Search results
Aug 20, 2020 · The Extra-Terrestrial is considered one of the worst games ever made, and goes so far as to suggest that the game was directly responsible for kicking off the downfall of the video game industry's first boom period. E.T. was first released in the summer of 1982 and became an immediate hit, further cementing director Steven Spielberg's ...
- Editor & Critic-Gaming
- Howard Scott Warshaw shares his perspective on the games industry’s transformation since his tumultuous stint at Atari
- The Lowest, Dirtiest, Grungiest System
- Nothing Like Pac-Man
- Killing an Industry
By Rebekah Valentine
Updated: Aug 20, 2022 7:35 pm
Posted: Aug 17, 2022 4:00 pm
We often get into vigorous debates about what the “best game of all time” is, but what about the worst game of all time? For decades, that honor has popularly belonged to E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial, a 1982 game for the Atari 2600 based on the movie of the same name. It was panned at the time for its plot, visuals, and gameplay, and its commercial and quality failures hurt Atari’s brand reputation, and this along with overproduction of this cartridge and others at least partially contributed to a Atari’s decline and a major, multi-year video game industry crash beginning in 1983.
The tale of E.T. has been told over the years as a cautionary tale against crunch, having only been made in five weeks. But the real story of ET, its creator, and their relationship with Atari is far deeper than the hole that was dug to house hundreds of copies of the critically-panned game in a New Mexico landfill.
IGN spoke to E.T.’s primary developer and sole designer Howard Scott Warshaw ahead of the release of his latest book, Once Upon Atari. It’s a cautionary tale of the perils of crunch, the advent of new game design ideas, an industry-shaking crash, and the necessary, inevitable movement of game creation from its formative Wild West years to the much larger, collaborative efforts we see today.
“I was in love with computers in my graduate work in college, and I fell out of love with computers at Hewlett Packard where I was drowning in a sea of computational mediocrity, and it was very unsatisfying, and so I used to act out,” Warshaw says. “I used to do some wacky stuff, especially, by HP standards. And one of my coworkers came up to me one day and said, ‘The kind of things you do - they happen all the time where my wife works.’ I said, ‘Oh, where's that?’ And he said, ‘Atari.’ And that was an interesting moment because it never occurred to me to look at Atari as a place to work.”
After this fateful conversation with his friend, Warshaw called up Atari and maneuvered his way into a series of job interviews – and was rejected. But Warshaw wouldn’t take no for an answer. He pushed back, and eventually was hired on probation at a much lower salary than initially discussed.
Upon his arrival in 1981, Warshaw immediately found himself fulfilled in a way he had never experienced before. Not only could he test his mettle on much more complex, sophisticated programming challenges than at Hewlett Packard, but Atari also gave him the opportunity to blend his technical, analytical capabilities with the wacky creativity that had made him stand out at his previous job.
“The environment was so free, and so creatively focused, and so accepting that you could be anything, you could do anything, and people only looked at it in terms of, ‘Well, does this inspire something cool to do?’ It was about looking for creative opportunity, which, to me, is the ultimate creative environment, right? Where you don't have a lot of restrictions, you just have goals. And it's all about trying to get there in an interesting or innovative way, as opposed to being all about structure, which is the way a lot of environments operate.”
The environment was so free, and so creatively focused, and so accepting that you could be anything, you could do anything.
“
Not only did Warshaw have to make a functional, licensed game for Steven Spielberg in five weeks, but he had to do it almost entirely on his own. No one in the Atari office wanted to help him program it. He did have Jerome Domurat doing most of E.T.’s graphics, and the opening theme was composed for him by Atari’s sound team. But all of the design, all other sounds, some of the graphics, and of course the programming was all Warshaw’s.
The reduced timeframe to do all that work was preceded by Warshaw only having three days to get his basic design concept down. That’s because three days from the initial phone call he was scheduled to fly out to LA and present his design to Spielberg.
“When I did present that design I laid it out, and Spielberg listened to the whole thing. And at the end he looked at me and he said, "Couldn't you do something more like Pac-Man?" My whole bottom fell out of me. I couldn't believe it.
“Spielberg was a big gamer, but the truth of it that I knew that I hadn't communicated to him was that this was a game I could deliver in the timeframe. I didn't want to say that to him because I didn't want to come off as desperate, frankly. And so what I did say was, ‘You know, Steven, E.T. is really extraordinary. It's a special film and I think it needs a special game to go with it. And this is a unique design, and this is something that I think lives up to the level of the film and is appropriate to what we're trying to produce.’ And he agreed with that, and that was good because if he would have said, ‘No, I really wanted Pac-Man.’ I would have had to say to him, ‘We can't do Pac-Man in this time. We only have five weeks. This is what I can do. Please be okay.’”
When I did present that design, and [Spielberg] looked at me and he said, "Couldn't you do something more like Pac-Man?"
“
While E.T.’s reception certainly wasn’t the only reason for Atari’s downfall, it was a contributing factor. It played a notable role in the infamous Video Game Crash of 1983, an event characterized by a flooded software and hardware market alongside decreased consumer trust in video game quality – E.T. had an initial print run of 5 million copies without user testing, and not only did they not sell, they were sometimes returned by irate parents. This glut of games led to the legendary landfill incident. Atari itself underwent significant layoffs, followed by the company being divided and sold off. On paper, Warshaw left before this happened, though he says that’s not how it felt.
“I didn't really leave it. Atari kind of left me. Because I never would've left Atari, but Atari died in front of my eyes. And that was probably one of the most devastating losses I've ever experienced.”
Warshaw left gaming but eventually returned in 1999, taking a job at 3DO. But by then, the industry had undergone significant shifts. It had grown. Programming a game was no longer, as Warshaw puts it, “a work of authorship” and had instead become a much more collaborative experience. While Warshaw recognizes that the new collaborative nature of game development was “perfectly viable,” he says it was less compelling for him personally.
Collaborative work is like an ocean liner in that...you can have very big adventures. But the one thing you can't do is change direction.
“
“It's like the difference between a motor boat and … a fabulous luxury ocean liner. The collaborative work is like an ocean liner in that you can do amazing things on it and you can carry way more stuff and you can have way more fun and have very big adventures on an ocean liner. But the one thing you can't do on an ocean liner is change direction. There's too much momentum. A motorboat can't carry as much stuff, but it's more exciting to drive. And if you suddenly decide, ‘Hey, what's that? I want to go over there,’ you can do that in a motorboat.
- Rebekah Valentine
Feb 22, 2016 · It was July 1982 and Atari, then one of the world's most successful tech companies, had just paid a reported $21m for the video game rights to Spielberg's new blockbuster, ET the Extra-Terrestrial.
Apr 14, 2024 · A: The E.T. 1982 Atari Game was created with a tight deadline of five weeks due to the high-pressure acquisition of the licensing rights to the famous movie. This rushed development process led to design flaws and gameplay issues that ultimately resulted in the game being considered one of the worst ever made.
Oct 10, 2020 · Atari’s 1982 ‘E.T.’ game was so disastrous it’s been blamed for the company’s downfall and the crash of the entire industry. The man responsible for the game, however, has taken it surprisingly well. In 1982, Shannon was 7 years old. Back then, she loved two things above all else: video games and E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial.
Apr 14, 2014 · A wax figure of E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial at Madame Tussauds in Hollywood. ... it made $1.1 billion at ... in the meantime, was “E.T.” really the worst video game ever? Our starting point is ...
People also ask
Why is et the Extra-Terrestrial considered the worst game ever made?
What is the worst video game in history?
What happened to Atari's 'et' game in 1982?
Why is et considered a bad game?
What's interesting about the phenomenon of 'worst game ever'?
Which video game triggered the collapse of the video game industry?
Aug 31, 2020 · The storm of players and critics who named E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial the worst game in history is probably the result of its failure as a commodity for Atari as much as any real problems with its gameplay. Media Genesis says the industry was already suffering from a combination of maladies, including "blind optimism, inflation, and competition."
