Slashdot Mirror
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.
That is what I like about the old systems: it certainly was feasible to develop an awesome game all by yourself. Even doing the artwork was doable if you're not an artist; making great pixel art takes artistic skill but pixels are forgiving enough to let anyone make something passable. I wrote a few C64 games for fun back in the days, and one of them even ended up being published (a horse riding game I wrote for our riding academy's 150th anniversary). It wasn't very good but in terms of complexity and performance it was comparable to some of the big titles out there. Just me, (literally) in my mum's basement.
Some modern titles credit hundreds of people, but developing something on your own seems possible today. These days there are a lot of free-ish tools, engines and resources available that a few years ago were out of reach of hobbyists. Still, you're not going to get anything good in 8k and 5 weeks...
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
Pac-Man is arguably worse on the platform
I actually came across a homebrew reboot of what could have been accomplished with an 8k cartridge back in the day.
After you watch that demo, check out what the original 2600 pacman creator, Todd Fry, had to say about it.
W
-------------------
This is my SIG. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
It's definitely feasible to write a game completely by yourself (I'm currently doing it), but you have to be somewhat creative to mask any of your deficiencies with a game design suited to your particular talents. For instance, if art isn't your strongest suit, you can make a highly stylized game that isn't quite as art-intensive, perhaps even working that into an advantage with an aesthetic that's abstract, or generates visuals programmatically. One thing that's changed over the years is improvements of both language, language tools, and game design & art tools - those all combine into a real game development force multiplier, allowing me to do so much more than I was able to do twenty years ago.
I've also worked on games that required a team of 100+ people years to make, not to mention a bunch of games in the middle ground on everything from handhelds to consoles to PCs. I have to say, it's pretty interesting to have worked on both extremes in terms of size and scope. They're both a lot of fun to work on, but for rather different reasons. The sheer amount of work that goes into the largest of modern AAA videogames is probably well beyond what most people even imagine.
Even so, nothing but respect for those early devs who wrote (mostly) amazing games with such unbelievable constraints in time and memory/capabilities in hardware. Those guys helped to instill my love of videogames, and are the reason I became a professional game dev myself.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
I liked it.
I mean sure, I was eight at the time, but I really did enjoy it. It taught me a surprising amount, too.
The weird pit collision thing, for example, taught me that video games had different physical rules than real life, and that what I was seeing was less important than what the computer was interpreting.
Dropping into pits without warning also honed my reflexes. I became good at levitating before I hit the ground.
The map (in which six screens were arranged as a cube) gave me an intuitive grasp of non-Euclidean geometry, and to adapt to the weirdness and even use it to evade the bad guys. I feel completely prepared if I ever suddenly manifest extra-dimensional mutant powers.
The ever-declining energy stat taught me efficiency. I got good at allocating my time and resources (and I was good and ready for Gauntlet when it came out a couple years later).
And, of course, it taught me to be patient. This allowed me to later beat games like Ninja Gaiden, Battletoads, Zelda II, and Demon's Souls. And college.