As a reminder, Activision was formed in part because they felt they were being mistreated by Atari. Well, looking at how they're doing now, that apple chose to stay very close to that particular tree.
That analogy would work better if the brand hadn't died and then gotten resurrected. All of the Activision founders had left the company by around 1984 and by 1988 the name was no longer even in use. The Activision we know now didn't really start until Bobby Kotick and co bought the brand in the early nineties because they wanted something with some recognition they could bank on.
@@tonybones5509 Can a computer make you cry? We may never know. But seeing the path Electronic Arts took over the decades might make one get a little misty eyed from what they became.
"We are passionate about our games, we are leaving this greedy giant corporation that is flooding the market with soulless games because all they care is money. We will never be like that!" Activision in the 80's
@@Noperare Also Activision: goes broke and gets bought up by Bobby Kotick, Lord of Destruction, who then turns them into a soulless mill and uses them to buy up other passionate game developers and turn them into soulless mills; it's like the system rewards greed and exterminates creativity and passion.
@@Kukaahi Well that's because generally the programmers, Artist or what ever have a degree of pride about their work and thus want to do the best work they can, while management can be divorced from this process and thus give the development team unreasonable goals. It generally isn't that developers are incompetent but rather those in charge have them do things way too fast (nothing good comes from rushing), with not enough money, with no clear direction or some combination of these 3.
They sega'd themselves. I.e go from hardware manufacturer to publisher infamous for publishing a lot of shit (Sega atleast has Yakuza and Atlus though)
@@stevethepocket The funny thing to me about Atari is that it's passed around due to its already burned legacy from *4 fucking decades* ago. If you were born the day Atari figuratively died you'd be old enough now to be a Dad with grown ass kids.
@@LOLquendoTV Sorry for the late comment, but the funniest thing about *that* Atari is that it has nothing in common with the Atari that made the 2600 and all the other games; it's just rebranded Infogrames that for one reason or another decided to buy Atari's trademark. It's like if Ubisoft randomly changed its name to Coleco
Almost as if the producer doesn't understand the planning and programming of a video game 🤔 But seriously it really is the producers fault most of the time when they push the game to come out much sooner than the developer wanted.
There is a reason why there is always a push for the holiday season. Most people are gearing up for Christmas shopping, and they know kids all want the latest and greatest new toy/game/doohicky, so they always try to hit that post-thanksgiving time frame since thats when lists/shopping usually begins.
Spielberg wanted a pacman clone like alien movie to game, he was convinced other wise by a guy knowing he was on a tight deadline Spielberg was most likely correct.
Someone said video games were different than other toys because they could sell year-round. Pac-Man came out in March-April 1982 and sold well. But the mentality that it had to be ready by Thanksgiving for Christmas was imbedded. I think Space Invaders came out in March 1980 and it's what made the Atari have 70%+ market share. Of course that programmer had been working on it even before they got the licensing rights so had a head start.
Another thing Atari did was dump undesirable inventory (like Basic Math or the early games using the Keypad controllers like Hunt and Score and Brain Games) on retailers if they wanted the hot new games. When Atari was the hottest name on the block retailers begrudgingly accepted this, but as soon as they started to fail with E.T. it made retailers less likely to tolerate this and it soured them on video games, laying the seeds for the crash.
Huh, interesting. The whole 83 "crash" is fascinating. Demand for good games didn't stop, and there was ok stuff coming it, especially on C64 and early home computers. Even atari had great games like Chopper Command, Star Master and Pitfall, with H.E.R.O just around the corner....and the 8-bit console era was what, 18 months away? Seems like a completely preventable crash.
@@davidprice7162 Funny enough, the Crash didn't really affect PC gaming at all, since at that time it was essentially a completely different thing from console gaming, with almost none of the games and developers being shared.
I think we had 3 layers of disappointment and loss of confidence: (1) Consumers who didn't like Pac-Man, Donkey Kong and E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial games for Atari, (2) Investors who didn't like it that 3rd party competition and Atari not making the best games resulted in their forecast of profits increasing by 50% to increasing by 15%, and (3) Retailers that over-ordered because of not getting their previous orders due to a chip shortage as well as retailers that wanted to get into the video game business but didn't know what they were doing so got a lot of stock that didn't move especially from 3rd parties. (Both Atari and Imagic had a return or exchange policy, so returning stock to those companies shouldn't have been a problem.) I hadn't heard that Atari forced retailers to take games that didn't sell. I figured they didn't want to remove from their catalog games from 1977-1979 that weren't selling, to make the claim they had more games than other systems and these old, ugly games took up shelf space. Claiming they could play a lot of games seems to be the strategy for Mattel (Intellivision) and ColecoVision by offering backwards-compatible plugins to play Atari 2600 games.
That's funny, they did that all the way back in the early days of movies...it was called block-booking, to get the studio's new hot movie, you had to run the crappy ones...
@@christopherlundgren1700 the huge amounts of DLC beginning in the 20th century did a lot to both improve and ruin the experience, if you could afford it all.
1:17 I know I’m sounding really nerdy when I say this, but the amount Atari payed for the video game rights was actually double the budget of the film itself. Yes, they payed twice the amount of what the film cost, so by that logic, the game should have been twice as good as the film. That is an Oof if I’ve ever seen one.
It turns out that after losing their programmers, they farmed out games for the 5200 in 1982, and 2600 in 1983 to 3rd parties. Perhaps that's why Jungle Hunt and Moon Patrol looked so good (even if I didn't like the controls of the former). The idea that carts had to be a one-programmer's job with no help in graphic design or sound and music should have been put to rest, especially if the lead programmer isn't getting credit.
Don't forget the movie scene where the Government agent grabbed ET, set him down in some random house and just wandered off, leaving ET to just casually bumble back outside. But admittedly, the movie's "ET falls down a pit for the hundredth time" scene was more iconic. ^_^
Irony: the main game for Christmas was called "Pitfall!" They say that changing the pixel checker might have solved that problem or putting E.T. clear of the pit upon leaving. I'm told someone did fix that for some kind of home brew version.
Actually, from a design perspective. I feel like if I were a 1980s game dev tasked with making a crude ET game in a few weeks ... I might have made an entire game that was just the bike chase. But would a recognizable version of that be possible on before even the NES?
Yeah like - have a blob that’s supposed to be a bicycle controlled by the player, have a blob that’s supposed to be a car chasing you, have (random position) trees zoom in from right to left to make it look like a high-speed chase, and make the score count up the longer you go. If you hit a tree or get caught, you restart the game. Seems like it would be both easier to make and a better game? But then, that’s hindsight for you. I mean for one, we probably know more about the movie than Warshaw did at the time (he didn’t exactly have time to rewatch it every day). And we also have 30 years of collective game design knowledge on him, knowledge that only came about because of high-profile failures like these. Also stuff like “market desires” - people might not have wanted an ultra basic arcade-style game that has like five seconds of unique gameplay as a major movie tie-in. Of course, the market didn’t want what actually happened either. But again, hindsight.
@MetaruPX So I just played a "bugfix" version of ET. Pit detection is moved to the feet, all movement costs 0 energy by default (normal settings are moved to the black and white switch) and socring is now consistent with the manual. I found it a bit too easy so I turned on energy loss while hovering and running and now it feels like a proper hunt game. And I was skilled at the game as a kid already.
@MetaruPX I dunno about easy to fix- I looked over the notes of the person who implemented all the fixes and memory contraints were tight, as far as building a patch that fits in the same cartridge space goes. It'd probably be doable for me, but about the only thing I'd want to fix could be done with just two bytes which is a trivial change. Fixing the scoring almost looked to me to be more trouble than it was worth. And I'll say it again, I already liked the base game, and read all the material for the game including the warning notes about holding up while coming out of holes. I just never played with FBI or Scientists as a kid because I wanted to actually win the game more often than lose. As to the idea of having the game be just the bicycle scene, I'd have loved that too. Those are pretty common game formats in the Atari 2600 library as well.
You should do a "What Happun?" on "Zillion", Sega's failure attempt at a multimedia franchise launch. They tried to tie together two games to an anime series called "Red Photon Zillion" and even had the Light Phaser gun for the Master System be based on the design of gun in the anime. In the end the anime only lasted 31 episodes (only 5 of which were seen outside Japan) and one 45 min OVA, the games didn't sell well and are now almost completely forgotten. In the end it ended up as the answer to the trivia question: "Why was the Light Phaser in the Master System Shaped like that?".
Nintendo: Can you Americanize our console? Atari: No, we're done with third party contracts from all you amateurs. * Several months later Atari: *What in the goddamn...?*
"the game had to be finished and ready to go in five weeks" me who doesn't know much abt how video games are made: oof, that doesn't feel like a lot of time. but, i guess the graphics and programming were way simpler back then and this guy was pretty experienced, so maybe it's not that bad a time limit - "in the early 80s most games could take anywhere from 5 to 10 months to complete" me: oh. oh N O that said, warshaw seems like a decent guy tho. gotta appreciate a dev who owns up to their mistakes
@@Sonichero151 I watched Watchmojo’s video on the Lord of the Rings games best to worst and the footage they got for Conquest was a joke because they were not showing any story or they just played bad on purpose and besides that game is a blast, I know it has many flaws but I still enjoy the game even to this day because it’s really fun (well for me anyway).
When the cool kids were rocking their NESs in the late 80s, I had a second-hand Atari and I'd regularly go to junk shops for cheap cartridges. I had ET and it was as incomprehensible and unfun to me as is widely reported. This was even taking into account that I was a fairly game-savvy kid with a lot of those kinds of games that I just had to figure out on my own since there's never any packaging or instructions when you're buying games for a couple dollars that someone probably sold for a dime. Fell into my share of pits.
The worst were those games that used the B&W/Color switch to do something for the game. Who'd have thought to toggle that without the instructions? And I don't think they even have that switch on later versions or flashbacks!
I remember playing Airlock for the Atari 2600. Airlock was produced by Hell if I Remember Industries. And Airlock did indeed suck sour frog ass. I brought it back for a refund less than two days later.
@@tjmauser6954 The early days of all-star programmers were wild. The show Code Monkeys wasn't too much of an exaggeration of the inflated lifestyle those guys were living. Meanwhile over in the UK you had studios like Imagine Software, where the guys were all driving around in Ferraris while failing to ship games on time and the company was crumbling around them.
I feel like Atari's Godawful port of Pac-Man, which was a prototype they just released because they wanted the money from it right then, Was at least as much of a factor in the console crash of the early '80s. E.T. was actually fairly advanced for a 2600 game. You need to understand that most of them didn't even have title screens or music that resembled a licensed property. It was not really user friendly for those who didn't read instructions at the time, so it was pretty safe to say that it was a confusing mess, although how the Raiders of the Lost Ark game didn't face the same scrutiny is beyond me. As an American, I will say that even in my case, the 'video game crash' wasn't a crash so much as it was a temporary transition. I got my Commodore 64 in that period, and I was gamin' strong until the NES and Master System came out here.
@@pentelegomenon1175 TBH I've always like the Japanese term for the '83 Crash over "The Great Video Game Crash of 1983", which is "The Atari Shock". It pretty much sums up the situation more clearly than the broad implications of "Great Video Game Crash", the relative collapse of a major industry titan who didn't kill off video games world wide (Japan and Europe were still going strong), but definitely significantly shrunk the US Video Game market and left a big open hole for Nintendo to swoop into - making the Video Game industry predominantly Japanese lead until the release of the Xbox almost 2 decades later
@@magnafoxodyssey2127 The Atari Shock rolls off the tongue a lot better I do admit (Plus you also have to factored in that the US and Japan has a symbiotic relationship with each other since the end of WWII)
I think it's a myth that Pac-Man was a prototype, alpha or beta. It just wasn't that good, and was put on a 4K ROM (like Donkey Kong) to reduce costs. And considering the time, kids would play anything like Pac-Man, even the hand-held Coleco Tabletop Arcades. What's amazing is that Donkey Kong for Atari and Pac-Man were still top-sellers when E.T. fell off the top-ten chart, shown in this video. 8:52. They and Raiders of the Lost Ark were disappointments. I liked adventure games, (and Haunted House could have been better having 1 screen per room, like Adventure and Superman, instead of 4 screens for 6 rooms each). I played three Scott Adams text adventure games for the VIC-20 back in the day and was able to win eventually without help. As for Raiders of the Lost Ark I couldn't discover anything new on my own that I didn't read in the manual. One hint is wrong since you lose points by using the grenades, (the game doesn't tell you that!) and the gun with bullets isn't supposed to be used to solve problems either. Apparently kids called Atari for them to send them a walkthrough. Also he took away some points so Indy can never get enough to reach the top of the Ark like he's supposed to. I finally read online how to dig years later to win, as well as to find the hidden Yar. This is another game that sold because of its name and Atari's name. It's amazing to think games that sold over 1 million could be failures, but this one (and the other three) are because of disappointing consumers and perhaps over-production. PS: I think they were able to move 1-2 million more Pac-Man games by bundling them with new consoles in 1983.
I appreciate the time spent pointing out that ET was a symptom as much as a cause. Another funny thing, people talk about the crash of '83 as though it was global, it was really more localised to NA. Over here (GB) the industry was *ascendant* on home micros, which is why things like Rare happened.
Maybe trashy games from 3rd-parties that retailers bought and couldn't sell didn't make it to the PAL format and Europe and Brazil? I heard they were 1 year behind.
"I have a E.T. cartridge in my office. It has five price stickers. The first one's $49.95, the last one's 99c." Betcha it has a _very_ different price tag now.
surprisingly a lot of the history of computers and video gaming is scattered around Texas, The 8 Bit Guy has a bunch of really nice videos exploring parts of the history, and even visiting some of the locations from the building that birthed Duke Nukem to Texas Instruments and a bunch of other early manufacturers and game company offices.
You know, there are a lot of games that come out and are promptly forgotten. This absolutely trash game came out and ended up being blamed for the video game crash and then had the whole buried in the desert thing. That's a legacy far greater than most games could hope to achieve. It's like how The Room will be eternally remembered while, idk, Tag or something will be forgotten to time
I'm aware that they found the buried games in 2014. it's 2021 now and it still sounds 100% surreal to hear that. That whole entire premise was literally a myth for almost 30 years. The AVGN Movie made fun of it before it was even found out that the games were actually down there.
Watching the episode, it's kind of fascinating how so many things about this game have transcended into legend, although not a legend anyone would be proud of (no, folks, it didn't singlehandedly caused the videogame crash of 1983, neither Atari buried millions of unsold cartridges in the desert). Also, kind of depressing how mismanagement, employee mistreatment, unreasonable development times and unrealistic sales expectations were already features of the industry back then.
I blame some of that on lack of competition. If Mattel got Space Invaders, then they might have become the dominant player and Atari would have had to come out with a better system (and games) to compete. But the Atari's 1977 system was just good enough and sold 10 million through the end of 1981 (before Pac-Man) and another 5 million after that, compared to 3 million Intellivisions in its life. Even with one joystick button and a cheaper processing chip than what it could have had, programmers were able to squeeze out more from that system to keep it going. (The Odyssey² compared favorably to Atari in 1978-9, but its games never got any better.) When Atari VCS came out in 1977, industry people expected it to be replaced in a few years, as previous generation one systems were. But somehow they didn't present that to consumers or do a "give Atari to your little brother" campaign to sell the latest system as being so much better.
I love how bandersnacth from dark mirror plot was a game developer was driven insane and to kill and that took 4-5 months of crunch. Yet this real life example was 5 weeks
Man, just imagine if Atari had kept all those unsold original cartridges on a pallet somewhere instead of just dumping them. Not only would they not have become the butt of jokes, but today they would have been able to make millions selling those untouched game boxes to the scammers over at WATA.
What I think about is how Hollywood breaks down sets, then decides whether to store them (for a sequel) or just trash them. Just imagine if you could go to England and see the sets for _The Empire Strikes Back!_ But they didn't think people would want to tour sets! Even if they moved sets (or video games) to a warehouse somewhere, storage costs money.
Great job man! This now brings the total number of videos to get the story right to like, uh, just 4? It's always good to have a big channel correctly cover this stuff. A lot of the other videos out there get some facts wrong.
Yeah. It was quite a messy development that it was a miracle that it came out and didn't flop. Sure, the practice of releasing episodic characters stories lead to some players leave a bad taste in their mouth but what can Tabata do when Square gave him a strict deadline whilst piecing together what Nomura left on the project. Just concepts without having a great foundation on the actual game itself (The game engine) Anyway, I am glad that the game aged well. I hear nothing but praise when the Royal Edition came out. There are still who are dissatisfied but they are only the minority. Well, as far as the various Final Fantasy communities in social media are concerned that is.
On the 20th anniversary of ET, another company bought the ET games rights and released about 6 different games based on ET on formats like the Gameboy Color, PlayStation, PC and GBA. None of them did well, and that company New Kid Co. went under shortly afterwards. The 40th anniversary is coming up if a games company feels like they’ve had enough of this world.
I have cried like a small child to maybe 3 games. Not a lot, but haven't been moved to tears by any of Ol' Stevo's films either. Hell, I've shed far more tears watching anime than any of the "real grown up art forms".
I got a bit misty-eyed when ET damned near died in that Government lab, but I actually lost a few tears over Schindler's List. Damn...I was _so_ sure that the little girl in the red coat was going to get out of that ghetto alive, too. :(
The funny thing is, even if ET had been a Pac-Man clone, given how the 2600 did pac-man, I have a feeling they'd have just been a different flavor of screwed.
The birth Activision: Former ex-Atari employee's who felt mistreated You became the one thing you were sent to destroy.... Ironic. (Honestly, I first found out about this whole story not from AVGN, or X-Play, but another from the G4 show... Code Monkey's, and if you know the show, you know it was GameAVision who put the blame on Atari... and that's why they don't exist as they once were lol)
I was actually there when they unearthed the landfill since I was born in Alamogordo. Very *very* windy day. I'm incredibly disappointed the City of Alamogordo sold all the carts instead of keeping at least one for our local museum...
Really with more fleshing out and development time, E.T. would have been an alright game. The concept was sound, the execution just fell short because of that tight deadline.
Raiders of the Lost Ark - with its generous nine-month development - wasn't exactly the best Atari 2600 game (and it certainly paled in comparison to Warshaw's magnum opus, Yar's Revenge), but at least Raiders was quite playable, perhaps even enjoyable and actually _beatable._ I always had trouble figuring out _which exact pixel_ I had to drop the bag of gold on so the giant bearded head _wouldn't_ telekinetically kill Indy, but that was the only distinctly sucky part of Raiders. Raiders beat ET by _leagues._
@@BloodyBay Today, (or three years ago) I played E.T. and finished multiple rounds before dying from lack of energy. I know little kids couldn't do that. But I never learned anything in _Raiders of the Lost Ark_ that wasn't in the manual. I finally won it after reading how to online over a decade later. Even though it sold 1 million, I think this was a disappointment and failure too that only sold because of its name and is worse than E.T. He should have made it an action game, like chasing the truck.
written before viewing: here we are, the media's favourite infamous villain of the video game crash, the face of scapegoats everywhere that were more innocent then they appear, but were still sacrificed anyway
The ET species makes a small cameo appearance in Revenge of the Sith, kinda confirming that a fictionalized version of Earth exists somewhere within the SW universe
No matter how many videos/docs there are about the infamous E.T. game, I always enjoy watching them cause the whole journey is just insane. Even the documentary 'Atari: Game Over' was enjoyable to watch as well.
This story really does put into perspective how vastly different game development is now. Given five weeks with *today's* tools, even a solo indie dev could make something bigger and better than not just the E.T. game, but every other game on the Atari.
Hey Matt, you should do a Wha Happun of the infamous Atari 2600 port of Pac-Man with details on how Atari fought up against Pac-Man clones during development. (13:52)
0:41 its funny, I was at Portland Retro Gaming Expo a few years ago, and Howard Scott Warshaw was signing autographs right across the aisle from James Rolfe, who was signing posters of the movie.
My programmer buddy used to work with Howard @ Atari. He stated that Howard negotiated a contract to get paid for cartridges Manufactured, not sold. So he knew he was making $$ and mailed it in. No stressing over quality. Dan Oliver always said he was a “lucky bastard”. Again it was still Atari who screwed up and paid a guy based on units produced and not on sold.
Well, when you drive off all the good programmers, I guess that means the one who remained gets to set his own terms! But of course they went to third-party developers for the 5200 games and in 1983 games for the 2600.
I always thought Spielberg was open-minded about videogamee, since Medal of Honor was his baby. Also ironic that Activision is at the root of ruin in the video game industry since the beginning.
Twenty-seven video games for Atari sold over 1 million, and only 4 were disappointments. I don't fault Activision at all, unless you say they kept Atari alive so people didn't buy a different system and Atari didn't retire it and put out a new system earlier. If Activision hadn't existed, then Atari still would have made Pac-Man, Raiders of the Lost Ark, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial and a bunch of junk like Swordquest and RealSports in 1982, but likely less consoles would have sold without Activision games to play on it.
@@sandal_thong8631 I made that comment 2 years ago, I can't remember the context of why I stated that nor do I care to rewatch the video now to find out why I said that.
@@rubz1390 Activision wasn't mentioned much in the video, but there must have been plenty of hate for Activision in 2021 since yours isn't the only comment like that. (There wasn't in 1980-83.)
@@sandal_thong8631 My comment would have been due to something in the video, I haven't bought a COD game in like 15 years so I'm not really that invested in the hate train.
I had this game back then, never figure out what to do until a recent AVGN video were he mentions that there's an actual objective, and a way to finish the game.
Oh crap yeah it’s Saturday i forgot, this will be a great episode but I’ve already heard that this was made in only 6 weeks which would explain why it was in the state it was in 😊
Even if it wasn't millions of copies there, just the fact that there actually, really ended up being a substantial amount of copies of the game in that landfill is pretty amazing.
Well, it looks like they didn't want to drop the prices to sell them, so that's a strategy to keep the prices up. I saw they were trying to sell games from the 1970s on Atari Age for $10 in 1983 rather than remove them from the catalog, even though games like Skydiver and Outlaw made the system look bad, like Odyssey².
Fuh-five weeks?! I knew it had a short dev time mandate but _five weeks?!_ How the sweet, tasty hell did they think _anything_ of quality could be done so fast?! I _wish_ it was that fast to make a video game because if it was ever RPG Maker project I've ever done would have probably actually gotten finished.
WAIT. Wait. So Atari was responsible for Activision? That's a big "yikes" from me. Also, since the E.T game was rushed, it makes me wonder what a finished version of the game could've been like.
It might have been playtested and the pixel-detection would have been better to not fall back in pits. I saw a video about Imagic developing Atlantis and they brought in kids to playtest and say what they felt. Whether anything was changed based on feedback, I don't know.
proud of you
Holy crap it's the historiganngaming
i love your avatar
GAMING HISTORIAN!!! 🤘😛🤘
Cool
This feels like Nick Fury showing up in the end of Iron Man.
As a reminder, Activision was formed in part because they felt they were being mistreated by Atari. Well, looking at how they're doing now, that apple chose to stay very close to that particular tree.
Activision lived long enough to become the villian
Also very differnt people in charge now. We taking about decades.
And Disney was founded by a man who hated how animation companies had more control than individual artists.
That analogy would work better if the brand hadn't died and then gotten resurrected. All of the Activision founders had left the company by around 1984 and by 1988 the name was no longer even in use. The Activision we know now didn't really start until Bobby Kotick and co bought the brand in the early nineties because they wanted something with some recognition they could bank on.
The apple fell far from the tree but rolled back to it
"E.T. was made in 5 weeks" is one of those sentences that just explains everything.
You can't make anything in 5 weeks, except mac and cheese.
They said Chase the Chuckwagon had to be made in under a week.
Idk man if it takes you 5 weeks to make mac n cheese you've got bigger problems@Mintylight
Hearing Activision's origin story and being buried in the layers of irony is something I didn't know I needed.
You should check out the EA mission statement when they formed. Absolutely painful.
Buried? It’s practically in the fucking crust of the Earth at this point
@@tonybones5509 Can a computer make you cry? We may never know.
But seeing the path Electronic Arts took over the decades might make one get a little misty eyed from what they became.
"We are passionate about our games, we are leaving this greedy giant corporation that is flooding the market with soulless games because all they care is money. We will never be like that!" Activision in the 80's
@@Noperare Also Activision: goes broke and gets bought up by Bobby Kotick, Lord of Destruction, who then turns them into a soulless mill and uses them to buy up other passionate game developers and turn them into soulless mills; it's like the system rewards greed and exterminates creativity and passion.
1:59 died seeing those 9 pixels generously labelled as a "snake" 🐍
what a Hissance....
*throws cartridge in landfill
That snake emoji on my iphone 11 probably takes up more space than half of the entire ET game
@@b-mansly7550 If that snake is a 32x32 icon, than it would be.
Well why the heck not; if 6 pixels can be charitably called a "hat".
The more of this series I watch, the more I realize that "management" is Wha Happun.
@@Kukaahi Well that's because generally the programmers, Artist or what ever have a degree of pride about their work and thus want to do the best work they can, while management can be divorced from this process and thus give the development team unreasonable goals. It generally isn't that developers are incompetent but rather those in charge have them do things way too fast (nothing good comes from rushing), with not enough money, with no clear direction or some combination of these 3.
@@SampoPaalanen There's a reason why some call it manglement instead of management
Executive meddling is the nemesis to good art.
I believe that Atari itself deserves its own "Wha Happun?" video, considering the the past few years.
Given how long Atari's been around in one state or another, it could probably support an entire Wha Happun mini-series.
They sega'd themselves. I.e go from hardware manufacturer to publisher infamous for publishing a lot of shit (Sega atleast has Yakuza and Atlus though)
@@stevethepocket I can explain that in one word: Driv3r
@@stevethepocket The funny thing to me about Atari is that it's passed around due to its already burned legacy from *4 fucking decades* ago.
If you were born the day Atari figuratively died you'd be old enough now to be a Dad with grown ass kids.
@@LOLquendoTV Sorry for the late comment, but the funniest thing about *that* Atari is that it has nothing in common with the Atari that made the 2600 and all the other games; it's just rebranded Infogrames that for one reason or another decided to buy Atari's trademark. It's like if Ubisoft randomly changed its name to Coleco
I'm starting to notice a pattern! Seems like any time there's a push to release something for the holiday season, it always ends in disaster.
Almost as if the producer doesn't understand the planning and programming of a video game 🤔
But seriously it really is the producers fault most of the time when they push the game to come out much sooner than the developer wanted.
There is a reason why there is always a push for the holiday season. Most people are gearing up for Christmas shopping, and they know kids all want the latest and greatest new toy/game/doohicky, so they always try to hit that post-thanksgiving time frame since thats when lists/shopping usually begins.
Spielberg wanted a pacman clone like alien movie to game, he was convinced other wise by a guy knowing he was on a tight deadline Spielberg was most likely correct.
It didn't for Metroid Prime 2 and Sonic 2 at least. Though those were sequels that reused a great deal of assets from the previous game.
Someone said video games were different than other toys because they could sell year-round. Pac-Man came out in March-April 1982 and sold well. But the mentality that it had to be ready by Thanksgiving for Christmas was imbedded. I think Space Invaders came out in March 1980 and it's what made the Atari have 70%+ market share. Of course that programmer had been working on it even before they got the licensing rights so had a head start.
Another thing Atari did was dump undesirable inventory (like Basic Math or the early games using the Keypad controllers like Hunt and Score and Brain Games) on retailers if they wanted the hot new games. When Atari was the hottest name on the block retailers begrudgingly accepted this, but as soon as they started to fail with E.T. it made retailers less likely to tolerate this and it soured them on video games, laying the seeds for the crash.
Yeah it can't be understated just how much of the crash came down to retailers and the like being sick of Atari's shit.
Huh, interesting. The whole 83 "crash" is fascinating. Demand for good games didn't stop, and there was ok stuff coming it, especially on C64 and early home computers. Even atari had great games like Chopper Command, Star Master and Pitfall, with H.E.R.O just around the corner....and the 8-bit console era was what, 18 months away?
Seems like a completely preventable crash.
@@davidprice7162
Funny enough, the Crash didn't really affect PC gaming at all, since at that time it was essentially a completely different thing from console gaming, with almost none of the games and developers being shared.
I think we had 3 layers of disappointment and loss of confidence:
(1) Consumers who didn't like Pac-Man, Donkey Kong and E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial games for Atari,
(2) Investors who didn't like it that 3rd party competition and Atari not making the best games resulted in their forecast of profits increasing by 50% to increasing by 15%, and
(3) Retailers that over-ordered because of not getting their previous orders due to a chip shortage as well as retailers that wanted to get into the video game business but didn't know what they were doing so got a lot of stock that didn't move especially from 3rd parties. (Both Atari and Imagic had a return or exchange policy, so returning stock to those companies shouldn't have been a problem.)
I hadn't heard that Atari forced retailers to take games that didn't sell. I figured they didn't want to remove from their catalog games from 1977-1979 that weren't selling, to make the claim they had more games than other systems and these old, ugly games took up shelf space. Claiming they could play a lot of games seems to be the strategy for Mattel (Intellivision) and ColecoVision by offering backwards-compatible plugins to play Atari 2600 games.
That's funny, they did that all the way back in the early days of movies...it was called block-booking, to get the studio's new hot movie, you had to run the crappy ones...
A new record for the longest amount of time between release and appearing on Wha Happun? by near 39 years!
WW2: Wha Happun
@@SerPinkKnight Wha Happun?: The Big Bang
@@SAPProd The Universe was changed numerous times during development, and after eons of delays, finally released as an unbalanced glitchy mess.
@@christopherlundgren1700 the huge amounts of DLC beginning in the 20th century did a lot to both improve and ruin the experience, if you could afford it all.
Lol it's kind of odd seeing you post without a gif of Phobos attached to it
1:17 I know I’m sounding really nerdy when I say this, but the amount Atari payed for the video game rights was actually double the budget of the film itself. Yes, they payed twice the amount of what the film cost, so by that logic, the game should have been twice as good as the film.
That is an Oof if I’ve ever seen one.
More like *THE* OOF
There's literally nothing positive in this story
3:00 dear god, how did anyone at Atari ever expect the game to be finished with that amount of crunch time!?
Crunch culture on the video game industry started with this game 😂
it was self-inflicted...
It turns out that after losing their programmers, they farmed out games for the 5200 in 1982, and 2600 in 1983 to 3rd parties. Perhaps that's why Jungle Hunt and Moon Patrol looked so good (even if I didn't like the controls of the former). The idea that carts had to be a one-programmer's job with no help in graphic design or sound and music should have been put to rest, especially if the lead programmer isn't getting credit.
Still remember when the landfill rumor was confirmed and all those buried copies were rediscovered like if it was yesterday.
the Landfill wasn't a rumor, it was a well known in the 80s. And ET was only a small portion of that was dug up
I heard that some of those cartridges were still playable.
@@absolutez3r019 a lot of people were dismissing it as a myth
So in a way, the development of E.T was the most intense Game Jam of all time.
We all remember our favorite scene in ET, when he fell in a dozen holes and flew out of them with his neck.
Such good cinema.
Don't forget the movie scene where the Government agent grabbed ET, set him down in some random house and just wandered off, leaving ET to just casually bumble back outside.
But admittedly, the movie's "ET falls down a pit for the hundredth time" scene was more iconic. ^_^
Irony: the main game for Christmas was called "Pitfall!" They say that changing the pixel checker might have solved that problem or putting E.T. clear of the pit upon leaving. I'm told someone did fix that for some kind of home brew version.
Actually, from a design perspective. I feel like if I were a 1980s game dev tasked with making a crude ET game in a few weeks ... I might have made an entire game that was just the bike chase. But would a recognizable version of that be possible on before even the NES?
Sounds like you made Paperboy but cut out the newspaper bit.
@@viscountrainbows6452 my imaginary game would have probably made more money
Yeah like - have a blob that’s supposed to be a bicycle controlled by the player, have a blob that’s supposed to be a car chasing you, have (random position) trees zoom in from right to left to make it look like a high-speed chase, and make the score count up the longer you go. If you hit a tree or get caught, you restart the game. Seems like it would be both easier to make and a better game?
But then, that’s hindsight for you. I mean for one, we probably know more about the movie than Warshaw did at the time (he didn’t exactly have time to rewatch it every day). And we also have 30 years of collective game design knowledge on him, knowledge that only came about because of high-profile failures like these. Also stuff like “market desires” - people might not have wanted an ultra basic arcade-style game that has like five seconds of unique gameplay as a major movie tie-in.
Of course, the market didn’t want what actually happened either. But again, hindsight.
@MetaruPX So I just played a "bugfix" version of ET. Pit detection is moved to the feet, all movement costs 0 energy by default (normal settings are moved to the black and white switch) and socring is now consistent with the manual. I found it a bit too easy so I turned on energy loss while hovering and running and now it feels like a proper hunt game. And I was skilled at the game as a kid already.
@MetaruPX I dunno about easy to fix- I looked over the notes of the person who implemented all the fixes and memory contraints were tight, as far as building a patch that fits in the same cartridge space goes. It'd probably be doable for me, but about the only thing I'd want to fix could be done with just two bytes which is a trivial change. Fixing the scoring almost looked to me to be more trouble than it was worth. And I'll say it again, I already liked the base game, and read all the material for the game including the warning notes about holding up while coming out of holes. I just never played with FBI or Scientists as a kid because I wanted to actually win the game more often than lose.
As to the idea of having the game be just the bicycle scene, I'd have loved that too. Those are pretty common game formats in the Atari 2600 library as well.
You should do a "What Happun?" on "Zillion", Sega's failure attempt at a multimedia franchise launch. They tried to tie together two games to an anime series called "Red Photon Zillion" and even had the Light Phaser gun for the Master System be based on the design of gun in the anime. In the end the anime only lasted 31 episodes (only 5 of which were seen outside Japan) and one 45 min OVA, the games didn't sell well and are now almost completely forgotten. In the end it ended up as the answer to the trivia question: "Why was the Light Phaser in the Master System Shaped like that?".
The multimedia rollout may have been a flop, but damn I loved those games.
At the very least, the anime would mark the debut of a little known animation studio called PRODUCTION I.G.
Nintendo: Can you Americanize our console?
Atari: No, we're done with third party contracts from all you amateurs.
* Several months later
Atari: *What in the goddamn...?*
Nintendo after being rejected by Atari: Fine, I'll do it myself
“The most important game we’ll ever make”
Yeah it was “important” alright…..
...in the same way that Bubonic Plague was important to medieval Europe, I'd say!
Or would that comparison be an insult to Bubonic Plague?
"the game had to be finished and ready to go in five weeks"
me who doesn't know much abt how video games are made: oof, that doesn't feel like a lot of time. but, i guess the graphics and programming were way simpler back then and this guy was pretty experienced, so maybe it's not that bad a time limit -
"in the early 80s most games could take anywhere from 5 to 10 months to complete"
me: oh. oh N O
that said, warshaw seems like a decent guy tho. gotta appreciate a dev who owns up to their mistakes
Fun fact: The 2600 was AWFUL to create graphics for.
czcams.com/video/sJFnWZH5FXc/video.html explains it pretty well.
I met the guy at a convention, great dude
How about a “What Happun” on Lord of the Rings Conquest because it was one Pandemic Studios last games before EA pulled an EA on them
I enjoyed that game lol, the concept was really cool
@@SwooshJush83 bro that game was a blast and also it holds a special place in my heart for the first PS3 game I owned
I loved that game. I still think its fun to play.
The reviews it got are still burned in my head and made me sad....... my friend and I who were very big Battlefront 2 fans loved the game.....
@@Sonichero151 I watched Watchmojo’s video on the Lord of the Rings games best to worst and the footage they got for Conquest was a joke because they were not showing any story or they just played bad on purpose and besides that game is a blast, I know it has many flaws but I still enjoy the game even to this day because it’s really fun (well for me anyway).
When the cool kids were rocking their NESs in the late 80s, I had a second-hand Atari and I'd regularly go to junk shops for cheap cartridges. I had ET and it was as incomprehensible and unfun to me as is widely reported. This was even taking into account that I was a fairly game-savvy kid with a lot of those kinds of games that I just had to figure out on my own since there's never any packaging or instructions when you're buying games for a couple dollars that someone probably sold for a dime. Fell into my share of pits.
The worst were those games that used the B&W/Color switch to do something for the game. Who'd have thought to toggle that without the instructions? And I don't think they even have that switch on later versions or flashbacks!
Considering the absurdly tight time crunch Warshaw did a damn good job. He must've had a lot of coffee and perhaps a lot of cocaine
Assuming that Warshaw had a connection to Hollywood through Spielberg, he must've gotten a decent supply of the latter.
It's like this series as a whole has been building up towards this fated day.
Can't wait to see the Gizmondo episode!
I'm sure there will be a PS5 episode.
"No name companies you couldn't possibly name" That checks out
I remember playing Airlock for the Atari 2600. Airlock was produced by Hell if I Remember Industries. And Airlock did indeed suck sour frog ass. I brought it back for a refund less than two days later.
Something missed when discussing why HSW took the ET job: he was very, very well compensated for his efforts and negotiated that upfront.
Oh thank god
@@tjmauser6954 The early days of all-star programmers were wild. The show Code Monkeys wasn't too much of an exaggeration of the inflated lifestyle those guys were living. Meanwhile over in the UK you had studios like Imagine Software, where the guys were all driving around in Ferraris while failing to ship games on time and the company was crumbling around them.
I feel like Atari's Godawful port of Pac-Man, which was a prototype they just released because they wanted the money from it right then, Was at least as much of a factor in the console crash of the early '80s. E.T. was actually fairly advanced for a 2600 game. You need to understand that most of them didn't even have title screens or music that resembled a licensed property. It was not really user friendly for those who didn't read instructions at the time, so it was pretty safe to say that it was a confusing mess, although how the Raiders of the Lost Ark game didn't face the same scrutiny is beyond me. As an American, I will say that even in my case, the 'video game crash' wasn't a crash so much as it was a temporary transition. I got my Commodore 64 in that period, and I was gamin' strong until the NES and Master System came out here.
Not to mention other parts of the world didn't have a "crash" around that time, gaming was still doing fine in Europe for example.
@@pentelegomenon1175 TBH I've always like the Japanese term for the '83 Crash over "The Great Video Game Crash of 1983", which is "The Atari Shock".
It pretty much sums up the situation more clearly than the broad implications of "Great Video Game Crash", the relative collapse of a major industry titan who didn't kill off video games world wide (Japan and Europe were still going strong), but definitely significantly shrunk the US Video Game market and left a big open hole for Nintendo to swoop into - making the Video Game industry predominantly Japanese lead until the release of the Xbox almost 2 decades later
also there is the new advanced 5200 console that came out. The one with the 360 degree joystick that was ground-break....Dammit It Broke.
@@magnafoxodyssey2127 The Atari Shock rolls off the tongue a lot better I do admit
(Plus you also have to factored in that the US and Japan has a symbiotic relationship with each other since the end of WWII)
I think it's a myth that Pac-Man was a prototype, alpha or beta. It just wasn't that good, and was put on a 4K ROM (like Donkey Kong) to reduce costs. And considering the time, kids would play anything like Pac-Man, even the hand-held Coleco Tabletop Arcades. What's amazing is that Donkey Kong for Atari and Pac-Man were still top-sellers when E.T. fell off the top-ten chart, shown in this video. 8:52. They and Raiders of the Lost Ark were disappointments.
I liked adventure games, (and Haunted House could have been better having 1 screen per room, like Adventure and Superman, instead of 4 screens for 6 rooms each). I played three Scott Adams text adventure games for the VIC-20 back in the day and was able to win eventually without help.
As for Raiders of the Lost Ark I couldn't discover anything new on my own that I didn't read in the manual. One hint is wrong since you lose points by using the grenades, (the game doesn't tell you that!) and the gun with bullets isn't supposed to be used to solve problems either. Apparently kids called Atari for them to send them a walkthrough. Also he took away some points so Indy can never get enough to reach the top of the Ark like he's supposed to. I finally read online how to dig years later to win, as well as to find the hidden Yar. This is another game that sold because of its name and Atari's name. It's amazing to think games that sold over 1 million could be failures, but this one (and the other three) are because of disappointing consumers and perhaps over-production.
PS: I think they were able to move 1-2 million more Pac-Man games by bundling them with new consoles in 1983.
I appreciate the time spent pointing out that ET was a symptom as much as a cause. Another funny thing, people talk about the crash of '83 as though it was global, it was really more localised to NA. Over here (GB) the industry was *ascendant* on home micros, which is why things like Rare happened.
Maybe trashy games from 3rd-parties that retailers bought and couldn't sell didn't make it to the PAL format and Europe and Brazil? I heard they were 1 year behind.
It's also worth mentioning that the vast majority of unsold ET cartridges were re-used/recycled and had at least the cases used for other Atari games.
"I have a E.T. cartridge in my office. It has five price stickers. The first one's $49.95, the last one's 99c."
Betcha it has a _very_ different price tag now.
Nah the pricetag is actually still roughly $1 actually 😂 i bought one myself for a laugh
Yet, did we learn from this? NO! Christmas crunch is STILL a thing!
They still make the christmas version of capn crunch?
Wait, i think you meant crunch time, my bad
This is a What Happened that caught of guard. Didn't think you'd do one for the E.T. game at all. XD
@@Poever Yeah. As he said, many covered it in the past. But I'm glad he did, there were details I didn't know here.
"You'll never cry over a scene in a video game."
Me at the end of every Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: *; _ ;*
Wow, your b roll footage is from the unedited version of the movie where the police had shotguns which weren't replaced with radios. Neat
Well, of all things, I never knew my home town of EL PASO, TEXAS was involved in the legend of the "E.T. Landfill." That's kinda neat!
surprisingly a lot of the history of computers and video gaming is scattered around Texas, The 8 Bit Guy has a bunch of really nice videos exploring parts of the history, and even visiting some of the locations from the building that birthed Duke Nukem to Texas Instruments and a bunch of other early manufacturers and game company offices.
You know, there are a lot of games that come out and are promptly forgotten. This absolutely trash game came out and ended up being blamed for the video game crash and then had the whole buried in the desert thing. That's a legacy far greater than most games could hope to achieve.
It's like how The Room will be eternally remembered while, idk, Tag or something will be forgotten to time
Warshaw was a legend for pulling this off. He’s made great games for their time period and I think ET could’ve much better if he more then 5 weeks.
I'm aware that they found the buried games in 2014. it's 2021 now and it still sounds 100% surreal to hear that. That whole entire premise was literally a myth for almost 30 years. The AVGN Movie made fun of it before it was even found out that the games were actually down there.
Makes me wonder if they had more than one dump site.
Imagine some future archeologist finding the cartridges buried somewhere on the desert and having to piece the story from there.
This was clearly some ancient ritual.
Atari: *backs out of the deal of a lifetime with what would become a major video game producer*
Nintendo: "First time?"
Funny how Nintendo has been on both ends of that kind of deal falling through.
Regardless, you still have to give Howard Scott Warshaw props for taking on such a task.
Watching the episode, it's kind of fascinating how so many things about this game have transcended into legend, although not a legend anyone would be proud of (no, folks, it didn't singlehandedly caused the videogame crash of 1983, neither Atari buried millions of unsold cartridges in the desert). Also, kind of depressing how mismanagement, employee mistreatment, unreasonable development times and unrealistic sales expectations were already features of the industry back then.
I blame some of that on lack of competition. If Mattel got Space Invaders, then they might have become the dominant player and Atari would have had to come out with a better system (and games) to compete. But the Atari's 1977 system was just good enough and sold 10 million through the end of 1981 (before Pac-Man) and another 5 million after that, compared to 3 million Intellivisions in its life. Even with one joystick button and a cheaper processing chip than what it could have had, programmers were able to squeeze out more from that system to keep it going. (The Odyssey² compared favorably to Atari in 1978-9, but its games never got any better.)
When Atari VCS came out in 1977, industry people expected it to be replaced in a few years, as previous generation one systems were. But somehow they didn't present that to consumers or do a "give Atari to your little brother" campaign to sell the latest system as being so much better.
I love how bandersnacth from dark mirror plot was a game developer was driven insane and to kill and that took 4-5 months of crunch. Yet this real life example was 5 weeks
To be fair, the fact he got something done in that timeframe is amazing
Man, just imagine if Atari had kept all those unsold original cartridges on a pallet somewhere instead of just dumping them. Not only would they not have become the butt of jokes, but today they would have been able to make millions selling those untouched game boxes to the scammers over at WATA.
What I think about is how Hollywood breaks down sets, then decides whether to store them (for a sequel) or just trash them. Just imagine if you could go to England and see the sets for _The Empire Strikes Back!_ But they didn't think people would want to tour sets! Even if they moved sets (or video games) to a warehouse somewhere, storage costs money.
Great job man! This now brings the total number of videos to get the story right to like, uh, just 4? It's always good to have a big channel correctly cover this stuff. A lot of the other videos out there get some facts wrong.
Aunt May: "Took you long enough."
Ah, the original Wha Happun.
The game made in 40 days and started the videogame crash of the 80s.
The Great Crash that occured nowhere outside the US, that's how huge it was.
Back in 2011 I met Warshaw. He confirmed that they dumbed a huge amount of the cartridges in the dumb.
I like to see a Wha Happun on Final Fantasy XV as it did had a very interesting and struggling development history.
Great vid as usual!
Yeah. It was quite a messy development that it was a miracle that it came out and didn't flop. Sure, the practice of releasing episodic characters stories lead to some players leave a bad taste in their mouth but what can Tabata do when Square gave him a strict deadline whilst piecing together what Nomura left on the project. Just concepts without having a great foundation on the actual game itself (The game engine)
Anyway, I am glad that the game aged well. I hear nothing but praise when the Royal Edition came out. There are still who are dissatisfied but they are only the minority. Well, as far as the various Final Fantasy communities in social media are concerned that is.
On the 20th anniversary of ET, another company bought the ET games rights and released about 6 different games based on ET on formats like the Gameboy Color, PlayStation, PC and GBA. None of them did well, and that company New Kid Co. went under shortly afterwards. The 40th anniversary is coming up if a games company feels like they’ve had enough of this world.
have been waiting for this omg
"No one will cry at a video game."
I have cried playing some video games. I have *never* cried at a Spielberg movie.
Not even when ET died?
You..."monster"!
I have cried like a small child to maybe 3 games. Not a lot, but haven't been moved to tears by any of Ol' Stevo's films either. Hell, I've shed far more tears watching anime than any of the "real grown up art forms".
I got a bit misty-eyed when ET damned near died in that Government lab, but I actually lost a few tears over Schindler's List.
Damn...I was _so_ sure that the little girl in the red coat was going to get out of that ghetto alive, too. :(
The funny thing is, even if ET had been a Pac-Man clone, given how the 2600 did pac-man, I have a feeling they'd have just been a different flavor of screwed.
The birth Activision: Former ex-Atari employee's who felt mistreated
You became the one thing you were sent to destroy.... Ironic.
(Honestly, I first found out about this whole story not from AVGN, or X-Play, but another from the G4 show... Code Monkey's, and if you know the show, you know it was GameAVision who put the blame on Atari... and that's why they don't exist as they once were lol)
Someone else watched that? Nice.
I've been waiting for this for quite some time. Thank you Matt.👍
I was actually there when they unearthed the landfill since I was born in Alamogordo. Very *very* windy day. I'm incredibly disappointed the City of Alamogordo sold all the carts instead of keeping at least one for our local museum...
And here comes Matt to make my Saturday morning work shift a little bit more bearable thank you sir
“A delayed game is eventually good, but a rushed game is forever bad.” Shigeru Miyamoto
Really with more fleshing out and development time, E.T. would have been an alright game. The concept was sound, the execution just fell short because of that tight deadline.
Raiders of the Lost Ark - with its generous nine-month development - wasn't exactly the best Atari 2600 game (and it certainly paled in comparison to Warshaw's magnum opus, Yar's Revenge), but at least Raiders was quite playable, perhaps even enjoyable and actually _beatable._ I always had trouble figuring out _which exact pixel_ I had to drop the bag of gold on so the giant bearded head _wouldn't_ telekinetically kill Indy, but that was the only distinctly sucky part of Raiders. Raiders beat ET by _leagues._
@@BloodyBay Today, (or three years ago) I played E.T. and finished multiple rounds before dying from lack of energy. I know little kids couldn't do that. But I never learned anything in _Raiders of the Lost Ark_ that wasn't in the manual. I finally won it after reading how to online over a decade later. Even though it sold 1 million, I think this was a disappointment and failure too that only sold because of its name and is worse than E.T. He should have made it an action game, like chasing the truck.
written before viewing: here we are, the media's favourite infamous villain of the video game crash, the face of scapegoats everywhere that were more innocent then they appear, but were still sacrificed anyway
The ET species makes a small cameo appearance in Revenge of the Sith, kinda confirming that a fictionalized version of Earth exists somewhere within the SW universe
Going old school! I like it 👍
Solid shout to The Nerd.
My mother got it as a kid. She loved E.T and said she played the game a lot and didn't understand why people didn't like it.
I have waited so long for this one
No matter how many videos/docs there are about the infamous E.T. game, I always enjoy watching them cause the whole journey is just insane. Even the documentary 'Atari: Game Over' was enjoyable to watch as well.
Great video as usual
Dang, didn’t think you would actually cover this game. Great job Matt! Keep up the amazing video’s.
Love all of the Destroy All Humans music mixed in this.
Love your videos! You should give Clock Tower: Ghost Head a look over!
This is a cool addition to the coverage of this historical video game!
been waitin for this one 😆
Been waiting for this one here
I can't get enough of these videos. Matt really can tell a great story.
I was hoping you would cover this one day...what a nice surprise. Also glad to see your show doing well.
I am literally macking on popcorn while watching this, I can't believe you actually did it. You absolute mad lads!
Great video. Nice quick breakdown of the events and reasons leading up to the crash that followed E.T.'s release.
Might I suggest Rascal for the ps1?
This story really does put into perspective how vastly different game development is now. Given five weeks with *today's* tools, even a solo indie dev could make something bigger and better than not just the E.T. game, but every other game on the Atari.
You kick ass man hell yeah for setting the record straight
Honestly, not very surprised with Spielberg and his "I love it" to E.T. That's the same guy who gifted the world with Pinky & Brain & Elmyra series.
Hey Matt, you should do a Wha Happun of the infamous Atari 2600 port of Pac-Man with details on how Atari fought up against Pac-Man clones during development. (13:52)
Love the Thunder Force IV in the background 😮🥰
0:41 its funny, I was at Portland Retro Gaming Expo a few years ago, and Howard Scott Warshaw was signing autographs right across the aisle from James Rolfe, who was signing posters of the movie.
Love this series so much
So this has been a long time coming. Right on.
I was surprised to see this in my notifications then surprised that you haven't done this already 😅
My programmer buddy used to work with Howard @ Atari. He stated that Howard negotiated a contract to get paid for cartridges Manufactured, not sold. So he knew he was making $$ and mailed it in. No stressing over quality. Dan Oliver always said he was a “lucky bastard”. Again it was still Atari who screwed up and paid a guy based on units produced and not on sold.
Well, when you drive off all the good programmers, I guess that means the one who remained gets to set his own terms! But of course they went to third-party developers for the 5200 games and in 1983 games for the 2600.
I always thought Spielberg was open-minded about videogamee, since Medal of Honor was his baby. Also ironic that Activision is at the root of ruin in the video game industry since the beginning.
Twenty-seven video games for Atari sold over 1 million, and only 4 were disappointments. I don't fault Activision at all, unless you say they kept Atari alive so people didn't buy a different system and Atari didn't retire it and put out a new system earlier. If Activision hadn't existed, then Atari still would have made Pac-Man, Raiders of the Lost Ark, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial and a bunch of junk like Swordquest and RealSports in 1982, but likely less consoles would have sold without Activision games to play on it.
@@sandal_thong8631 I made that comment 2 years ago, I can't remember the context of why I stated that nor do I care to rewatch the video now to find out why I said that.
@@rubz1390 Activision wasn't mentioned much in the video, but there must have been plenty of hate for Activision in 2021 since yours isn't the only comment like that. (There wasn't in 1980-83.)
@@sandal_thong8631 My comment would have been due to something in the video, I haven't bought a COD game in like 15 years so I'm not really that invested in the hate train.
I totally forgot about the AVGN movie!
It's really cool learning about the history behind these games.
This one's been a long time coming
I had this game back then, never figure out what to do until a recent AVGN video were he mentions that there's an actual objective, and a way to finish the game.
Oh crap yeah it’s Saturday i forgot, this will be a great episode but I’ve already heard that this was made in only 6 weeks which would explain why it was in the state it was in 😊
Even if it wasn't millions of copies there, just the fact that there actually, really ended up being a substantial amount of copies of the game in that landfill is pretty amazing.
Well, it looks like they didn't want to drop the prices to sell them, so that's a strategy to keep the prices up. I saw they were trying to sell games from the 1970s on Atari Age for $10 in 1983 rather than remove them from the catalog, even though games like Skydiver and Outlaw made the system look bad, like Odyssey².
Great thunderforce music in bg 😉👍🏻
No matter how many times I hear this story, I am always in awe
Fuh-five weeks?! I knew it had a short dev time mandate but _five weeks?!_ How the sweet, tasty hell did they think _anything_ of quality could be done so fast?! I _wish_ it was that fast to make a video game because if it was ever RPG Maker project I've ever done would have probably actually gotten finished.
6:37 Well, he clearly never anticipated Super Mario Galaxy and Legend of Spyro Dawn of the Dragon then.
WAIT. Wait. So Atari was responsible for Activision? That's a big "yikes" from me.
Also, since the E.T game was rushed, it makes me wonder what a finished version of the game could've been like.
It might have been playtested and the pixel-detection would have been better to not fall back in pits. I saw a video about Imagic developing Atlantis and they brought in kids to playtest and say what they felt. Whether anything was changed based on feedback, I don't know.
This was a brilliant video.
I love this series to much! 🤌😁