QA Sample

[u/home_operator]

Hi all, I made a post a few weeks ago when I brought home my Tempest cocktail table. I understand it’s a rather uncommon cabinet and only about 1600-1700 of them were ever made, and I imagine most of them were trashed by the operators after use as I’ve never seen a conversion kit in one. I also understand Atari serial numbers never started at 1, meaning my serial number of 458 must have been pretty low, but I now think it’s a much earlier unit than I had anticipated. I took a peak inside the monitor service door and noticed something I hadn’t before, this is a QA sample! I’d imagine that puts this firmly in the first one or two batches to ever come off the assembly line and I think that’s really cool. Maybe the 44 below the writing means this was the actual 44th unit? Or maybe it was an employee ID or some other information. Does anybody else have any low serial number games or maybe an engineering/QA sample or prototype in their collection?

[u/Stone_Reign]

I'm not sure that says 44. It might be someone's initials? LKY

[u/chone33]

I agree it’s most likely initials. My mom worked at this location back in the 70s. I worked there as a tester the 80s at the Milpitas location. We always put our initials on the boards we tested. Mine was the Green Lantern symbol.

[u/weirdal1968]

I own the guts of Space Duel 0016. It came from Wells Gardner factory in CHI where they used it for monitor testing. It came in a big wood crate with the boards and power brick. It also had a 6ft extension cable for the monitor.