We often get into vigorous debates about what the “best game of all time” is, but what about the worst game of all time? For decades, that honor has popularly belonged to E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial, a 1982 game for the Atari 2600 based on the movie of the same name. It was panned at the time for its plot, visuals, and gameplay, and its commercial and quality failures hurt Atari’s brand reputation, and this along with overproduction of this cartridge and others at least partially contributed to a Atari’s decline and a major, multi-year video game industry crash beginning in 1983.
The tale of E.T. has been told over the years as a cautionary tale against crunch, having only been made in five weeks. But the real story of ET, its creator, and their relationship with Atari is far deeper than the hole that was dug to house hundreds of copies of the critically-panned game in a New Mexico landfill.
IGN spoke to E.T.’s primary developer and sole designer Howard Scott Warshaw ahead of the release of his latest book, Once Upon Atari. It’s a cautionary tale of the perils of crunch, the advent of new game design ideas, an industry-shaking crash, and the necessary, inevitable movement of game creation from its formative Wild West years to the much larger, collaborative efforts we see today.
The Lowest, Dirtiest, Grungiest System
“I was in love with computers in my graduate work in college, and I fell out of love with computers at Hewlett Packard where I was drowning in a sea of computational mediocrity, and it was very unsatisfying, and so I used to act out,” Warshaw says. “I used to do some wacky stuff, especially, by HP standards. And one of my coworkers came up to me one day and said, ‘The kind of things you do - they happen all the time where my wife works.’ I said, ‘Oh, where's that?’ And he said, ‘Atari.’ And that was an interesting moment because it never occurred to me to look at Atari as a place to work.”
After this fateful conversation with his friend, Warshaw called up Atari and maneuvered his way into a series of job interviews – and was rejected. But Warshaw wouldn’t take no for an answer. He pushed back, and eventually was hired on probation at a much lower salary than initially discussed.
Upon his arrival in 1981, Warshaw immediately found himself fulfilled in a way he had never experienced before. Not only could he test his mettle on much more complex, sophisticated programming challenges than at Hewlett Packard, but Atari also gave him the opportunity to blend his technical, analytical capabilities with the wacky creativity that had made him stand out at his previous job.
“The environment was so free, and so creatively focused, and so accepting that you could be anything, you could do anything, and people only looked at it in terms of, ‘Well, does this inspire something cool to do?’ It was about looking for creative opportunity, which, to me, is the ultimate creative environment, right? Where you don't have a lot of restrictions, you just have goals. And it's all about trying to get there in an interesting or innovative way, as opposed to being all about structure, which is the way a lot of environments operate.”
But over time, Warshaw says, he noticed something wasn’t quite right. While he was having the time of his life, a lot of his colleagues seemed to believe there was a cultural transformation taking place. And with time, Warshaw began to see it too. Atari, he says, was beginning to drift away from the fast-paced, creative environment he fell in love with, instead becoming what he calls more of an “ordinary production environment.”
“Engineers want to be proud of the product they're producing, they want to innovate, they want to do something strong. Marketing and sales people, their whole job is to create sales and generate business and maximize it. And we thought they were a bunch of ridiculous, silly, shortsighted people. And they thought we were a bunch of little entitled babies who didn't have any sense of dedication or discipline. The truth is, there were a lot of brilliant people at Atari. And we all sort of joined hands and walked right off a cliff, making the best decisions we possibly could. That's the story of Atari.”
But, at least for a while, Warshaw enjoyed the creative freedom he had taken the pay cut for. But he didn’t make things easy on himself. First, he was asked what system at Atari he wanted to work on:
“I didn't have much of a basis for the decision, so I said, ‘What's the lowest, dirtiest, most grungy system you have to work on? What's the most difficult one to program?’ And he said, ‘Oh, that's the 2600.’ I said, ‘Well, that's where I want to start because I never like moving down. I like to start at the bottom and move up.’”
So Warshaw was assigned to port the arcade game Star Castle to the Atari 2600…and immediately began stirring up trouble:
“The first thing I did with my project was go to my boss and say, ‘You know what? This game is going to suck. I don't want to do this game. This is not the project I want to do.’”
Warshaw presented an alternate gameplay idea that he felt was better adapted to the Atari 2600, a machine designed to play Pong-like games in 1977, but stretched far beyond its limits by creative programmers to adapt games – like the cutting edge 1980 vector graphics and physics-based Star Castle. is pitch was accepted, and that game ultimately became Yars’ Revenge, which has since become the best-selling non-licensed game for the Atari 2600, and remains well-regarded to this day. On the strength of Yars’ Revenge, Warshaw was pitched on developing the first movie-to-video game conversion for Atari: Raiders of the Lost Ark. And his work on that made a strong enough impression that in the final days of development, he received a career-changing phone call.
“The person who called me was Ray Kassar, the CEO of Atari at the time. My boss's boss's boss's boss's boss, which I don't get that call very often, but I was sitting in my office putting the final touches on Raiders of the Lost Ark, and in came the phone call. ‘Hey, Howard. This is July 27th. We need E.T. for September 1st. Can you do it?’ I said, ‘Absolutely, I can do it provided we reach the right arrangement.’”
Nothing Like Pac-Man
Not only did Warshaw have to make a functional, licensed game for Steven Spielberg in five weeks, but he had to do it almost entirely on his own. No one in the Atari office wanted to help him program it. He did have Jerome Domurat doing most of E.T.’s graphics, and the opening theme was composed for him by Atari’s sound team. But all of the design, all other sounds, some of the graphics, and of course the programming was all Warshaw’s.
The reduced timeframe to do all that work was preceded by Warshaw only having three days to get his basic design concept down. That’s because three days from the initial phone call he was scheduled to fly out to LA and present his design to Spielberg.
“When I did present that design I laid it out, and Spielberg listened to the whole thing. And at the end he looked at me and he said, "Couldn't you do something more like Pac-Man?" My whole bottom fell out of me. I couldn't believe it.
“Spielberg was a big gamer, but the truth of it that I knew that I hadn't communicated to him was that this was a game I could deliver in the timeframe. I didn't want to say that to him because I didn't want to come off as desperate, frankly. And so what I did say was, ‘You know, Steven, E.T. is really extraordinary. It's a special film and I think it needs a special game to go with it. And this is a unique design, and this is something that I think lives up to the level of the film and is appropriate to what we're trying to produce.’ And he agreed with that, and that was good because if he would have said, ‘No, I really wanted Pac-Man.’ I would have had to say to him, ‘We can't do Pac-Man in this time. We only have five weeks. This is what I can do. Please be okay.’”
Pac-Man was off the table, so what was Warshaw pitching to Spielberg? When he sat down to design an E.T. game, he first had to puzzle out what genre he was going to make – whatever it was, it had to be simple enough to be made very quickly, but needed to be fun enough to replay and have a broad enough scope to actually be replayable.
Warshaw settled on the idea of a treasure hunt for the phone pieces E.T. assembles during the movie. Once players find all three phone pieces, they then have to find the one spot on the map where they can use the phone to call the spaceship to come get them, and from there must find the landing zone. And there are also a number of candies – Reese’s Pieces, rather – scattered about that E.T. can collect, either to help restore his energy as it’s spent by walking around, or to give to Elliot in return for a phone piece. All this must be accomplished while avoiding enemies trying to drag E.T. off to other screens or steal the phone pieces he’s collected so far.