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

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.

Comments

Atari: Game Over

[Guillermito]

There is a documentary on the subject that is worth watching. Atari: Game Over http://www.imdb.com/title/tt37... It's available on Netflix

Re:Atari: Game Over

[tommeke100]

Also, they clearly say in the Documentary that it really wasn't ET that killed the 2600. It was just the arrival of better consoles and computers.

Re: Atari: Game Over

[SlashdotOgre]

Correct, Atari failed to place any controls on the platform and the market eventually imploded. In particular, since there was no controlling body limiting the number of the games or ensuring any quality standards, the market got flooded with shovelware (making the platform unattractive to customers). To make matters worse for the few good games, copy protection didn't exist so there were rampant cases of games being cloned by competitors (which led to quality original developers exiting the platform).

Nintendo on the other hand took great strides in controlling everything, and likewise was able to dominate for so long. Nintendo did things such as only allowing licensed games which they enforced with a rudimentary copy protection chip that only they could install (so all games came through them and they could ensure quality). They limited the number of games each company could publish per year to five (creates an incentive for those companies to make it their five best games), and they forced third party developers to sign platform exclusivity agreements for a couple years (severely hurting competitors). They took several other steps as well to do things like control distributors who were mostly companies much larger than them - it's actually quite impressive). In fact, they were so successful that case studies on Nintendo are taught as part of the core strategy class for graduate business schools.

Re:Atari: Game Over

[hairyfeet]

Sigh...poor child, you don't understand the bad games DID kill the industry...but not in the way you think. It was caused by bad business practices which ended up with retailers having huge piles of unsold bad games which they then dumped on the market cheap, which quit people buying new games at full price because "why would I buy a new game for $35 when I can get 5 for $1?"

You see THIS is how it worked in retail back then, and I should know as I was buds with the owner of one of the larger retailers in my area and he and everyone around him all took a bath. The distributors had this "You can't lose!" scheme set up where it went like this..1.- You buy X number of games at wholesale and 2.- Any you don't sell in Y number of days you get to trade for new games so how could you lose? Starting to see the flaw in the system yet? Because retailers thought they couldn't lose they bought much more inventory than they could move without regard to quality because "Hey if it doesn't sell they'll just give me new product until it does sell" and the profit margins were pretty good for retailers then.

What then happened was a snowball effect, as these fly by night game companies sold distributors piles of stock and then went as quickly as they came, the distributors couldn't unload these turkeys for new carts because they found padlocks on the publishers doors so they stopped accepting carts back, and the retailers saw they were stuck with all these carts and went "Holy shit I'm on the hook for thousands of carts I can't sell!" which caused them to just dump in the hopes of recovering some of their money back. As I pointed out earlier this caused gamers not to buy new carts at retail prices because there were bins just filled with carts (my local retailer, in a city of less than 15K, had no less than 5 systems, over 500 titles, and countless handheld games and they dumped them all) which they could get for pennies on the dollar which caused more publishers and game companies to fold, helping the ball build up more steam.

The end result was gamers like me ended up getting Atari carts 10 for a buck, 4 Colecovision carts for a buck, and handhelds for a couple buck a pop. I went into my local store with $50 worth of Bday money and ended up with a shopping cart completely full of games and systems, but the retailers wouldn't touch games or consoles for years after and it would be nearly a decade before you saw stores fully stocked with games after that fiasco.

Play the hack instead

[Stormwatch]

There is a hacked version of ET that fixes most of the annoying design issues, check here -- or even play online.

Another major issue is, you really need to RTFM. It's not a very intuitive game.

Re:Play the hack instead

[tlhIngan]

You have to admit, though, that "24 year-old programmer destroys billion-dollar company with worst video game ever" is a fantastic story. I doubt many of the people supporting the narrative have even seen an Atari 2600. It hardly matters how much of "Atari: Game Over" is truth, hyperbole, or flat out fiction, any more than "Wargames."

Atari only invested five person-weeks of effort into ET: it was not a big production. They lost something like $30M on E.T. (most of it marketing and the $20-25M fee to license E.T.), but most of the stories will mention Atari's $300+M quarterly loss when they talk about ET. And no one's going to suggest that the real reason ET lost so much money was some executive's decision to pay Spielberg $25M. The truth is boring, though, and always has been. Much better to tell an implausible story supported by conflating and exaggerating data.

Except what's true is the programmer behind ET made multi-million dollar hits. He was specifically chosen for the ET game because his career record for games was basically stunning.

So he did the best work he could making a game in 5 weeks (which was done by piss-poor management, who overpaid for an ET license as well). Sure in those days you could write a game in 5 weeks, but that's not a lot of time when you toss in a long test cycle (you had to assemble the code, then burn it onto cartridges, which meant testing a build took easily an hour or more) Plus, you didn't have debuggers or other sort of debug capability which made it all the much harder.

And the hardware itself was really only designed for two games - Pong and Battlezone. Any other game using the hardware was really more of luck than anything - the graphics hardware was designed purely to support Pong and Battlezone.

ET was also a pretty good seller - for the worlds worst videogame, it certainly moved a lot of units.

Finally, ET the game required approval from Spielberg - he actually LIKED the game and felt it did justice to the movie. And his approval was required in order to publish.

Re:Not even the worst game on the platform...

[TheRaven64]

Last time there was a Slashdot article about the game, someone posted a link to someone who had fixed most of the bugs. 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. With them fixed, it wasn't a bad game. If Atari had waited another week, they'd probably have had something good - just not in time for the Christmas buying season.

Re:....predictions.

[PolygamousRanchKid]

I doubt "one bad game" brought down the industry.

Yes, hallelujah, praise the Lord! Sir or Madam, you are preaching to the choir. I notice a disturbing behavior in industries of all flavors from senior management to "blame a serious business failure, on a single programmer." This is clearly not the real truth. A simple programmer has an Atlas weight of executives on his or her shoulders. What are all those folks doing . . . ?

My favorite recently was an interview with the new boss of Audi and VW . . . he blamed the whole manipulated emissions scandal on, "a couple of rogue programmers." If he was Pinocchio, his nose would have grown to the size of a Louisville Slugger baseball bat. Oh, wait. Scratch that. Does anyone appreciate the size of a California Redwood?

I work in the IT industry (although, I am American). The employees in the German auto industry that I work with, complain that they can't scratch their butts without getting three levels of manage approval. A "couple of rogue programmers?" Bullshit. The quality assurance organization in Audi and VW should have flagged this . . . unless it had been approved by a bunch of executives. I say the same thing when a "Rogue Trader" brings down a big bank . . . if the executives had down their jobs, it shouldn't have been possible for a "Rogue Trader" to place the bank in impossible positions.

I'm thinking, that the same thing happened at Atari. Their executives were not on the ball, and didn't realize that the industry was due for a correction. It's a tough thing for an executive to say that they failed in their job. It is a lot easier to put the blame on a simple, lowly programmer.

Re:Not even the worst game on the platform...

[silentcoder]

The big piece of evidence is that when the cartridges were dug up - there were very few E.T. games among them. The great ET coverup never happened, this was just a bankrupt company that trashed it's worthless left-over stock supply in a dump. There were all sorts of different ATARI games there, ET was just one among many. It was never as bad a seller as it was made out to be.

ATARI, as executives from the time will tell you now - had been dying for ages before ET came out, at most it was the last straw, ATARI's death was the result of a long chain of bad decisions that left the company unable to adapt to a changing market, bad decisions made over a period of several years.

And most of the blame belongs with Warner, this is the classic problem with having some big megacorp own your company - when what it does stops being profitable - they shut it down, the fact that it was the fastest growing company in history 2 years earlier and that there's somewhere on the upside of 4 billion dollars in your bank account because of it doesn't matter.
ATARI made at least 4 billion in nett profit for warner before it's demise, and once showed a loss of 350 million. That's not bankrupt, that's just one bad year. Surely 4 billion should have been worth saying "Lets take half of that and invest it in inventing the next game-changer - even if we fail we're still 2 billion up".

Re:One person writing all the code

[TheRaven64]

Let's take Tetris as an example. Shapes need to rotate, which you need to implement via a state machine (lots of game development kits have built-in DSLs for state machines, but this one is very simple). You need to make the shapes advance down, but that's just integer addition in a loop. Collision detection is just a matter of trying the advance and seeing if any of the blocks would hit. Then you just need to check if there are any full lines. I'd probably implement this by having a per-line counter that I added to when I stopped a shape, but even a naive loop-of-loops would be fast enough on a vaguely modern computer, even in a purely interpreted language. If you're happy with the blocks being filled rectangles, then the core data structure is just a two-dimensional array.

So, with the current grid being grid[width][height] and the current shape being shape[4][4] (true for a block there, false if there's no block), we have:

Collision detection is just a nested loop, i,j both from 0 to 4. If grid[x+i][y+j] && shape[i][j], then we've collided. If we get to the end of the loop with no collision, then we haven't. Requires basic understanding of loops and of arrays and the basics of logical operations.

Left and right arrow keys just increment / decrement x, run collision detection, undo if we collided or if the shape is off the edge (detecting the edge of the shape is simpler than collision detection, but we can just provide the left and right edge widths with the shapes).

For each shape, have an array of 4 rotations. Up arrow key just increments a counter, replace current image with current_shape[counter %4], run collision detection, undo if we collided.

Basic game play is just start at (width/2 - 2),0, each second we increment y, run collision detection. If we've collided, check if we've made any new lines and delete them (just shift all of the blocks down - simple loop will do this). Then start a new block. If it has collided on initial insertion, then the player has lost.

There's a little bit more than that for keeping scores, but that's the core logic of Tetris. With a game development kit that lets you put sprites on the screen tied to simple data structures, it's very easy.