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.

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...

[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: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...

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: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.

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?

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.