His E.T. was once thought to have been responsible for the "Atari Collapse," but the reality is much more complicated.
"Atari", a name that once represented the glory and glory of the video game industry in the 1970s, ushered in a cliff-like decline a decade after its founding.
In early 1983, Atari stopped trading stocks and laid off nearly 1,700 employees in two weeks, and in the years since, the Size of the North American game market, which was originally as high as $3.2 billion, has shrunk to $100 million, a decline of more than 97%, which is also one of the reasons why American players have lost confidence in local games.
When it comes to this great decay 30 years ago, E.T., which was once considered "the worst game in history", is always the first key word that people can think of.
Due to its own poor game quality and exaggerated publicity strategy, "E.T", which holds the famous movie IP, has a huge deviation from people's expectations, and the bad wind reviews have led to thousands of game cartridges being sold slowly, which eventually led to the bankruptcy of Atari.
These uninvited, attesting to atari's shame and decay, were eventually packed up and buried under a landfill in Alamogordo, New Mexico.
Years later, the specific gameplay and details of the game may have been forgotten, but many people still think that it is the fuse of the "Atari Crash" incident. In April 2014, organized by Microsoft, a bulldozer drove into the alamogordo landfill to re-dig out the atalica strips that had been sealed for more than 30 years. At that time, many young players rushed to see what the game, which claimed to have "destroyed the North American game industry", looked like.
And for the creator of "E.T." Howard Scott · For Howard Scott Warshaw, this is the excavation of his past.
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Growing up, Walshaw was not a conformist, and he called himself a "wild boy." As a teenager, Walshaw witnessed Pong! The birth and popularity of this Atari originator-level game has been associated with the game ever since. As a student at Tulane University's School of Economics, he eventually chose to pursue a master's degree in computing — primarily because the program didn't require students to write long papers.
After college, Walshaw worked as a systems engineer at Hewlett-Packard, but soon he lost interest in HP's bland job and felt he "wanted more."
At the same time, Atari, which has just launched well-known games such as "Space Invaders" and "Pac-Man", is in the limelight, and its new console VCS (later known as "Atari 2600") has just come out, and it is in urgent need of more popular games to escort it. To attract the best programming talent, Atari regularly hosts hot tub meetings within it – stimulating employee inspiration through baths, alcohol, and cannabis.
Apparently, Atari also "wanted more." In January 1981, Walshaw was introduced by a friend to join the game company that would later make him famous.
"Fame" is not the opposite, although there is no game development experience, but Walshaw's first task after joining Atari is to develop a video game that runs on the new console "Atari 2600". After receiving the task, the ambitious man made a wish: "To develop the best game ever." ”
Soon, Walshaw's wish came true.
The first game Warshaw developed was called Yars' Revenge, a side-scrolling shooter adventure game. It took him 7 months to make, and the game went on for another 5 months of testing and fine-tuning. When it was released in May 1982, Yars' Revenge was a huge success, eventually selling more than 1 million and becoming the most popular Atari 2600 game of all time.
The success of Yars' Revenge won Walshaw the opportunity to develop further at Atari, and a few months later, famed film director Steven Spielberg contacted Walshaw to design a game based on his new film, Raiders of the Lost Ark.
At the time, there was no precedent for a movie to be linked to a game, and the 23-year-old Waschaud was honored to be the first producer to eat crabs.
He spent another 10 months designing the game, programming, testing, feedback, optimizing, and when 10 months later he put the game in front of Spielberg, the big director's first reaction was, "I feel like I've just finished watching a movie." "'Raiders of the Lost Ark' finally lived up to expectations and also achieved millions of sales.
Two million-dollar films in a row proved Walshaw's potential and talent in game design, and he became a star producer within Atari. According to media reports at the time, Walshaw "earns millions a year and is asked for autographs by many game enthusiasts." ”
After the success of Raiders of the Lost Ark, Walshaw rose to prominence, and Atari gradually changed its development strategy. Early Atari often gave employees plenty of time (usually 5-10 months) to produce high-quality games, but with the success of "Raiders of the Lost Ark", they believed that the popular IP was the key to the success of the game, a game of less high quality, through the linkage with well-known IP and the later market promotion, it can also get good sales.
This strategy compressed the time it took at Andaly employees to make games, even if that employee was a star producer at the time.
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Thanks to the success of Raiders of the Lost Ark, Wahlshaw naturally took over the game adaptation of Spielberg's new film E.T. The "E.T" movie was a sensation, setting a record for the highest box office of the film at that time, and Atari, who changed his strategy, naturally would not let go of this opportunity to link up with well-known films.
After a month of bidding, Atari's parent company Warner won the adaptation rights to "E.T" at a high price of more than $20 million. And the responsibility of making the E.T game once again fell to Walshaw.
Wahlshaw (right) and Spielberg
Everyone knows the rest of the story, and this time, Walshaw has never been able to continue to write glory.
The first was a matter of time, as Atari and Spielberg had been arguing for so long over the price of the rights, and in order to release the game before Christmas that year, Walshaw had to complete the production task within five weeks — a journalist at the time jokingly said that this was equivalent to writing and playing a waltz in one minute at the same time.
But a confident Walshaw made a promise to atAri's CEO: "Of course I can." At this time, it was less than 36 hours before he showed the director the concept and basic setting of the game.
In later media interviews, Walshaw always mentioned: "This will always be my most humiliating day." 36 hours later, he presented his game idea for E.T. in front of Spielberg, but initially Spielberg disagreed, asking Walshaw for advice: "Can't you make something like Pac-Man?" ”
Walshaw, who was already famous at this point, retorted: "Can't you make a movie like 'The Day the Earth Stops'?" In the end, Walshaw persuaded the director to accept his setting for the E.T game and completed the production of the game in just 5 weeks.
Walshaw is working on E.T. in the office.
Later, In an interview, Walshaw recalled: "As far as work was concerned, it was the hardest 5 weeks of my life. ”
E.T. was finally produced in early September of that year and, as promised at the time, was released on time before Christmas. At that time, Atari believed that as long as a game had a well-known IP, it invested a certain amount of resources in the later stage, even if the quality of the game itself was not good, it could achieve good sales, so Atari at that time invested more than $5 million in advertising. Walshaw himself frequently attends various promotional events.
In 1982, Warshaw attended the launch of the E.T game in Lendo
But with the release of the game, more and more people found that this so-called "E.T" had all kinds of bugs, problems, and most importantly: it was not fun.
As a result, a large number of Atari game boards were discounted, not only the most famous E.T. but also countless lesser-known but equally inferior quality games. To say that "E.T" was the trigger for Atari's collapse is rather to say that it was the last straw that crushed the camel.
The price of E.T went from $38 to $8
With layoffs, losses, and slow sales of the game, parent company Warner had to spin off Atari in 1983. Once the legendary producer Woshaw, he also lost his job.
In the years since Atari's departure, Walshaw has experimented with writing, videography, and even real estate. He has compiled his game production experience into related books, and even made a documentary called "Once Upon a Time at Atari", which contains interviews and stories of game designers in Atari's heyday.
In 2011, Walshaw, who had received psychotherapy, earned a master's degree in counseling psychology from the University of Kennedy and became a psychotherapist, working in a private practice that specialized in stressing couples and programmers.
But making games has always been the happiest thing he thinks, and even though he has left Atari, when talking about the negative reviews that making the E.T game has brought him, he still thinks: "The failure of E.T is really nothing compared to losing his job at Atari. ”
But in the end, Walshaw didn't make a fourth game either.
When the game disk of "E.T" was dug out by the excavator as the "end of the era" and "the fuse that caused the collapse of the industry" many years later, Walshaw once again received attention, and he himself was invited to the excavation site at that time to witness his work reappear.
But just like Atari's founder, Nolan Bushnell once said: "When you talk about something like the decline of the electronics industry, the detailed analysis of the reasons is a very complex thing, and then there needs to be a representative symbol." ”
Unfortunately, "E.T" became such a symbol, and as its initiator, Walshaw was often "mentioned in passing" when people talked about it. But his feelings about E.T. and making games have always been mixed, and although he has been out of the game industry for many years, he is optimistic when he hears the remark that "E.T is the worst game":
"Now, I kind of like that because My Revenge of Yars was once considered one of the best games, so if E.T was the worst, I was the designer with the biggest wind span in history."
*References:
1.《The man who made the “worst” video game in history》 The Hustle
2.《The man who made 'the worst video game in history'》 BBC News
3.《Total Failure: The World's Worst Video Game》 NPR News