Vette! (Mac OS Classic)

Vette!
Developer: Sphere Publisher: Sphere Platform: Mac OS Classic Released in US: February 27, 1991 This game has unused text. This game has debugging material. This game has revisional differences. This game has anti-piracy features.

Vette! was one of the first open world driving games, boasting a fully 3D simulation of the streets of San Francisco.

Menu Titles

VETTE! Demo

MENU resource 666 contains no items, just the title "VETTE! Demo" preceded by 29 spaces. Here's what it would look like if added to the menu bar:

However, the only demo to resurface is a self-running one, in which MENU 666 is titled (with no leading spaces) "VETTE! Demo - VETTE! and Color VETTE! by Spectrum HoloByte". In this non-interactive demo, it replaces the File through Tour menus completely.

High Screen

Resource 177, the High Score submenu of the Options menu, is misnamed "High Screen". This title is overridden in-game by the corresponding item of the Options menu.

Unused Text

Tiananmen Square Tribute

During the development of the game, the attack on protesting Chinese students in Tiananmen Square occurred. In memory of that event, one of the programmers snuck this string into the program executable: "IN MEMORY OF THOSE WHO WERE MURDERED IN TIAN-AN-MEN SQUARE ON JUNE 4, 1989. J.P. "

Debugging Tools

The "β BETA β" menu was probably used during beta testing. It offered a peek at the offscreen bitmaps (except for Screen 5, I guess)...

...and the ability to jump to coordinates on the map:

Anti-Piracy

If the copy protection trivia challenge is failed twice, the player is allowed to race anyway...but the gearbox is jammed, reacting randomly if at all to the player's input and never exceeding second gear. After a couple minutes of this frustration, the following message is shown and the game quits.

Revisional Differences

• Version 1.01 (1 May 1991) made the police less aggressive on freeways and bridges, and able to ticket the AI opponent if it broke the law. A "Restart Race" command was added to start a new game with the same settings.
• Version 1.02 (23 June 1992) reduced the manual lookup copy protection to a single question the first time the game is played. The page numbers for the questions were advanced by two to match the second edition of the manual.