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

One person writing all the code

[justcauseisjustthat]

It's amazing to think about how small that game is and how one person wrote it. You look at a modern game and there are teams of designers, developers, writers, etc. I love technology.

Re:One person writing all the code

[AmiMoJo]

It's amazing just how much they managed to get out of that primitive system, and how its limitations shaped the games. Games like Pitfall really pushed it.

The Atari 2600 had 1MHz, 8 bit CPU and a mere 128 bytes of RAM. Games had to reduce the amount of volatile data they stored to fit into that, often using a single seed number to procedurally generate levels, for example. ROM was nominally maximum 4kb, but most games had to fit into 2kb for cost reasons. You can fit every 2600 game ever made onto a couple of floppy disks.

The graphics and sound hardware were incredibly basic too. The system was designed to play Pong and not much else, so every other game was basically a massive hack. The CPU spent most of its time helping the graphics hardware generate the screen image, leaving little time left over for running the actual game.

To make a great game you not only had to really understand and abuse the hardware, you had to be good at hiding its limitations. The swinging rope in Pitfall is a great example of something the system was never, ever designed to do but which added something really unique to the game and made it seem to escape from the limitations of it's origins as a Pong playing machine.

Re:One person writing all the code

[Locke2005]

I have a hard time believing that they would spend $21 million for the rights and $5 million for advertising, but only pay 1 guy for 5 weeks to actually implement the game! Sounds like the world's worst case of inverted priorities, totally driven by marketing greed rather than logic.

Not even the worst game on the platform...

[jpatters]

The premise here is flawed.

While it's a pretty bad game, E.T. is not even the worst game on the VCS platform let alone the worst game ever made. Pac-Man is arguably worse on the platform, and there are numerous third party games that are way worse than anything Atari released. "Sorcerer" by Mythicon really sets the benchmark for how bad a game can be in my opinion. E.T. is at least 100 times better than that piece of crapola.

....predictions.

[Mirar]

I doubt "one bad game" brought down the industry. I'd say it's

1) making someone make a game ready to publish in 5 weeks (!!!)
2) not doing any research on target audience
3) predicting this game will sell MILLIONS of CONSOLES (not just games) on a saturated market

I think we need to focus on who made those decisions.
Not the genius who made a not-too-bad-game in impossible time.

Because those kind of decisions is what's bringing down companies.
We want to know how they appear and how we can stop them.

Hiring a genius that follows orders and does impossible things never brought down a company.

So, let's blame developer, shall we

[Kartu]

1) Pay Spielgerg 21'000'000$ for the title
2) Force some nerdy dude into "work, with small breaks to eat/toilet/sleep" mode for 5 weeks. (effectively spending say, 5000$ on game development)
3) Spend 5'000'000 on marketing campaign

Later on figure, that #2 didn't work as planned, claim it was nerdy dude's fault.

Isn't there something very wrong in this picture?

Re:Play the hack instead

[tburkhol]

E.T. was simply not as bad as people remember.

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.

Re: It can't be as bad as the act in this haiku

[Anonymous Coward]

Hateful bigotry
You should feel ashamed of your
Outdated dogma