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​Chubby Checker's 'Dig Dug' was unearthed by the son of an Atari VP

You've probably heard or Dig Dug, and if you were born before 1983, you might even remember seeing a bizarre, upbeat commercial for the game in movie theaters -- but did you know that the video game miner's theme song was almost sung by Chubby Checker? It totally was. Matt Osborne, son of former Atari VP of coin-op marketing Don Osborne, recently uncovered an alternate version of the commercial's catchy song with the iconic singer's vocals. "The only info that I have about it was that Atari had envisioned a somewhat '50's styled take on the song, inspired in part by Chubby Checker's hit 'The Twist.'" Apparently, Osborne's father managed to get the man behind the twist to sing his own rendition, but until now it was lost to the ages. That may have been young Matt Osborne's fault.

"I'm not sure how I actually ended up with it," he wrote in an Facebook Atari Museum group post, "but he may have lent it to me and I just never gave it back or he never asked for it to be returned." Osborne found the song languishing on an old cassette tape, and says he can't find any other information about Chubby's recording elsewhere on the web. "How funny would it be that the only reason they never used Chubby's version of the Dig Dug song was because I never got the only known recording of it back to my dad?" Osborne has recorded the cassette to his PC and uploaded the song to SoundCloud. There was probably a better master of the song somewhere, but he says he doesn't know where it is -- he's asking former employees and diehard fans in the Atari Museum group to offer any information they might have.

Check out the full, ridiculous track on Osborne's SoundCloud account, or at the embedded player below. Want to compare it to the version used in the commercial? We'll embed that too -- but make sure your speakers are on: audio only comes out of the right channel.