“What Kind of Crazy Planet Is This, Anyway?”
“It was nothing like that, penis breath!”
Art by yours truly.
If you mention the name “E.T.” to most folk, their first thoughts will probably be of the classic Steven Spielberg film and the titular alien within. However, among those who fancy themselves “gamers,” their first thoughts might be of the infamous Atari 2600 game adaptation. There’s also probably some contingent of teeny boppers who might think of Katy Perry, but they’re outliers and shouldn’t be counted.
Gaming history has not been kind to the E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial video game, with many attributing what they call “The Video Game Crash of 1983″ almost single-handedly to it. A handful of documentaries and films have focused their narratives on it, tending to focus on the burial of millions of its unsold cartridges in a New Mexico landfill. Perhaps more interestingly, there are thousands of videos across YouTube dedicated entirely to tearing it apart, perpetuating its reputation as having killed Atari and nearly taken the whole games industry with it. In the wake of its relatively newfound notoriety, and with the myth “it nearly killed gaming” passed around as common fact, E.T. has found itself with the dubious distinction of being called “The Worst Game of All Time.” But is it really? Is it really really? Well, all things are a matter of opinion. In my humble one, it’s not even close. And I’m not just saying that to be some Armond White-esque contrarian jerk! I honestly believe that given a fair chance – while knowing the real history behind it – minutes of forgettable, totally passable gameplay can be extracted from E.T. by today’s modern game-player! Not exactly high praise, I know, but it’s certainly fairer than stringing a bunch of swear words together to the effect of “I’d rather chew a poop than play this game” or whatever.
I’m well aware other defenses have been written and recorded for E.T., and that I’m not the first to take this bold stance. 2014’s Atari: Game Over documentary (as directed by Zak Penn) does a pretty good job of painting a picture of the game landscape at the time and makes a bit of a case for the game itself, but doesn’t dedicate much time at all to discussing the actual mechanics and merits of the gameplay itself. I’ve also read a couple of other articles on the subject which do get into detail about the mechanics, but which fall apart when trying to discuss the historical context. So hopefully, this article should serve to address both aspects of the release, and give them both the proper consideration they have historically been due. Because it is my personal belief that historical context is just as important as the quality of a given game, and that historically hated games are all worthy of reconsideration.
“Just in Time for Christmas.”
First, it’s necessary to have an actual context for the state of the video game industry in 1982. And in reading retrospectives on this period in gaming history, you’ll find that the phrase “market oversaturation” sure gets tossed around an awful lot: The belief that the number of available products not only far exceeded demand, but also served to confuse an audience still trying to figure out what this emerging video game business was exactly. With over a dozen game consoles in competition with each other – boasting libraries between dozens and hundreds of unique games – it’s believed that folk simply found themselves overwhelmed by the sheer number of options being presented to them. To make matters worse, the market at this point was being flooded by shovels and shovels worth of shovelware games, which supposedly fostered a distrust between consumers and the companies responsible for producing consoles. We’ve just recently experienced a similar sort of rut with the advent of the mobile / social media games market, where any brand or Joe Schmoe can put out a cheap little game in relatively short time, and make it immediately available to the consumer at large across major platforms. The difference back in the day was that these shovelware games were typically sold for the same price as top shelf titles, without significant distinction between them. As far as many folk were apparently concerned, every game on the Atari was made by Atari themselves… except maybe the awful porn games. They were probably a bit suspect about the porn games.
Now, while there’s certainly truth to the claim that there was an overabundance of hardware and software being made to compete with each other for consumer attention, the idea that this was a major factor in the industry’s downfall in the years to follow is something of a fallacy — a bit of revisionist history, honestly. It’s certainly a version of events that serves to absolve Atari of their share of direct blame, but we’ll get into more on that later. For now, let’s just consider the simple fact that Atari were the name in gaming, and that their influence over retailers [in the business of selling games] was immense: For whatever talk there is of the likes of Colecovision and Intellivision and whoever else have you leaving consumers overwhelmed by decision-making anxiety, the truth of the matter is that Atari had achieved a level of brand ubiquity that their competition could only dream of, and that retailers would arrange their sales displays to reflect this degree of recognizability. After all, if a given retailer might’ve chosen not to push Atari’s wares as their primary games offerings, Atari would threaten to pull their products from said retailer’s supply chain — depriving them of the ability to rake in surefire profits with the leading name in the business. It was a similar threat to one they had leveraged back with the emergence of Activision in 1979 – the first third-party developer in the industry, formed by former Atari programmers – where in Atari’s attempts to prevent their ex-employees from establishing a foothold / theoretically eating into their profits, they initially threatened retailers who would’ve dared to stock Activision’s cartridges on shelves. Naturally, Atari would lose that particular battle, and the result of Activision’s success would be a wave of similar third-parties looking to get a piece of that lucrative pie.
That leads us tidily into the subject of shovelware games, and the idea that consumers were beginning to “lose confidence” in Atari based on the belief that the manufacturer were somehow directly responsible for all these sub-par cartridges coming out. Again, I’m gonna have to call bullshit on this, based on a similar reality of the market situation: Atari’s own software was effectively guaranteed the most prominent display in any given retail situation, as they held claim to the most lucrative licenses / heavily-marketed titles that consumers would be looking for. Sure, a casual consumer may well have not been able to conceptualize the difference between software publishers and console manufacturers; but that hardly matters when their most typical intention on walking into a store to buy a game is to seek out cartridge versions of their favorite arcades, or to pick up a box based on their recognizing some familiar media property attached to it — tie-ins to popular movies and TV shows of the time, which Atari were often in the unique position of being able to negotiate exclusive rights to develop games for. The truth of the matter is that most third party publishers and developers to emerge in this period were flashes in the pan — there one day and gone the next, often unable to produce enough games or cartridges to really contribute measurably to the issue of “flooding the market.” And as it would turn out, Atari would be the ones most guilty of this perceived sin, as their decision to trade primarily in recognizable conversions and licensed properties would lead to their miscalculating just how compelled consumers actually were in buying up these cartridges.
One of the most significant releases of 1982 was the port of Pac-Man to the 2600, which was in fact developed and published first-party by Atari. Programmer Tod Frye was put in quite the predicament when he was given four months to develop the game (a short time by the standard of the time, but not the record for the shortest by any stretch), and more worryingly, only 4KBs of storage to contain the game code at a time when 8KBs were potentially available (albeit at a higher cartridge production cost). I won’t get into too much detail about the Atari port of Pac-Man here, since that’s an essay for another day, but the important notes are as follows: More copies of the game were produced than a console install base existed (12 million Pac-Mans vs 10 million Atari 2600s), less than 3/4ths of the cartridges were actually sold (figures seem to point to around 7.7 million units sold), and while it did in fact become the most-purchased 2600 title of all time, the quality of the final product left some consumers unsatisfied. It wasn’t an entirely unplayable game, but it did serve as a stark reminder that the 2600 was five-year old hardware come 1982, and that the rest of the industry was moving forward faster than Atari was.
Pac-Man should’ve been a learning experience for everyone involved in the industry, and more importantly anyone under the employ of Atari. It should’ve served as a lesson about the risks of over-estimation, hasty deadlines, and the importance of knowing how best to spend money to make money. With at least five months between the release of Pac-Man and the beginning of development for E.T., you’d think Atari would have had plenty of time to absorb the data they’d have gathered from Pac-Man‘s reception and sales. If the story of E.T.‘s development can be taken as indication, Atari seemed to have learned nothing at all.
With the success of Steven Spielberg’s film E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial, the decision was made to get a game adaptation ready by holiday season of that year. For reference, E.T. the movie was released in theaters in the month of June, while holiday season in North America traditionally refers to the month of December. This would mean there were at most six months time to prepare a development team, design and develop the game, and have it ready and printed for store shelves. Development being arguably the most essential and potentially difficult part of this process, it’s obvious it should’ve been given the most time allotted in the production process. Instead, it was given five weeks, two artists, and one programmer; Howard Scott Warshaw. Good luck, buddy!
Howard spent much of his time working for Atari, by his own admission, high as as a kite. He was also a certifiable genius, who is responsible for the excellent Yar’s Revenge and the debatably not-so-excellent [but still wildly successful] Raiders of the Lost Ark game adaptation. His legacy as a programmer should reflect the fact that he was a man dedicated to pushing the medium forward through conceptualizing then-unseen mechanics. Instead, he may only be known to many as “the guy who made that bad E.T. game.” And that’s terrible — truly unfortunate, and hugely unfair to the man. To be clear, Howard isn’t entirely without blame for how things wound up: The short development cycle was an incredibly risky and stupid gamble to take, and internally within Atari there was some degree of worry about the deadline. But as it would turn out, it was Howard himself who confidently assured everyone that not only could he finish the game in time, but that it would be an incredibly ambitious game in its own right. To this end, Warshaw was flown out to pitch the game concept directly to Steven Spielberg himself, who was already tuned in to the game industry to some degree. As Howard finished laying out his grand plan for the game, Spielberg had only one question: “Couldn’t you do something more like Pac-Man?” (Presumably, Spielberg had in image of the original arcade game in his head, rather than the 2600 conversion.) Frustrated but undeterred, Howard continued to sell Spielberg on his original concept, and Spielberg eventually relented.
Five weeks of night-and-day development later, the game was complete, and between four and five million cartridges were immediately sent to production. It’s difficult to lock down an exact number on the number of cartridges produced, but by my guesstimation it’s closer to the five million mark. Typically, at some point between development and production, there’d be a stage for “quality assurance” of the game, followed shortly thereafter by a final stage of development for implementing feedback. However, due to time limitations, these steps were skipped entirely, leaving us with… well, the game we got, I suppose.
“Help E.T. Get Home!”
“I’ll believe in you all my life, everyday.”
North American box art.
The first thing a player in 1982 would do with their new Atari 2600 game would be to read the accompanying instruction manual. Not only did these tomes of knowledge explain how to play the game, but they also explained the incredibly essential “switch settings,” which effectively necessitated the reading of the manual. You see, back in the day, a game’s difficulty wasn’t always determined by an in-game option, but rather by configuring a pair of difficulty switches and a ‘Game Select’ switch on the console itself prior to starting the game. While I’m sure there was a contingent of players who would just jump right into ‘Game 1’ with both difficulty switches set to the default ‘A’ position, more folk than not would at least clue themselves into the function each switch and setting served. In the case of E.T., the differences in game configurations and difficulties affected the presence and speed of the enemy AI, as well as enabling / disabling an oddly specific condition regarding the rescue ship at the end of the gameplay loop. More on that later.
The manual opens with a cute introduction to the game written by E.T. himself, setting a bit of a light-hearted mood right off the bat. I do love the referral to “Reeessseess Peeesssesss” as ‘energy pills.’ Man, did M&Ms drop the ball by letting Reese’s Pieces take their product placement spot or what? The goal of the game is to collect three pieces of an interplanetary telephone, hidden at the bottom of pits (or as the manual refers to them as, ‘wells’) scattered across four of the screens of what we’ll call the game’s overworld, and summon a ship to rescue E.T. from our cruel and terrifying planet. Obstacles to completion include FBI agents (“Naaashaaannaall Seeeccuuuureeetteee?”) who will steal your collected phone pieces if they manage to grab you, scientists who will drag you to a science jail on another screen, and your ever-impending death by way of running out of energy points — which are consumed by every action and movement you make. Supposedly helping to even the odds is your pal Elliot (“Ellleeott!”), who serves to collect the Reese’s Pieces you pick up off the cold wet ground for bonus points, and who can revive you a limited number of times in case you run out of energy. That’s what best friends are for right there.
One of the most fascinating aspects of the gameplay is the attempt to map multiple different functions to the 2600 joystick’s single button. By holding it down, you sprint. By pressing it from within a pit, you begin to levitate your way out of it. But perhaps most interestingly, standing in specific spots in the world will open up various different context actions (indicated by symbols at the top of the screen), including eating a Reese’s Piece for energy, scaring off the enemy AI, pointing out which pits on the screen contain phone pieces, and even instantly teleporting to other screens. Curiously, the visual cue for these hotspots isn’t indicated on the game screens themselves, but only by the symbols that appear on the top of the screen as you’re standing within the spaces. The trick lies in finding out where the hotspots are, and being able to run to them without running into the baddies or inadvertently falling into a pit.
Much has been said about the pits in E.T.: That they’re too big, too easy to fall into, too hard to climb out of, and that there’s too many of them to check. Personally, I just don’t understand why they were implemented in the first place. Why not instead of creating individual screens for every pit, allocate more screens to the overworld, and have all the phone pieces appear there? I like to believe the pits were an idea that sounded good on paper, but by the time Howard might have realized it was flawed in execution, it was too late for him to take them out / design an alternative system. But for what it’s worth, the holes really aren’t as difficult to escape as watching video may lead you to believe. Assuming, of course, that you read the instruction manual.
In the ‘Helpful Hints’ section of the manual, it states that in escaping from a pit, you should stop holding up to levitate once you near the top of the screen, as the screen transitions from the pit to the overworld. While you’re gathering your bearings, enemies on the map will pause and give you time to get back on your feet. This gives you plenty of time to decide whether you want to escape left or right, and the opportunity to do so. Admittedly, this is not the most intuitive mechanic, and there are times where you will inevitably hold up for a moment too long and fall back down into a pit. But when it comes to people who claim that it’s “impossible” to climb out of certain pits, it’s pretty obvious they never did their reading.
It’s very easy to pick on folk making videos in the modern day who skip the manual, and I do so happily. In their defense though, I suppose we’ve all become accustomed to games tutorializing us through early gameplay, as well as the idea that “primitive” games can’t possibly require too much instruction given their simplicity. When all you have is an eight-way joystick and a single button, how complex can things possibly get? But Howard Scott Warshaw had a very forward-thinking design philosophy, and crammed as many of his ideas as he could into his game cartridges. His aforementioned Raiders of the Lost Ark game went so far as to require the use of two controllers for a single player, with the second controller acting as an inventory select!
While Raiders ultimately became another million-selling game on the 2600, it still may have been a case of “too much too soon,” with puzzles that required problem-solving far beyond what was expected of players in other comparable games. We’re talking nonsense like having to walk through a specific spot in a wall in a room where touching any other wall or object instantly sends you back to the beginning, with nary an in-game hint or visual cue to inform you as such (though the accompanying instruction manual does provide a step-by-step walkthrough of the game). Again, to Howard’s credit, he was ahead of the curb here, as “cryptic nonsense” became quite the game design fad in the mid-80’s, with the success of 1984’s Tower of Druaga beginning something of a trend in Japanese game development. Still, it’s to the benefit of E.T. that it is free of overly-elaborate puzzles, and that it serves as a refinement of some of the better ideas from Raiders: Navigation across the multiple screens comprising the game world is much simplified, with a “cube” structure allowing easy access to each of the six main screens. The laundry list of collectible items is condensed to just phone pieces and Reese’s Pieces. The road to the end goal is far more direct and simple, making it a far more achievable one. It’s less of a grand adventure, to be sure, but there’s still a sense of accomplishment every time you manage to send E.T. home.
Presentation-wise, it’s definitely a step up from Raiders. The image of E.T. on the title screen set to a one-channel rendition of the theme from the film is a good subtle tactic for reminding players of their enjoyment of the film, and adding to the anticipation of beginning the game. E.T. in-game is clearly identifiable as such, even given his off-color palette (brown honestly would’ve worked fine against the shade of green in the background), which is more than can be said for poor Indy in the Raiders game (who, funnily enough, can be found within E.T. as an easter egg, along with Yar from Yar’s Revenge). The graphics for the other characters are passable as well, and the symbols that identify the context actions are quickly understandable. The Reese’s Pieces being small dark lumps on the ground is probably the worst bit of graphic design, since it would’ve been just as easy to make them bright orange or yellow (as is the color of the candy) and far more visible. The pits are pretty hideous, but I also can’t think of a better way to have rendered them — other than not render them at all and do away with them entirely, opening up the option to put more detail into the backgrounds. It’s not infeasible that they could’ve done this, since the forest area is appropriately detailed with a pattern of pinewood trees.
Speaking of, the forest is probably the single most frustrating screen in the game, more so than any of the pits. While the pits at least provide shelter from the enemies, the forest is a wide open space, where you’re made to wait for your rescue ship to touch down… That is, after you’ve found the randomized hotspot on one of the overworld screens from where you’re meant to call the ship. To actually be rescued, you have to be standing in another randomized spot on the forest screen, as the ship will pass you by if you happen to be standing outside of that spot. The problem is, the enemy AI is relentless in attacking you during this waiting period, and will do their best to chase you around and possibly drag you away from the landing zone. You can combat them by finding the hotspot which sends them back to their bases on the bottom screen, but this is only a temporary reprieve, and it does cost precious energy to scare them off (not to mention, requiring you to walk away from the landing zone).
As if that wasn’t bad enough, if the enemies are present on the screen as the rescue ship arrives, it’ll mess up everything and cause the ship to leave without E.T., forcing you to call it and wait for it again. Oddly, the left difficulty switch on the console toggles one more condition for the ship landing: Whether or not Elliot is allowed to be on-screen when the ship touches down. This is close to a completely pointless condition, since Elliot’s two purposes in the game are to collect your Reese’s Pieces for points (when you use a hotspot to summon him to do so) and to revive you when you’ve run out of energy. Neither of these processes take a particularly long time luckily, and so it almost takes a deliberate effort to have Elliot present in the forest at the moment the rescue ship arrives. Shouldn’t Elliot be there to say one last goodbye to E.T. anyway, like at the end of the movie? The difficulty switch would’ve been better served toggling whether or not the enemies can be presents in the forest as the rescue ship arrives.
All that being said, the challenge and level of difficulty provided by the game is close enough to where it should be. Playing the game without the presence of the enemies (‘Game 3’) is an interesting experiment, if not an incredibly boring one, as it demonstrates that the game is a relatively straightforward one at its core. The agent and the scientist, for much of a pain in the ass as they can be, definitely serve as a much-needed hazard for players to overcome. If anything, they could have been made to drain energy from E.T. to make them slightly more dangerous, especially since the scientist character dragging you to the bottom screen is more of a minor nuisance than anything. Still, I do have to appreciate the option to shut them off being present in the game, handy as a way of making the game more enjoyable for younger players who didn’t mind the lack of challenge and who just wanted to help E.T. get home. You don’t see levels of difficulty designed with that demographic in mind too often in the modern age of games, not even coming from Nintendo.
In summation, E.T. is a totally playable game, even with its handful of technical hiccups and more tedious mechanics. The fact it was developed in record time for the time is honestly incredible, as the presentation really doesn’t do much to give away that it was effectively a rush job. That being said, it’s not exactly a stand out game in the 2600 library, in spite of its attempt at pushing mechanics forward in the form of the button-context functionality. In hindsight, the mechanic was half-baked, and could have potentially worked better by having tapping the button cycle through the list of available actions and holding the button to perform them. At least it was more sensible than using two controllers at once, I guess. It should also be noted that despite its relative complexity for a 2600 game, there were certainly other games seeing release at the time which were moving game mechanics forward in far more meaningful ways.
Still, Howard was on the right track to refining his formula for impressive Atari games. E.T. could’ve potentially been a game-changer if given more time for him to work the kinks out: The concept is mostly sound, save for the mechanic of having to search the pits, and would’ve benefitted greatly from just a few tweaks. In the form it exists in, if you stripped it of its movie tie-in and historical importance, it’d just be one of the hundreds of passable games in the library of the first major home console — one that doesn’t stand out as particularly good or bad. Some would argue that’s actually a fate worse than being extraordinarily awful. You can be the judge of that for yourself.
“Use the Wells as Escape Zones.”
E.T. sold between 1.5 and 1.97 million cartridges, according to various different figures. This would, in fact, earn it the not-too-shabby distinction of being one of the best-selling 2600 titles of all time. And despite what revisionist history may tell you, the game wasn’t actually critically panned on release! In actuality, it was… Well, actually, it was pretty mixed as it turns out. There were certainly those who found fault in the game, most tending to criticize it for lack of difficulty, of all things. Video Games magazine contributor Phil Wiswell wrote in a March 1983 review “E.T. is really for the kids (the littler ones),” before going on to extol the praises of Raiders. But for every published negative review, there was either a positive or neutral score to balance it out. Kevin Christopher of Vidiot contended in March of ‘83 that the pits were “about the only flaw with an otherwise A-1 game.” You can question his credibility if you will, but the fact of the matter is that not everyone was down on E.T. like the modern narrative claims they were.
So, why and how the hell did Atari fill a landfill with E.T. cartridges?
Just under two million copies sold is a very respectable number. The problem was that, as Atari should’ve learned with Pac-Man, overproduction negates profits. The number of cartridges actually produced for E.T. varies wildly from source to source, with an Atari engineering technician Jerry Jessop claiming that as many as twenty million cartridges may have been produced for the game! In reality, the actual number as stated earlier would appear to be closer to five million, far more reasonable by comparison. I would say that might’ve demonstrated a lowering of sales expectations in the wake of Pac-Man’s failure, but it was still a pretty high bar they set for themselves. Pac-Man on 2600 was as successful as it was because consumers were naïve enough to expect that the port would be at least comparable to the arcade game they had already collectively dumped billions of quarters into, and because they theoretically knew what game they would be getting on their Atari. But a movie tie-in should not have been presumed to be a guaranteed seller, like a home console port of an already-proven arcade game would more potentially be.
In fairness, Atari was more or less forced to produce the number of cartridges they did, because selling any less than the whole five million would mean a massive loss for them. How? Because they spent an absurd $20-25 million for the rights to E.T., that’s how! As successful as E.T. was as a film (it made well over $300 million by the end of 1982, on a production budget of $10.5 million), the games industry was nowhere near big enough to compete with that kind of business, and the asking price at the time for a copy of a game was $39.95 versus $3.00 for a movie ticket. Add to that the fact that the audience for video games was growing more discontent compared to a generally happy movie-going crowd, and all signs should’ve pointed to “don’t make this deal” for Atari. But they did, and so they paid the price for it. That price, by the way, happened to include having to buy back copies of their own game from retailers when they failed to sell; an added expense they were not used to or prepared for.
You see, with copies of E.T. and Pac-Man sitting unsold on store shelves (among plenty of other games, in fairness) and discounted prices failing to move them, retailers would learn to force publishers to come to terms on formal return policies before agreeing to stock their games. If publishers failed to come to terms, retailers would in turn refuse to sell their products, thus forcing the publisher’s hand. In the case of E.T., Atari was eventually forced to buy back hundreds of thousands of the unsold cartridges from retailers several months after the game’s release. With millions of various unsellable, unwanted games now back in their possession, Atari was now faced with another challenge: “Where the hell are we gonna put these things?” The answer ended up being “in the trash.”
And so, in September of 1983, semi-trailer trucks travelled from Texas to New Mexico carrying Atari’s excess inventory. Their destination; the town of Alamogordo’s landfill. The practice of corporations destroying and ultimately burying unsold product and excess inventory isn’t actually an uncommon one sadly, since giving them away for free has the nasty habit of attracting resellers and other opportunists who would use this goodwill to make profit (that’s not a good excuse for destroying perfectly good products, but it’s the one you’ll hear most often). And yet, the “urban legend” that surrounded Atari’s inventory burial has been passed around for decades, and considered by gamers to be one of the “great mysteries of gaming.” Even now with the truth revealed – that only several hundred thousand E.T. cartridges make up the total of the dump site, roughly 10% of the total contents – many are still misinformed as to the nature of and quantity of the buried games.
To be totally honest, the burial aspect of E.T. is the least interesting aspect to me personally. I guess I understand the excitement and sensationalism around it, but I can’t help but feel that some of that attention should be reinvested into further examining the circumstances around the development of the game? Yes, Atari’s thought process surrounding the decision to dump their inventory is a fascinating and depressing one. But I for one would love to know exactly what drove them to stake all their futures on one game, and then proceed to give it far less attention and resources than an investment like that should warrant? It’s absolutely harebrained in hindsight!
The video game crash of 1983 is alternatively referred to as “Atari shock” by some — namely in Japan, where that particular turn-of-phrase was evidently coined by the press. And while Atari themselves aren’t wholly responsible for the crash – given some of the contributing factors addressed earlier – they are certainly responsible for the largest follies by far. The investment in E.T. and its subsequent market failure was but one of many mistakes made by Atari between ‘82 and ‘83, but not one that would have single-handedly bankrupted the company if taken by itself. It did, however, prompt changes within Atari’s corporate hierarchy, forcing the resignation of CEO Ray Kassar who had guided the company through its greatest period of prosperity. His replacement, one James J. Morgan, would preside over one of the darkest chapters in Atari’s history, overseeing a massive restructure that would see many employees lose their livelihood. As fate would have it, this change in corporate structure would also allow the Nintendo Corporation to distance themselves from negotiations to release the Famicom under Atari’s banner, likely saving the North American release of the Nintendo Entertainment System from a hell of mismanagement under Atari’s purview.
It was Atari who had most to do with the industry boom as well as with its subsequent crash in the states. The short-sightedness and incompetence in handling E.T. is emblematic of their short-sightedness and incompetence as a corporation, demonstrating an inability to set realistic long-term goals and poor investing of large funds. Perhaps most damningly, despite their numerous innovations in the games market and their pioneering approach, their early success made them too self-confident to continue innovating. Their strategy to continue selling 2600s in the face of ever-evolving technology was an incredible blunder, and their refusal to change course despite countless warning signs is damn near hubris. In the end, Atari’s executives and decision-makers truly had no one to blame but themselves.
“Atari committed suicide. It was not homicide, and it wasn’t the E.T. cartridge. It was a concomitant effect of a lot of missteps in technology, in deployment, [and] in marketing.” ~ Nolan Bushnell
As for HSW, he found himself one of the many victims of Atari’s restructure, canned while in the process of programming a cartridge by the name of Saboteur (which would later be repackaged as The A-Team as a tie-in to the television show of the same name, ultimately never being released). The firing caught Howard off-guard, as well it should have: In his near three years of employment, he was responsible for two of the 2600’s biggest hits! Sure, E.T. was a misstep, but the fact he was able to produce a competent game in such limited time surely should have demonstrated his value and devotion to the company. But at the end of the day, his name was just one of approximately eight thousand who Atari had no choice but to cut in order to have any hope of staying afloat. While Atari desperately attempted to maintain a business in video games, Howard moved on to other pursuits, which saw him publish a handful of books, produce a documentary, and eventually settle into a role as a psychotherapist specializing in aiding Silicon Valley clientele. Say what you will about the population of Silicon Valley, but his service to them is certainly admirable. Oh, and he also seems more than happy to feature in films and videos about E.T. if you ask him politely (and probably with the offer of money).
E.T. on 2600’s legacy will always be clouded with misinformation, exaggeration, and negativity towards everything to do with the game. Its status as the sole scapegoat for the video game crash of 1983 will probably never be fully corrected, despite it being an incredible overstatement and simplification of a far more complex market situation. But why, when the true story is so readily available? Well, it’s simple, really: The untrue story is all a bit funnier, innit? That’s sort of the nature of “bad games” media and journalism: To take games that range from anywhere from unspectacular to mediocre, and to rate them as if each successive title is the worst the reviewer has ever played, for the sake of comedic effect or what have you. When you deal in extremes like that, you may find yourself bending truths and revising history in order to make your narrative a bit more entertaining. The unfortunate side effect is that viewers are left walking away with a head full of half-truths and opinions that aren’t truly theirs. And while there are most certainly worse ideas you can implant in someone’s head than untrue video game facts, it’d sure be nice if we could do something about curbing that, wouldn’t it? Someone should really go about writing some overly-long essays about these sort of things…
Cool article! (also the first article!)