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

[Anonymous Coward]

Looks like Vimeo too. I saw this doc.. it was quite excellent.

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

[Teancum]

said that the high volume of bad games killed the video game industry

Which is utter BS on the most basic level. You might be able to argue that it was the high volume of overly hyped bad games from a bunch of vendors who didn't know what a good game was... in part because very few of the salesmen of those games and definitely the retail store purchasers of those games at the time never bothered to actually play any of the games themselves. If you have piles of games sitting on shelves of stores that are all terrible and a purchasing manager who is clueless about what even makes a game tolerable thus buys even more garbage, no wonder the game industry died. A mother or father going to buy something for their kids heads to a store trying to buy the latest cool game for a birthday and comes back with that terrible game... making those same stores buy even more of those terrible games.

And it didn't help that the few really good games were gone from those same retail store shelves, giving rise to the idea that the terrible games were all that was left.

The revival happened because finally there was a group of salesmen and department store purchasing agents who had a clue what made even a mediocre game instead of something utterly terrible.

Re:Atari: Game Over

[jellomizer]

In short it was due to a lack of a good community of gamers. You shelled out a good chunk of money for a crappy game, you may be less apt to try that again.
What the next generation did, was have a community of magazines that showcased good games and had reviews of them. While a lot of it was paid advertisements, but still the adds would try to showcase what the game was targeted towards. While before someone who went to the store, would only really figure out the game by what was on the Box.

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.

Re: Atari: Game Over

[sjames]

The issue of other companies knocking off (or blatantly copying) games was a problem, but a hard one to solve given that at the time it wasn't clear that software was actually copyrightable at all.

The Nintendo lockdown on the platform was not really good for the market, it was just a way to keep competition down and prices high. Yes, there were some cheesy publishers for 2600, but everyone knew who they were. There were also newcomers like Activision that probably extended the life of the 2600 platform by a year or two. The real death knell for the 2600 was when Atari itself joined the race to the bottom and put out shite like E.T. They cut open the goose that laid the golden eggs and they paid the price. Had they assigned the resources an opportunity like E.T. deserved, they might still exist.

Re:Atari: Game Over

[kriston]

You are correct. Atari's "E.T. The Extra Terrestrial" was actually a decent adventure game. People who claim that "E.T." caused the "video game crash" have no idea what really happened and obviously never actually played "E.T." The same author wrote the even better game "Raiders of the Lost Ark" with a similar same kind of multi-segment structure and even more difficulty.

There was a glut of bad games from companies nobody ever hear of, like "Sunsoft," and the retailers lost so much money clearing them out.

Nintendo took steps to implement hard-line rules and license fees to avoid this and in doing so saved the industry.

One thing about the documentary that I find amusing was that their entire premise was false. They assumed that "E.T." destroyed Atari, and they assumed that the landfill story was a secret. The fact of the matter is that before the documentary was released the officials in Alamogordo said that all anyone had to do was ask. It was public knowledge and not an "urban legend."

Re:Atari: Game Over

[Quirkz]

Didn't realize the same guy had programmed both. I had E.T., and while it wasn't my favorite game, I played it now and then. Yeah, it had some odd collision detection and frustrating controls, but so did quite a few Atari games. The manual was also mandatory reading, but with that you could play and beat the game.

I didn't own Raiders, but tried to play it when visiting friends or relatives. I never got to see the manual, and without the manual found that game equally unplayable. I would die on the second screen every time, no matter where I went or what I did. I couldn't ever figure out what anything was. To this day Raiders sticks in my mind as one of the more frustrating Atari games I tried.

Re:Atari: Game Over

[Jack Griffin]

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..

I worked for a big software distributor in the 90's. Their sales model was to offer refunds to retailers for anything they couldn't sell. But here's the catch, the sales people still got their commission even on returned items. So come Christmas millions in stock went out the door, and come January millions came back again minus all the commission.
I was only there 2 years before they went bankrupt.

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

[JaredOfEuropa]

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...

Re:One person writing all the code

[Dutch Gun]

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.

Re:One person writing all the code

[TheRaven64]

Lots of Flash games are orders of magnitude more complex than ET, in terms of story, game engine, and graphics, and are developed by one or two people. You have a lot more cycles to play with now, you can either burn them on development environments that make people more efficient, or on the game itself. AAA titles opt for the latter path, but they're not the only way that you can go. There are a load of systems where making something like Pac Man or Tetris is possible in a day or two for someone with no prior programming experience.

Re:One person writing all the code

[Viol8]

"There are a load of systems where making something like Pac Man or Tetris is possible in a day or two for someone with no prior programming experience."

I really doubt that. There's a lot more to those games than the artwork, there's a hell of a lot of logic under the hood that no novice is going to replicate at all, never mind in a day or two. Unless the IDE comes with some pre-packaged logic designed for these games already.

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

[RPGonAS400]

Kip:

Yes, I love technology

But not as much as you, you see

But I still love technology

Always and forever

Re:One person writing all the code

[Anonymous Coward]

Even so, the logic for the pacman ghosts is actually rather simple.

Have a look at this article where they explain it a little.

Of course, this simplicity is one of the consequences of the system's limitations. After all there's only so much the hardware could do and the space available in the cartridge to store the full game.

Re:One person writing all the code

[wisnoskij]

Some modern games are worked on by hundreds, a handful, but far more are written by single people and small teams. With all the game engines and game development platforms (see Unity) it is easier than ever for a single person or small team to make a game.

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.

Re:One person writing all the code

[Teancum]

What amazes me about Tetris is that it wasn't developed much earlier. You are correct that it is a simple game, but it originally came out at a time when computer graphics permitted far more complex games, thus it was even then seen as something of a throwback to earlier video game concepts.

The "Brick-out" or "Break-out" game, on the other hand, is an example of the very early games. As a matter of fact, the Apple I computer was originally designed with the specific goal of being able to write Brick-out in BASIC, but be flexible enough to do other things as well. That even influenced the design of the Apple Integer BASIC, which was also designed specifically to make that one game.

Then again, my hat is off to a guy that designed his own motherboard and hand assembled a BASIC interpreter simply to play one silly video game.

Re:One person writing all the code

[jfbilodeau]

> Even so, the logic for the pacman ghosts is actually rather simple.

Actually I would say that it was _not_ simple--especially for the time. It would have been simpler to have all the ghost share a common algorithm.

Re:One person writing all the code

[Maury Markowitz]

> That is what I like about the old systems: it certainly was feasible to develop an awesome game all by yourself

Beyond that, the system itself was entirely accessible. Books like Mapping the Atari and C64 let you have complete, direct, access to the hardware with a single POKE. I remember reading through the former when something caught my eye... one POKE later all the glyphs were upside down. I have no idea why someone put this into the hardware, but there it was.

The closest we've come since then is HyperCard. As a single integrated environment you could poke about, although not in memory. It was, however, *accessible* in the same way that the 8-bit machines were. I have tried any number of similar solutions since then, and simply put nothing is really the same. Even Apple couldn't do it, and they tried over and over. VB6 was close, and a hell of a lot more powerful, but again just didn't have the accessibility.

Today I'm finding hints of improvements. I just did my first 3D app in SceneKit in Swift. It was a couple hundred lines in total. I was astonished. But I can't fool myself into thinking that Xcode + Swift + source code editing + SceneKit + IB + compile/link/run cycle is even remotely accessible. I wish I could say Swift playgrounds were, but they're not.

So raise your glass to SK8 and Bill Atkinson!

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.

Re:One person writing all the code

[kriston]

The book "Racing the Beam" by Nick Montfort and Ian Bogost is a great and detailed book about the technology exploited by ActiVision and some others.

David Crane's (ActiVision) line of iOS apps provides an animated tutorial on the concepts used to program the 2600.

The first step is to "create a kernel." You had to "race the beam" of the television. Every game was completely different. It is amazing.

Re:One person writing all the code

[Sir Holo]

... 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. ...

Did the 2600 have a clock, as in 'clock time from boot-up'?

Even with millisecond precision, no one could beat it. I used it all the time to seed procedurally generated game maps and other graphics or sound when programming games in BASIC back in 1985-8.

Re:One person writing all the code

[AmiMoJo]

There was no clock. You could use some of your 128 bytes of memory to count frames manually I suppose.

Re:One person writing all the code

[Viol8]

Yes, tetris is relatively simple for an experienced programmer. Now try explaining all the above to someone who doesn't even know what "programming language" means and get them to implement it. Good luck,

Re:One person writing all the code

[tingentleman]

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.

I raise a glass to my ruined productivity also...

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.

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

[clickclickdrone]

Indeed. Not only is it not as bad as people point out, it actually introduced many firsts such as a title screen. It was also not responsible for Atari crashing. There were many other things going on, this was just a symptom of an overall problem. There is an absurd amount of disinformation around both this and the 'buried carts' story which just seem to get repeated ad-nauseam.

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

[raftpeople]

A title screen wasn't anything new, all the games I made (early 80's TRS-80 color) had title screens as did most of everyone else's. Not sure why the 2600 didn't have them.

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

[AmiMoJo]

The issue with collision detection in ET was that the perspective was odd. The 8 bit Zelda games actually use the same perspective. It's basically bird's eye, straight down, except that the characters are drawn as if they were side on. You might think of it like tokens in a board game, where each token has an image of the thing it represents shown from the side, but you look directly down on it to determine position on the game board.

In ET that means that whenever any part of ET touches a pit he falls into it. His feet can appear to be on solid ground, but if his head touches a pit he falls in. This was extremely confusing for many players.

There was a fix someone did. It involved reducing the vertical resolution of the sprites to half the original, to free up enough CPU cycles to handle the more complex collision detection.

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

[cnaumann]

Atari bet the farm on ET. That is what makes it special in terms of bad games.

The truth is the farm was already in deep trouble. They lost nearly $400 million dollars by failing to sell 4 million copies of a game at $20 a pop?

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

[gauauu]

A title screen wasn't anything new, all the games I made (early 80's TRS-80 color) had title screens as did most of everyone else's. Not sure why the 2600 didn't have them.

Mainly because of ROM space restraints. Putting in a nice title graphic could quickly use up your precious ROM space. More ROM space required more ROM chips, which, when the atari first game out, were somewhat expensive per-unit, so Atari made less profit off of each cartridge (and/or had to charge more). . Particularly if you got above the 4K limit, which meant you had to introduce extra circuitry in the cartridge to handle bank switching, which would raise the price further.

By later in the atari's life, these presumably became significantly cheaper, so more games had title screens.

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

[sjames]

For all it's flaws, Pac-Man was at least playable. It's collision detection was good enough that you didn't seem to lose by coin toss.

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

[T.E.D.]

ET mostly gets the title these days because its release was such a famous fiasco.

Until fairly recently, what was generally agreed to be the worst Atari game ever, and quite possibly the worst in history, was a game called Custer's Revenge. Not only was the gameplay pretty cruddy, but the idea behind it was just repellent. The object was to kill as many "Indians" as possible and rape their women. Not even kidding. It was made by a porn producer.

Even by the standards of cultural sensitivity in the late 1970's, this was going too far. Atari tried to sue to keep the game off their console, and it was exhibit A for a long while of why console platform makers have to keep control of their platform (a theory which governs game console licensing to this day).

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

[rworne]

While the game was repellent, not a single Indian is killed in Custer's Revenge.

The game consists entirely of a cowboy character trying to move from the left side of the screen to the right, dodging falling arrows to reach the "goal". Once there, you mash a button.

That's it as far as gameplay is concerned.

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

[antdude]

It's funny history repeats itself with companies pushing to Christmas deadline these days. :(

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

[drinkypoo]

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

It's no worse than Raiders of the Lost Ark yet many people consider that to be one of their favorite Atari games, while E.T. is considered to be the worst. I had both games. I beat E.T. in a day or two. I never could get the timing right on parachuting into the cliff hole under the tree on Raiders. E.T. was criticized for being unlike the movie, but it's ten times more like the movie than Raiders.

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

Re:Play the hack instead

[gfxguy]

Agreed... I saw the movie people are discussing a few posts above; the problem is that it was over-hyped and then just "meh," which made people pretty upset with it. It was rushed, it had bugs, but as bad as it may have been, it was hardly "one of the worst."

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:Play the hack instead

[hey!]

In some ways the take away lesson is that the best people are easiest to exploit.

Think about it. This guy's life was derailed by his feeling of personal responsibility for the consequences of his work. Granted, he shouldn't have agreed to designing and programming a game in five weeks when it normally took six months, but he was only twenty-four years old. People don't give inexperienced 24 year-olds 30 million dollars to spend because you don't expect someone like that to have the maturity to say "no". Many might have the judgement to do that, but it's normal for young, brilliant people to feel invincible, and the people with control of the purse strings should have known that.

Re:Play the hack instead

[pla]

It's no worse than Raiders of the Lost Ark yet many people consider that to be one of their favorite Atari games

Having had both in their heyday, RotLA counted as a far, far better game.

That said, I wouldn't call ET the worst game ever. It had wonky collision detection, but you could quickly figure it out and adjust accordingly. Not a great game by any stretch, but not as awful as most people say.

I note, interestingly, that another commenter mentioned that you really needed to read the manual to "get" it - And that may well explain why I didn't hate it. The nearest Atari-carrying store to where I lived as a kid required an hour's ride, so by the time I got home, I would have eagerly absorbed every scrap of information available in the box.

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:Play the hack instead

[RailRide]

I never could get the timing right on parachuting into the cliff hole under the tree on Raiders.

Probably too late to offer this, but...

I seem to recall that you had to hit the branches under the leaf cluster with the canopy of the parachute. The game would then pull the player-character diagonally down the tree trunk and into the hole.

Then you had to avoid touching the "thieves" running back and forth across the next screen as you made your way to your objective on the bottom.

---PCJ

Re:Play the hack instead

[Sir Holo]

... People don't give inexperienced 24 year-olds 30 million dollars to spend because you don't expect someone like that to have the maturity to say "no". ...

So, $35M for rights, and $20-30M for Marketing.

I wonder how much money above his salary (overtime, bonus) that he was paid to attempt the impossible. HE did not have control of the ~$50M. Oh no. He was just tasked with creating the product. He slaved on it for every conscious moment during those few weeks.

8 kB of code people. That's like a 6-page essay (compiled).

What Genius MBA thought that it was wise to spend less than 0.1% of budget on creating the actual product, and >99.9% of budget on rights and marketing?

Re:Play the hack instead

[Sir Holo]

... And the hardware itself was really only designed for two games - Pong and Battlezone. ...

I think you mean Tank Wars, not Battlezone.

Breakout was a nice interweaving of the two capabilities of the hardware. (Moving paddle and collision-detection).

Re:Play the hack instead

[drinkypoo]

I seem to recall that you had to hit the branches under the leaf cluster with the canopy of the parachute.

I seem to recall this actually being described, if not in the manual, at least somewhere. But I never could manage it. The problem, if I recall correctly, is that it was a major slog through tsetse-infested swamps to get there, and then it's suddenly BOOOOPsplat in about one second. I've played through Ninja Gaiden (with a friend, but we split it up pretty well between us) so I think it's safe to say that I had persistence back in those days but I finally just gave up on that crap.

As others pointed out in this thread, the biggest problem with E.T. (besides the need to read the documentation - I could read long before I had video games, so not a problem) was the wonky collision detection, and as they have also pointed out, it wasn't that bad once you got used to it. To be fair, I also had the E.T. board game, so I may be slightly biased. I don't think it was an amazing game, though... just not astounding crap.

Obviously, the best VCS game was Star Raiders, unless you have a special attachment to something. I also had one of those supercharger thingies that loaded games from tapes, but only about three games for it.

Re:Play the hack instead

[Lotana]

Alas this was always the case with games based on licenses of other media. This is a very good basic summary of why quality is not the priority when making these kind of games: Shovelware

ET?

[jez9999]

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

Re:ET?

[Anonymous Coward]

Depression Quest is actually an amazing Game, of a different sort.
It is very accurate, highly reflective of what its like to struggle with Depression; I went through it; and completed the game, It was remarkably accurate.

....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.

Re:....predictions.

[JohnStock]

5 weeks was more than enough time for someone back then if they were already "set up" to write games.

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:....predictions.

[gfxguy]

The problem is that the world is a very complicated place, but people like simple answers... so that's what the press gives them.

Re:....predictions.

[sad_]

indeed, you should watch some documentaries, it's clear that ET was just there when it happened but not the cause.
atari made some very bad calls, some that are simply inexplicable. producing more games then consoles ever sold (what the??) is one of those. The company was losing money fast, and somehow put hope in ET being the hottest and biggest thing of that year to make up for some of that loss. When it didn't, the game was easily blamed for everything that went wrong.

Re:....predictions.

[Kartu]

It depends on what you are doing.
If it is accounting (finance) related, rules are very strict (than's to the Enron scandal) so no wonder every step is under control.

Re:....predictions.

[bozzy]

I think we need to focus on who made those decisions.

This. The project was set up to fail from the outset before a single line of code was written with the unrealistic deadline. Unrealistic targets are not achievable just because management says "make it so".

Re:....predictions.

[Yunzil]

You know back in those days they didn't just load up a new project in Visual C++ and start coding, right? There were no frameworks, no libraries, no pre-made engines. It had to be done in assembly, and their code had to handle redrawing every scanline so they had to carefully count CPU cycles. All the gameplay logic had to be done during the vertical blanking interval. And they had to fit the whole game in 4K of memory (8K if they were lucky). Oh and you had whole 128 bytes of RAM to play with.

Re:....predictions.

[Yunzil]

Their executives were not on the ball

Well yes. You're talking about a company that once said the game programmers were no more important than the people who put the cartridges in the boxes on the assembly line.

Pac-Man on the 2600... what could have been

[VValdo]

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

Re: Pac-Man on the 2600... what could have been

[Surak_Prime]

I've always thought that the reason the 2600 port of the game was so crappy (as well as the one for Ms. Pac-Man) was to keep them from killing kids' desire to still put quarters in the arcade machines.

And there is nothing in that demo or what I'm reading as the ingenuine-ness of the original programmer, there, that makes me think otherwise, now, frankly.

Re:Pac-Man on the 2600... what could have been

[kriston]

While Pac-Man was horrible, the Ms. Pac-Man sequel cartridge was exceptionally good, and it was produced a very short time after Pac-Man was.

Not even close to the worst game

[Anonymous Coward]

The worst game is Big Rigs.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Yahtzee did it best.

[adhdengineer]

Yahtzee (Zero Punctuation) already did it best.
So there.

Re:Yahtzee did it best.

[CronoCloud]

You can easily make your own Yahtzee review just by saying:

"Fucking Sod rubbish wanker bloody bollocks penis joke branston pickle!"

He should have denied the offer.

[master_p]

The developer that programmed E.T. should have denied the initial offer. It wasn't a sane business plan. He should have negotiated for something better.

Insane business plans like this is what gives the job and industry a bad name.

Re:He should have denied the offer.

[loonycyborg]

Easier said than done. They'd sooner find another programmer than forfeit a Christmas release.

Re:He should have denied the offer.

[itsdapead]

The developer that programmed E.T. should have denied the initial offer. It wasn't a sane business plan. He should have negotiated for something better.

Its pretty clear from TFA that he was a bit star-struck and naive at the time (and, sadly, Speilberg was right - an ET-themed PacMan clone would probably have been a bigger success, and a more achievable target in the time allowed, with tried-and-tested gameplay) so that's partially fair.

However, its also clear that there were plenty of other mistakes made by Atari over the budget and sales projections (and would have probably fired him if he had objected). The notion that all the established (and totally routine) production and marketing processes take as long as they take, but the one non-routine and unpredictable aspect (designing and writing a novel bit of software) can always be compressed into whatever time remains is pretty endemic thinking amongst management.

What could have been... in this decade.

[DrYak]

I actually came across a homebrew reboot of what could have been accomplished with an 8k cartridge back in the day.

If back in the days you had easy access to a more powerful machine with a good set of crafting tools (editor, assembler) and tools to help you test (emulators), access to possibility to test multiple iteration of your code on the actual hardware (cheap flashcards), and plenty of time (it's hobbyist's).

All that in addition to plenty of knowledge (we're in a post demo-scene period. Plenty of knowledge, known tricks, etc. in addition of all the details that the hobbyist has learned about the platform).

I'm not saying that this a minor feat to manage to cram such a game into a 8k cart.

I'm just reminding that back then, developers where mostly working on *paper*.
Tools and experience is not substitute for talent, but they supplement the talent quite nicely.

Re:What could have been... in this decade.

[clickclickdrone]

I believe Atari used a VAX to develop 2600 games with a cross assembler, then downloaded the code to dev 2600 carts.

Re:What could have been... in this decade.

[sad_]

so true, you should see the stuff people are making on the c64 these days, boggles the mind.

Re:What could have been... in this decade.

[operagost]

Yup. If you note, in one of the photos Warshaw is using a VT-100.

Re:What could have been... in this decade.

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

True

I actually came across a homebrew reboot of what could have been accomplished with an 8k cartridge back in the day.

If back in the days you had easy access to a more powerful machine with a good set of crafting tools (editor, assembler) and tools to help you test (emulators), access to possibility to test multiple iteration of your code on the actual hardware (cheap flashcards), and plenty of time (it's hobbyist's).

All that in addition to plenty of knowledge (we're in a post demo-scene period. Plenty of knowledge, known tricks, etc. in addition of all the details that the hobbyist has learned about the platform).

I'm not saying that this a minor feat to manage to cram such a game into a 8k cart.

I'm just reminding that back then, developers where mostly working on *paper*.
Tools and experience is not substitute for talent, but they supplement the talent quite nicely.

Commander Data: Cloaking devices of that era leaked in the high gamma radio range.

Re:What could have been... in this decade.

[operagost]

Go look at Ms. Pac Man for the 2600. It's not quite as good overall as this 8K homebrew, but in some ways it's better (the monsters don't flicker) and it's worlds better than the Pac Man port.

They could have pulled it off with better management.

Re:What could have been... in this decade.

[obsess5]

That might explain the VT100-based Space Invaders game I saw in the early 1980s in our VAX/VMS shop! Also, I remember one of my colleagues coming in with the latest DECUS tape, excited that it had a Z80 cross-assembler implemented using macros in the VAX assembler.

In the Words of Arthur Dent

[Aaron_Pike]

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.

Re:In the Words of Arthur Dent

[Sir Holo]

In other words, flatten out a box. Euclidian. Topologically, each face just warps to another.

Recall, for example, that this is similar to the case in Asteroids. Topologically, the playing field was just a flattened-out toroid. That is, mapped to a Euclidian (Cartesian) visual representation.

OK, math nerds, destroy me now, too.

Sounds like CEO material

[Kjella]

"It's awesome to be credited with single-handedly bringing down a billion-dollar industry with eight kilobytes of code. But the truth is a little more complex."

With a little more training he could be like Stephen Elop, bringing down Nokia with less than 8kB ASCII memo. Sure, the truth is a little more complex ;)

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:So, let's blame developer, shall we

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

Yes. You didn't include the following items:

4) ???
5) Profit!!!

Re:So, let's blame developer, shall we

[operagost]

Yes. Dollar signs go before the figure, not after, and where in the world is the apostrophe used as a thousands separator?

Re:So, let's blame developer, shall we

[wikthemighty]

developer, developer, developer, developer, developer, developer, developer, developer, developer!!!!

Fixed that for ya.

Re:Le ET is epin bad

[Anonymous Coward]

I had a 2600 when they came out. The worst game I ever played on it was the space shuttle simulator game. The information on the screen was completely incomprehensible and the manual was no help at all so I had no idea what I was supposed to be doing and why. Terrible game.

Squij was worse

[Alioth]

ET was nowhere near the worst game of all time. Squij! (a game for the ZX Spectrum) handily beats it in terms of sheer awfulness. What Squij! lacks is the infamy and the truly epic nature of ET's failure.

http://www.worldofspectrum.org...

Re:Squij was worse

[Megane]

Even on the 2600, there were worse games. This might be the worst of the first-party titles, but in no way is it the worst 2600 game of all time, or even "the Worst Computer Game In History". But it might be the most over-published bad game in history, if you don't count 2600 Pac-Man (Atari supposedly manufactured more copies of Pac-Man than consoles to play them on!), which was at least playable. And ET's badness was mostly due to the two-month schedule imposed to get it out for a Christmas release. Most 2600 games took about six months for a single developer (no artists; the developer usually had to make the graphics too!).

Star Fox by Mythicon was arguably the worst, and their other two games, Sorcerer and Firefly were basically the same game with different graphics.

Kudos!

[Anonymous Coward]

Kudos for writing a game in 5 weeks (and back in the 80's using assembly, not modern Unity3D game engine).

The game might have sucked, but it is still a wonderful accomplishment!

Re:Kudos!

[Megane]

2600 games usually took 6 months (still usually by only a single programmer), so this was a very rushed schedule.

Buried in the New Mexico desert...

[Applehu Akbar]

Call Vince Gilligan. Surely this can be worked into an episode of Better Call Saul somehow.

Re:Years Old Story With Nothing New - And...

[Megane]

Yes, but it's from the BBC, so it must be important!

Computer game? No!

[bbelt16ag]

Computer game? how dare you soil all other computer games with those words! It was a console game not a computer game!

Re:Do you even know what an Atari is timothy?

[CronoCloud]

While computer game usually refers to games running on general purpose machines ET on the 2600 is quite literally a computer game. Simply put it is because a 2600 IS literally a computer, a Von Neumann machine just like some CBM PET, TRS 80, or APPLE 1. It has a CPU, RAM, ROM, registers, IO. It's a specialized kind computer, commonly referred to as a game console, but a computer nonetheless.

Admittedly the more generalized terms of "one of the worst video games" or "one of the worst electronic games" might have been better choices.

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

Re:Not even the worst onion on the belt...

[Hognoxious]

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.

Original Atari and New Atari...

[__aaclcg7560]

I had the privilege of witnessing the original Atari implode as an outsider in the 1980's and the new Atari implode as an insider in 2000's.

The original Atari had no quality standards over third-party developers. So everyone and their grandmother were making bad video games at $30 per cartridge. The last Atari 2600 cartridge I bought was a shark attack game from a photography shop that was truly awful several months before E.T. killed the market. Nintendo changed that by enforcing quality standards and charging a per-cartridge licensing fee to develop for their console.

I ended up working at the new Atari (Infogrames acquired the intellectual property to Atari when it bought Hasbro Interactive) and become the lead tester responsible for Nintendo GameBoy Advanced and GameCube titles. The new Atari fell into the same trap as the original Atari, buying into the Hollywood convergence trap by licensing expensive properties (*cough* The Matrix *cough*) and producing a title for every game console available. This got them into trouble with Nintendo as the developers ported games from the Playstation 2 without making them unique for the GameCube and Nintendo started rejecting them out of hand. And then the dot com bust ended everything for the new Atari, which is still around today but with smaller ambitions.

Worst game I played wasn't ET

[mitcheli]

I can't remember the name of it, but there was a Nintendo strike fighter game that as a first person shooter flight simulator. Each successive level would add two additional boogies to take down. The bug with this game was that if you wedged a tooth pick into the button on the controller and had a "rapid fire" option turned on all you had to do was lean a book against the joystick so that you continued to do flips while firing. If you did that, the boogies would never be able to hit you and you would eventually take them out every time. You could leave the game like that for days and it would just keep going up in levels. No game play needed.

watch out for the hamburgers!

[Thud457]

Obviously Kartu is Australian.
Or from Rand McNally.

Fix the bugs

[Berkyjay]

Part of me wants him to go back and fix those bugs and polish the game proper like.

Re:Fix the bugs

[Quirkz]

Check some of the other posts in this thread. Someone else did a bug fix in the game. You can download it, or play online.

Re:Fix the bugs

[Berkyjay]

Nice thanks for the tip.

worse?

[FlamingGuts]

Bible stories was pretty awful...

Re:memories

[gauauu]

only having 256bytes of ram for everything

As somebody that's making an Atari 2600 game now for fun, I'd LOVE to have 256 bytes of ram to work with. The machine only has 128. It's painful and wonderful all at the same time.

Yars Revenge in a nutshell

[Trax3001BBS]

You shot out it's shield (to get at it), while it shot at you.

Activision Laser Blast

[Trax3001BBS]

You complaints of a pattern game much more believable when you complain while playing a game your not looking at anymore.

Proof.

[DrYak]

I believe Atari used a VAX to develop 2600 games with a cross assembler, then downloaded the code to dev 2600 carts.

Which was *definitely* not as common and cheap as a mid- to high- end PC desktop, an emulator and a cheap Asian flash card.

In the interview Warshaw mentionned that in order to maximize his dev time, he had the copany to setup development equipment at home "within 5 minute reach from his bed", which back then was quite a feat (unlike nowadays, where it would basically be: "plug the laptop's charger nearby the bed").

Undertale

[loufoque]

I thought this was going to be a story about Undertale, I'm disappointed.

Now he's a therapist in Silicon Valley

[Snufu]

That's an impressive personal story to pull out when trying to put your client's own disappointments into perspective.

Also, super nostalgia for a time when personal computers were exploding onto the scene and anything seemed possible. Beige boxes and polyester wardrobes forever!

Battlecruiser 3000AD

[Andurian]

How is this not about Battlecruiser 3000AD?