Entombed is the game Tom Sloper designed and Steven Sidley programmed for U.S. Games in 1982: the player descends through a maze generated on the fly, dodging a "zombie" that pursues them and collecting energy capsules to break through the walls. What's remarkable isn't so much the gameplay — solid but modest — but the algorithm behind the maze generation, so compact and peculiar that not even its own programmers could fully explain why it worked.
That mystery became a subject of academic study decades later: researchers devoted entire papers to unraveling the logic of a lookup table that seemed to work almost by accident, until in 2021 one of its original authors was precisely identified and the full story was pieced together. Few Atari 2600 cartridges generated that much genuine technical curiosity so long after their release.
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