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

[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

[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.

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

[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

[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

[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.

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".

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

[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

[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

[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?

ET?

[jez9999]

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

....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.

[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.

[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

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.

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.

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?

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:Kudos!

[Megane]

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

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!"

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.

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.