In 1982, the acclaimed American science fiction film "E.T. Alien" was released, surpassing "Star Wars" at the box office and becoming the total box office champion of the film at the time, a record that remained for 10 years before it was broken by Jurassic Park in 1993.
Rotten Tomatoes named it the greatest sci-fi film of all time. The "great" movie, why the game in its name sold so badly, and received the most failed video game in history.
High price to buy the copyright
In July of the same year, Atari, the largest tech company at the time, bought the game rights to E.T. Alien director Spielberg for a whopping $21 million and gave the design and manufacture of the game to game designer Walshaw.
Walshaw had successfully made the game for Spielberg's other film, Raiders of the Lost Ark, which was well received, becoming Spielberg's "certified" genius and hand-picked him to be in charge of the development of the E.T. Alien game. "I'm scared stupid!" Walshaw, who was 24 at the time, said he admired Spielberg too much, so when Atari's CEO called and asked if he could make an E.T. Alien game, he simply agreed, but he didn't expect it to be the beginning of all tragedy.
The production time is only 5 weeks
Since it took weeks to make a cassette that fits the Atari 2600 model, Atari wanted the game to hit the shelves on Christmas, just in time for the E.T. Aliens craze to burn and the americans to do a lot of shopping. The company asked Walshaw to finish the game by September 1, which means only 5 weeks left.
"Normal game production time is 6 to 8 months, not 5 weeks!" Walshaw thought it was unreasonable, but Atari offered him the opportunity to meet the adored Spielberg, sending jets flying from California to Los Angeles to discuss the game, hoping to make a game like Atari's masterpiece Pac-Man.
"E.T. Alien is a groundbreaking movie, and a movie like that has to be paired with a groundbreaking game!" Walshaw defines et games as adventure games, players must help lost aliens, with a special "interstellar phone" to allow aliens to contact the original planet, and interstellar phones must be composed of a variety of special components, players must explore the map to find parts, help aliens go home.
At that time, Walshaw's idea was very novel, but the most important thing was the time problem, and within the next 5 weeks, Walshaw even moved the company's equipment home, saving time on the way back and forth, and making games every day except eating and sleeping. After working day and night, the game finally came out. But I didn't expect that this would be the key to crushing Atari.
Non-stop marketing began, opening up popularity with the slogan "ET needs the help of human friends", which was broadcast in newspapers, magazines and television for several weeks, spending a total of $5 million on publicity. Director Spielberg even made his own promotional video to advertise the game.
haste makes waste
As expected, the game's sales immediately grabbed the top spot on the billboard charts, but then found irreparable mistakes. Games often end in strange situations, or the characters in the game will get stuck in the potholes, etc., these mistakes have caused players to be disappointed in the game, and the gap between expectations and reality has ruined their interest.
Sales were less than expected, with only 1.5 million copies of the game originally produced, and the lower sales than expected caused the parent company Time Warner's stock price to plummet, indirectly driving the stock prices of other game companies to decline. With a large inventory backlog, huge royalties, and a large number of returns, Indari accumulated a loss of $310 million in the second quarter of 1983. Probably to cover up this black history, Atari buried the remaining ET cassettes in the Mexican desert.
"It's like I'm destroying an industry with hundreds of millions of dollars of capital with coding." Walshaw later recalled that while the game's failure was the trigger that crushed Atari, the background behind it should have been more complicated.
The advent of home computers carved up gaming patronage and the saturation of the home console market forced Atari to continue to lay off employees to reduce expenses, but still could not recover the decline, and finally, Time Warner sold Atari for 240 million in July 1984.
After everything has calmed down
"My life in the game industry is over." Woshaw, who suffered a great defeat, briefly left the technology industry and then returned to the team as a game experience and director, but the subsequent work has lost his charm and cannot get any sense of achievement. He was no longer enthusiastic about creation, but he could not find an alternative, which made him fall into a frustrated circle.
"Maybe my heart still wants to make up for the trauma and loss caused by creating ET games." In 2008, he finally found a solution and trained to become a psychotherapist. He derisively calls himself a "Silicon Valley therapist" and uses his own huge failure stories as a prescription to boost patients, arguing that engineers and therapists are in some ways "systems analysts," but the hardware they parse is much more complex.
Dig into the past
In 2014, millions of ET game stocks buried in the Mexican desert were dug up in 1983, which provided Walshaw with a chance to face failure head-on. "It's like watching the past get dug up again." He said that after 30 years, when he saw these hearts that had been corroded and broken again, an impulse still gushed out of his heart, and he could still feel the original throbbing.
"Is this game really the worst game ever?" Maybe not. But Walshaw believes that the home console industry needs a reason to rout, and ET Games has thus shouldered the "heavy responsibility."
Although ET games are rated as the worst games of all time, another game also made for Walshaw, Yar's Revenge, is also often rated as the best game ever. He also said self-deprecatingly that he was the developer of the most widely rated game. At this point, the legend of E.T. has been pulled down with the passage of time.