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The Story Behind the Worst Computer Game In History (bbc.com)

Posted by timothy on from the mythical-game-coder-month dept.

An anonymous reader writes with this story at the BBC about the famously bad video game based on Steven Spielberg's ET, a game "considered to be one of the worst of all time," and on which some have blamed the collapse of then-powerhouse Atari. The game's sole programmer, Howard Scott Warshaw, explains how it was that what must have sounded at the time like a sure thing turned into a disaster.

2 of 157 comments (clear)

  1. ET? by jez9999 · · Score: 4, Funny

    I thought they were gonna do a documentary about Depression Quest...

    --
    == Jez ==
    Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
  2. Re:Not even the worst onion on the belt... by Hognoxious · · Score: 4, Funny

    Most of them were to do with the collision detection regions being subtly different from the drawn regions, so you'd step near a hole and fall in.

    The edge of a hole is usually weak, so it's expected to give way. It's realistic physics, that - and it'd take 67,000 lines of code and 37kb of XML these days.

    Back in my day, we didn't have physics. We had to make do with philosophy - if we were lucky.

    --
    Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."