, plus another $120 for shipping.  Overall, the game was in fair, but not necessarily great shape – on the plus side, the electronics all worked, and the marquee & monitor overlay were intact; on the minus side, though, the cabinet has some significant water damage along the bottom (which I knew was the case when I bought it), and the monitor was in desperate need of a rebuild.  The picture was so dim that you really had to crank up the brightness to get any kind of visible picture, and the vertical retrace was quite annoyingly visible.  (It seems to be my particular curse to get games with monitor problems!)  The problem turned out to be the picture tube itself; the guns were going weak, and giving them a whack with a tube rejuvenator didn't seem to improve matters much, so I just junked the monitor and replaced it with a secondhand, but freshly-recapped Wells-Gardner, and now the picture looks just fine.

Fortunately, the spaceship art on the front of the cabinet, located underneath the coin door, seems to have survived pretty much intact.  Even more importantly, the water didn't damage any of the electronics inside the cabinet, so it's possible this cabinet could be fully restored just by cutting some new particleboard sides, painting them to match, then disassembling and re-building it.  However, that's a major project that, alas, will have to wait for another day – one of the downsides of apartment dwelling is that it really isn't practical to do major woodworking projects there!

The MEGATACK control panel.  Just a basic 2-way joystick, plus a left and right fire button and the 1-player / 2-player start buttons.  This, too, is a bit water-damaged; the clear-plastic sheet over the artwork is a tad warped.  This, too, should be an easy fix – although, having tracked down the electronics, marquee, and control-panel overlay for a KILLER COMET, I have other plans for this cabinet – eventually.   I think a KILLER COMET / MEGATACK combo machine would be cool, don't you?

My first, and only, encounter with a MEGATACK game "in the wild", as it were, was at a Gold Mine arcade inside a mall in Salt Lake City, UT.  (I don't remember which one, other than that I'm pretty sure it was not the Crossroads Mall, and I don't think it was ZCMI...)  I never saw another one, until a collector/dealer in California offered this unit for sale on the rec.games.video.arcade.collecting newsgroup.  We quickly negotiated a sale, and I arranged to have it transported by a private door-to-door shipper who subsequently turned out to be, shall we say, somewhat less than reliable...  (and who is now, deservedly, somewhat less than still in business. )  Then again, I suppose I got off easy compared to some people, since at least I got my game; last I heard, there were quite a few collectors whose games simply went missing, or got stranded in storage units and U-Hauls that got siezed by their owners because this guy hadn't paid any of his bills...

So proclamed (somewhat ungrammatically) the game flyer, at least.  (Remember, these flyers went out to arcade operators and were intended to convince them to buy the game, not to convince players to play it!)  MEGATACK, like most of the vertical space shooters, is a simple, straightforward game, with rules and objectives that are immediately obvious just by watching the attract mode.  Shoot everything that moves, and don't let anything hit you.  What could be easier?

Bonus Spacepods are awarded at 20,000 points (not operator-selectable), and there is no buy-in capability to continue the game once your last Spacepod is gone.  MEGATACK saves and displays the highest three scores, and allows you to enter your initials.  High scores are not preserved when the game is turned off.

• Waves of bombarding monsters challenge player!  Tri-Angle Laser shoots down monsters.

MEGATACK consists of two alternating stages.  In this first stage, you are under attack by a horde of Space Monsters which descend from the top of the screen, dropping bombs; your task, of course, is to shoot them down and avoid the bombs.  If any of the invaders manage to land on the ground, they begin to "hop" towards your ship, intent on consuming you.

Fortunately, your ship is equipped with the "Tri-Angle Laser" which not only fires straight up, but 45 degrees to either side as well, whenever you press the fire button, so dispatching any monsters attacking from the sides is usually not that hard.  (Tip: the three shots are independant of each other, so if your straight-up bullet is still in the air, but your side bullet(s) have already hit something, you can still whack the FIRE button again and shoot two more side bullets.)  If one of them does manage to catch you, though, your Space Pod will be "eaten" rather than simply blown up – which is worth doing deliberately once or twice, just for the goofy animation and sound effect which accompanies it.

Another advantage you have going for you, besides the Tri-Angle Laser, is that thanks to the limitations of the MEGATACK graphics hardware, only 8 monsters (out of an attack wave of 25) can be on the screen simultaneously, so there's little danger of the monsters overwhelming you by sheer numbers; their chief advantage in later waves is just the sheer speed with which their bombs fall, and their somewhat random movements.

• Score enough points or get pod eaten by monsters and game moves to Mode 2 - the fiendish Space Rings!

Whoever wrote up the flyer obviously hadn't played the game, since getting your pod eaten by a monster is not a way to get to the "fiendish Space Rings" stage!  (And even if it was, it'd be a pretty dumb strategy.)  As for the Space Rings themselves, they're not "fiendish?" so much as annoying;  each time you shoot one of the rings, they split into two smaller ones (up to an internal limit known only by the game's computer) which quickly begin growing in size again.  If you allow any one of them to reach full size, it will suck your Space Pod into its center and crush it.  Unfortunately, in this stage you no longer have the "Tri-Angle Laser" at your disposal (guess that would've made this stage a bit too easy!); now, you can now only fire straight up – however, you can have up to three bullets in the air simultaneously, so that helps.  The rings can be difficult to hit, especially since they drift around randomly and the two "new" rings that a shot ring splits into will immediately fly off in opposite directions before you can hit them again, so you have to keep chasing them back and forth across the screen.  However, at least no one is dropping bombs on you or trying to come at you from the sides in this stage, so your primary obstacles here are how fast can you fire, and how quickly can you react to the rings' sudden changes of direction as you chase them across the screen.

If you complete this stage, either by destroying all of the rings or getting absorbed by one, you go back to face a new breed of Space Monsters.  (Perhaps this is where the guy who did the flyer copy got confused.)  The monsters appear in the order given on the Score Menu screen, from the bottom up; if you make it past the 800-point yellow monsters, then you face a mixture of breeds in each round thereafter.

MEGATACK has a peculiar, and somewhat annoying, way of displaying the number of Space Pods you have left – or, perhaps more accurately, not displaying how many you have left.  You start each game with a predetermined number of pods (either 3 or 4, depending on the DIP switch setting on the board), and the number in the center of your current Space Pod reflects how many Pods you have left out of this initial set you started the game with, not the total number of pods you have left including the earned bonus pods!  Any "Bonus Space Pods" you earn during the game do not change this number, nor do they change the X SPACEPODS REMAINING message which is displayed after your current Pod is destroyed, but before you begin playing with the next Pod.  That message, too, counts only how many of your original Pods you have left.  After all of your original Pods are destroyed, the message changes to BONUS SPACEPOD, and the Space Pod is numbered "0".  Basically, nowhere does the game ever tell you how many bonus Space Pods you've actually earned, or how many Pods you really have left before the game ends!

MEGATACK used a design entirely unique to Game Plan, as was common in those days (the idea of an interchangeable system, such as JAMMA, wouldn't come about for several years yet, although some of the manufacturers, such as Sega, had started to offer a few games which could be converted to other games of that manufacturer's system).  One of the most interesting aspects of their design is their graphics board – rather than use any of the several commercially-available graphics-controller chips, they elected to roll their own graphics system out of discrete 74XX-family logic chips, along with a handful of linear chips to handle the analog video-signal generation.  The result is low-tech, but effective – and its resolution of 256 x 256 does have a certain appealing symmetry to it.   Another unique aspect of Game Plan's video system is that the VRAM cannot be seen or accessed by the CPU; the video display exists solely as a write-only device on some of the CPU's I/O ports, and objects appear to be "drawn" into VRAM using a "turtle-"-like vector-drawing system rather than directly bitmapped.  Very odd.  Why it was done this way, I'm not entirely sure (any information about Game Plan seems to be hard to come by), but it's possible that, given the cost of full-scale graphics-controller chips back then, it might've ended up cheaper to build this way.

The back side of the old, dim-picture monitor, as it looked when I first opened up the cabinet.  A thing of beauty, it is not.  Then again, neither was the rest of the interior!  This machine had obviously spent a long time gathering dust in a forgotten corner of someone's warehouse.  I tried recapping the monitor to improve the picture, but it didn't help much, so this monitor has since been pulled and replaced with a secondhand Wells-Gardner 19" which, even though it probably didn't really need it, has also been recapped just on general principles since it already had some time on it when I got it.

The MEGATACK logic-board stack.  This stack consists of three boards: the CPU board, the sound board, and the graphics board.  This same board system was used for their previous KILLER COMET game, and probably for most of their other games as well.  The main obstacle to simply rigging this cabinet to play both, I suspect, will be the control mapping – the "left" and "right" pins on MEGATACK's connector are not left and right on KILLER COMET, and so on.  This was a common tactic used by game manufacturers during the '80s; the idea was to make it more difficult for operators to convert one game into another just by making bootleg copies of the EPROM chips from one game and sticking them into another cabinet.

The CPU and Sound boards are both driven by 6502 microprocessors, clocked at 895KHz – yes, that's kilohertz!  The peculiar clock speed is yet another cost-cutting measure; that number is the frequency of a 3.579MHz "colorburst" crystal, which was (and is) dirt-cheap because it's used in just about every color TV set made (or at least every NTSC TV set), divided by four.  In their documentation, Game Plan tried to play this up as a "feature", by claiming that the CPU – which was rated for 1MHz – would be more reliable when run at the lower clock speed.  (Considering the less-than-ideal conditions which many arcade games were called upon to operate in 24 hours a day, they may have had a point!)  That their programmers were able to wring the kind of performance they did out of an 8-bit CPU, that wasn't even running at a full one megahertz, is a testament to the ingenuity of the assembly-language jockeys of the day.  I'll lay odds that most of today's bloatware programmers, spoiled as they are on C++, RAM by the gigabyte, and multi-GHz CPU's, couldn't even get a decent PONG game running on this system!