A couple of comments based off of the first ET poster/ad in the article:
* Atari games like this cost $40? That seems expensive!
* Why did Pennsylvania residents have to call a different number?
* Funny that a point of advertising was getting the game before everyone else. It reminds you that these were real games people wanted and not just nostalgic blasts, how I view them now.
Back in the day, AT&T had technological issues that meant that there were separate "in-state" and "out-of-state" 800 numbers, so every national advertisement always mentioned a main 800 number, plus a different one for the one particular state where they actually had their call center. Single-state institutions sometimes only had in-state 800 numbers, so, for instance, you literally couldn't call California's Franchise Tax Board (the state's IRS-like tax authority) from outside of California (as I learned from bitter experience). Look up "InWATS" in Wikipedia for more details. Now, get off my lawn.
My mom worked at GTE and when I went to college in 1997 she got us a WATS line so I could dial 1-800 to call home.
One of her jobs in the early 80s was to calculate the bills for WATS lines. There was a room full of mechanical counters, like odometers, that would increment while people were talking on their line. Every day she'd write down the new counts, subtract the previous day's counts, and they'd bill the difference.
It's a 95% Australia tax. We pay more for almost everything just because. It was originally justified by our exchange rates (which got down into the AUD$1 = USD$0.5x) but persisted at the same dollar values even when the rate went to AUD$1 = USD$1.2.
Basically, we get screwed because there's precident establishing that we can. And it permiates almost anything that is produced overseas including phones and laptops but also all kinds of software, not just games.
I don't believe the exchange rate alone is the explanation. Here the Canadian dollar is very low versus the USD right now, yet on Steam I rarely ever see $100 games.
With the DLC and "Season passes" and other nickel and dime schemes they have, sure, but usually it's around $70-80 for AAA titles. I have an Aussie friend who I'd often gift games, then she'd pay me back on a 3rd party service what I paid, and end up saving money.
Australia really does just get screwed for whatever reason.
Yup. My grandmother bought me it for christmas, no doubt full retail. It was inordinately expensive. It would be inordinately expensive today with a retail cost of $100 inflation adjusted dollars.
Best 2600 title screen ever though. No one ever mentions that about the game though.
Anyone who is in to Atari 2600 knows that ET is verrrrrry far from the worst game available on that system! And it's so sad making it a great game would have take so few tweaks! http://www.neocomputer.org/projects/et/
I was quite young when ET came out. I loved ET, but the game was basically impossible for me to play because I couldn't get out of the pits very well; which was exacerbated by falling into them when I shouldn't have.
In contrast, Combat was easy to figure out and play and I could play it with loved ones.
I'd suppose most kids learned quickly that you could float mid fall and bypass the energy penalty. Even if you fell by accident, it cost practically nothing.
One of the reasons ET flopped was because the game was confusing. Combat, meanwhile, is literally just player 1 and player 2 trying to shoot each other. In terms of accessibility, engagement and gameplay Combat is objectively better.
Combat is, frankly, one of the greatest videogames ever made. Easily in the top ten. If you don't understand why, you've missed out on a great deal of history.
The Atari 2600 was designed, almost exclusively, to play Combat. It has the ability to animate only 3 sprites: player 1, player 2 and "ball". There are many hacks to get around this, but we're talking about the pre-release period of the Atari Video Computer System, AKA VCS, the Atari 2600.
The only other game in mind for the system was Pong, which actually come out for the system in the form of Video Olympics, and it was created by one of the 2600's TIA chip designers, Joe Decuir. That chip literally synced up the processor with the television's refresh rate, and had each scan line drawn out of processing exactly when the electron beam was moving over the proper position on screen. The 2600 has no frame buffer. Essentially, when it's in the CPU, it's drawn on the screen. The machine only had 1024 bits, not bytes, of RAM.
But that's neither here nor there. For more info on the fascinating hardware that was the Atari 2600, read Racing the Beam by Ian Bogost and Nick Montefort. https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/racing-beam
Video Olympics could be considered to be the 100-in-1 of Pong games, with dozens of variants on the Pong theme. Combat takes the same sort of approach, with lots of game modes, but the actual gameplay was based on another arcade game. Rather than just recreating the arcade game, however, Combat expands on the theme, as Video Olympics did.
Combat is, to my mind, the only game on the 2600 that really holds up to this day. It's still fun, despite it's graphical limitations. For its day, it was the Super Mario Brothers of the Atari: that cart you could always turn to for fun.
It's elegant in its simplicity, extremely deep in its variations on a theme, and even offers a few asymmetrical playing options: one player can be given a different set of planes from the other.
For my money, in terms of accessibility and fun while having a steep but manageable difficulty curve - the 2600 game that stands up the best today is Kaboom. It can induce an almost zen-like state that is very hard to capture in gaming.
Fully agree. I would love to see a modern version (complete with control wheel) in HD with smooth frame rates. Still have found memories of sitting in front of an RCA XL-100 console tv with my eyes burning trying to catch all those bombs. Wish I would have sent in my score back in the day to get the Patch from Activision.
Ha! I played 4 player Warlords in the dorms at Ga Tech during its era. Lots of fond memories of Techwood/McDaniel hall. Glad to know that the tradition continued!
I played combat ... With my mother. The day we got our 2600. It was accessible, simple, and as a child, made me see my mom in a whole new light. I'm 40 now, but feel like a little boy realizing that his mom is fun whenever I see that game come up.
80's kid here. My mom could always kick my butt in a small set of video games. Galaga, Ms. Pacman, Tetris. But she can't beat the first couple levels in Super Mario Brothers to save her lift.
Howard is a brilliant programmer. In Yar's Revenge, that fuzzy barrier on the left side of the screen is the graphics code from the program literally reading the game's own code as graphical data, thus creating the crazy static pattern of chaotic colors. Talk about a cool and space saving hack!
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/8/85/A2600_Yars_Re...
The Atari: Game Over movie is on Netflix. It'll give people more insight. The guy was an exceptional programmer and good game designer who was dealt a death march with a hard deadline.
I think all lower-level programmers have done similar mistakes at one time or other. I managed to do it several times while learning assembler on the Atari ST/STE/Falcon :-)
The BBC Micro also allows you to change the address of the video framebuffer. A particularly neat trick was to remap it to 0x0000, so you get to see the OS workspace, stacks, program storage etc. You can watch the bits twiddle in realtime as you do things.
There's another neat hack which would cause the machine to run in slow motion. I don't know how it worked; I can't find any references now. Possibly it overloads the system with interrupts. But under its influence, clearing the screen would take several seconds. These two hacks combined beautifully, letting you see all the details of, e.g., Basic's heap management.
Psychotherapy must be up his alley, he seems to have come to terms with it quite well and taken it with a sense of humor.
An initial run of 4 million copies is a lot of pressure on a single developer, the sort that can make you a legend or a catastrophe. I wonder if release management was considered to allow for bug fixes in subsequent production runs or phased production runs with hedged risk.
Probably adding to the pressure is the frustration that immediately following the production run you find a one-liner bug fix but you are 4 million copies too late.
Interestingly, Pac-Man also had millions of unsold cartridges left over. This candid Q&A talks more about the failure of ET, the frustrations and challenges:
With this guy clearly being such a talented programmer, it's too bad he hasn't taken up some FOSS game programming as a hobby, just to "scratch the itch". It'd be great to have a really great old-school side-scroller; I wonder what he could come up with using more modern tools if he really wanted to make a new game. And this time, he could take as much time as he needs.
Everyone forgets about Pac-Man, that was another huge contributor to the crash. The 2600 couldn't handle 5 sprites, so they used one sprite for all the ghosts and showed one per frame. The flickering ghosts against the bright blue background was physically painful to watch.
They estimated 10 million consoles were actively being played, so they made 12 million copies. They sold 7 million, and that's before returns. 7 million people who would think twice before buying another Atari game.
That was he one thing I complained most about with the Atari PacMan. I don't think I ever noticed the flickering ghosts specifically, or even how different the bird layout was vs the arcade version.
But instead of a cherry/orange/pretzel that moved around the screen, the bonus fruit was a dark-brown square inside another slightly-larger light-brown square. It didn't move, it didn't look good, and as a kid I felt like this was the classic example of either the game designers cutting corners or limitations of the system.
I used to joke about this specific example as one of the key reasons to move on to better consoles when they came around.
Graphically it was so-so. But the game play itself was just not fun. The worst part of it was the time limit was basically the number of "steps" the character moved, and you had to collect these "communicator" parts that were buried randomly in pits and then use some kind of crappy "levitation" move to get out. And that took up extra energy as well so it cut into your time limit to find the next communicator piece.
Never beat it. Got extremely annoyed/bored with it after a short time. There were games with much worse graphics and sound that had a much better gameplay overall.
Of all the memes IWBTG has created, "bad game" is not one of them. (the deliberate difficulty of that game has in fact created a new genre of games, leading to things like Super Meat Boy)
I also remember really enjoying it as a six or seven year old. I remember how excited I was when I figured out how the forest and the government linked to the various screens with the wells, and which directions would guarantee you fell into a well and which didn't. Bouncing in my chair excited.
Then again, I had weird taste in video games when I was a kid.
> "It's awesome to be credited with single-handedly bringing down a billion-dollar industry with eight kilobytes of code. But the truth is a little more complex."
Eight kilobytes?! How do you build anything meaningful, especially a game, with just eight kilobytes?
Get a copy of Racing the Beam to get some insight into how programmers were able to wring out every bit[1] of potential from the Atari 2600: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/racing-beam
- In 2600 coding you often don't need a stack, so you can use 'S' as a temp register. Very useful in the display kernel.
- The 2600 has a standard parallel port chip. There are configuration registers (e.g., port direction) that can be temporarily hijacked as RAM, when you don't care about input or output (which you generally only sample once a frame). That's a whole 8 more bits of RAM, not to be sneezed at.
One of my cow-orkers at Atari decided that he'd try to learn 2600 programming (he was mostly doing Atari Home Computer stuff). Over three or four months I saw him go through what I can only describe as deterioration and utter discouragement. The people who could get even an awful game out of the 2600 were pretty damned good hackers.
8K is 8192 bytes. Atari runs on MOS 6502, for which each instruction takes up between 1 and 3 bytes. This gives you about 2K instructions, give or take (you probably want to make space for some data). Given how simple most atari games are, I think you could reasonably get away with 1-1.5K instructions for code if you hand-write the assembly and optimize for size.
Actually, the Atari 2600 runs a 6507 which is a cheaper version of a 6502. Unlike the 64kbytes a 6502 can address, the 6507 is limited to 8kbytes. Worse, the cartridge design limited you to 4kbytes unless you bank switched.
But that was storages, which was huge compared to the 128 bytes of RAM. Further complications happen because you need to time things with the scan lines of the display.
I tried running it back then - the textures, the music, the models, all of the content is generated "from scratch", which is why it takes forever to start, it has to create all content first
It doesn't even have a screen buffer, just a half a line buffer. You have to count scan lines and keep track of what's being drawn on a cycle by cycle basis, then update the line buffer live to get what you want on screen.
Eight kilobytes is plenty of space. How about doing something meaningful in 128 bytes (yes, bytes!): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cD49RXnEGNE - it's a mouse-controlled 3d Wolfenstein-like maze. All with the code about half the size of this comment.
Another contender for the title of worst video game:
Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing was critically panned.
The game's criticism is largely directed at its
"blatantly unfinished"[2] state: lack of collision
detection and frequent violation of the laws of
physics, frequent and major software bugs, poor
visuals, and severe lack of functionality. As a result,
the game is now widely regarded as one of the worst
video games of all time.
A close friend of mine worked on PaintBrawl, which made the list (#2.11). PaintBrawl is a first person shooter but used paintball guns since WalMart wouldn't carry violent video games in the 90s.
> "I actually prefer it when people do identify it as the worst game of all time because I also did Yars Revenge and that's frequently identified as one of the best of all time. So between the two, I have the greatest range of any designer in history!"
I really liked Yars' Revenge. That constant droning sound -- it was really unlike anything I'd heard at that point.
I remember learning about this game on a G4 special, and seeing Warshaw's spots talking about how it was made. I wasn't alive when this game was released, but it seems to be very frustrating to play. But hey, that's what you get on the first try when you rush things (coughJavaScriptcough). I'm glad to see someone's "fixed" it just to see what it would have been like had Warshaw been able to get the time needed to really complete the project. It looked like a great idea, just a terrible execution.
If we're going to rate Atari games adjusted by the level of effort and time put into them, I'd say this is one of its better games. This is one developer coding non-stop for five weeks straight, and he had the temerity to push back on Spielberg's ideas. I wouldn't say he caused Atari's demise, but rather he almost saved the company.
Of course this game did not lead to the 'videogame crash' of 83, other videogame areas like the arcades was doing just fine, and home computers as well.
The problem was that the console games of the time were incredibly poor in graphics/sound, and typically also in game play.
Consumers wanted better games than what the console hardware at the time could produce, once something came along which was a technical leap compared to the Atari, Coleco etc, it did fantastically well, this was the NES.
To be described as 'the worst' in any genre on an international site does, of course, warrant a degree of scale that separates you from those who are, really, probably no better than you.
The worst movie ever made probably doesn't have enough Rotten Tomato or IMDB reviews to be considered. I was once told I had hosted the "worst program on television"[1], but being community tv there were probably 100 people watching each week and as far as I know no extant copy has survived - we'll never appear on a "worst TV shows of all time" list.
So almost by definition on a site like BBC.com, 'the worst video game in history' means 'which also sold tens of thousands of copies [2]', which is a measure of success and recognition most genuine failures won't achieve.
[1] Someone actually called the station and left a voicemail to that effect. I took it as a compliment - it meant he'd watched the whole show, because nobody calls to complain if they just changed the channel.
[2] Or, in ET's case, 1.5 million.
That's a good point about any list. Best game ever, worst game ever, hardest level/boss/game ever, you name it. The percentage of works or parts of works that ever become popular enough to get noticed is dwarfed by the (couple of hundred) times larger number that simply fall off the radar or never get any attention in the first place.
I mean, what's the hardest game ever made? Probably if you're really picky, some ultra obscure shoot em up or kaizo esque Mario ROM hack. But the average list will only name titles like Battletoads, Dark Souls and I Wanna Be the Guy, because those are the ones many people (including the authors) have actually heard of.
I'm 99% sure near the end there (the last minute or so, last phase of the boss) it is literally unbeatable without buying more lives and if this wasn't an arcade game that allowed purchasing new lives, I don't think it'd be beaten by anything short of a tool-assisted run.
I would think that a "worst [item] ever" list would generally be limited in sensible ways, such as with a video game, having the requirement that it actually be commercially sold. Obviously, any amateur could make some crappy little game and give it to his friends and no one would ever know or care about it; when we think of "the worst video game in history", we're going to naturally assume that it's a commercially-sold game. So some Mario ROM hack would not qualify, IMO. Even better would be to limit it to games with some decent amount of distribution.
Same goes for movies: a "worst movies" list would probably be limited to movies that actually made theatrical release, not someone's home movie, or even a straight-to-DVD movie.
There's also the fact a lot of games are distributed pretty well (and sometimes even sold), legality be damned. Is there any more legitimacy to a bad (and likely illegal) app store game featuring characters from Mario or Pokemon than a game mod or fan game featuring the same thing? People sold Doom Wad collections in boxes in shops at one point, does that count?
Even assuming only legal retail games, there's an awful lot of somewhat obscure shovelware that could fill up an entire (very long) list. Like the tons of PS2 and Wii shovelware (the latter's games were often ported from the former) by companies like Data Design and Phoenix Games.
A worst game ever list would be incredibly hard to make to any decent degree, simply because you have so many possible choices to include on it, especially if you go looking outside the most popular titles.
You've got a point. Maybe the worst-of list should be limited to games that achieved a certain amount of sales, to keep the obscure stuff out. Also, personally I'd be more interested in worst-of lists if they were restricted to certain years, or perhaps even certain platforms. For instance, a worst-of-NES-games list would be much more interesting than a list that comprised all video games ever, since I stopped paying attention to games after the mid-1990s. Or a list of worst-of arcade games from the 80s.
The narrative has always been about hubris, to some degree, but shifting the blame to E.T. was always a distraction from some of the bigger lessons.
Atari had reached a point where it thought it could print money in perpetuity regardless of what it did. And that was true for a while. But you can't screw customers over forever. Eventually they bail, and that's what the big "video game collapse" was all about. Poor quality products being pushed at absurd prices. The lesson here is for startups with lock-in or few competitors: it doesn't take much to have it all fall apart. Make the best product you can.
I mostly marvel at the fact that this was done in 5 weeks. That's absurd. And while it was, objectively, a "bad" video game, there were far worse. They just weren't as high-profile. The second lesson is for developers: always appreciate the fact that you live in a world where patches, releases, and iterative development allow you to retroactively fix the things you had to do in a hurry.
It's a cool story. I'm actually really amazed he managed to make a game that sold 1.5 million copies (@ $40 per unit that'd be $60mil) in _5 weeks_. As the sole programmer. In an era when programming was far more tricky and low level.
It isn't his fault the managers were being unreasonable in the timeline, and the company grossly over-manufactured the cartridges.
If I made something in just 5 weeks that sold 1.5 million units, I'd be proud of myself! hehe, and as others have pointed out, it isn't actually the worst game.
> As the sole programmer. In an era when programming was far more tricky and low level.
In the same era, early 80s, kids across the UK were single-handedly writing games packed into 1-16k, some of which (Manic Miner being a prime example) sold in their hundreds of thousands in the UK market alone.
There was some pretty amazing programming skill going on back then.
That sounds pretty interesting. Do you know if anyone has written on that history yet? It sounds like it'd make a great article in one of the tech magazines.
Lots and lots. There are and have been any number of Kickstarters for whole books covering various older game developers.. Also another source that springs to mind is the Llamasoft blog [1] - Jeff Minter behind Llamasoft fits the profile above perfectly.
There's also a number of magazines devoted entirely to retro gaming, such as retroGAMER [2] that regularly have articles and interviews with the people involved.
Sorry I thought I had replied to this. I'm not aware of any article or book going through the history of that era, unfortunately, but I wasn't aware of Bedrooms to Billions, so there could well be. It's just kind of 'known' that it happened, I think.
IIRC when the Raspberry Pi was first announced, it was suggested it might inspire kids to program in the same way that computers did in the 80s, since teaching at UK schools apparently centres around how to use Microsoft applications.
In some ways it was probably easier to write a game solo than it is now, because expectations were lower and there were such tight limits on what was technically possible. These days people expect high-quality graphics, music and sound effects as well as good gameplay, and they expect much bigger games too. I'm not sure anyone's managed to develop a commercially-successful game solo, and even developing most of one solo requires years of work and a wide set of skills.
You seem to be unaware of Ludum dare and similar challenges where (literally) thousands of games are created over the weekend that could easily compete with games made in the 80's.
Skill is still here, it is just muted by the modern media. Back then a any game release was huge news, today such games are made all the time every day and don't even get noticed.
I really don't know why you take what was an entirely positive comment, in praise of programming and programmers in the early 80s, and try to turn it into a negative, pointless, opinion-based pissing contest about which era was 'better'.
If the early 80's was good, then something else must be bad. Perhaps you meant it was good compared to what happened before, or compared to what it would have been if people didn't make games. But a reasonable guess is good compared to today, which is an implicitly negative comment about today's programmers. I think the reply was quite reasonable - it doesn't make sense to glorify the past when the present has massively more of what was good about the past.
> If the early 80's was good, then something else must be bad.
If programming from one era was good, why do you think that means programming from another era "must be bad"? Why can't good programming exist in both eras?
> But a reasonable guess is good compared to today
If you insist on guessing there's more to my final sentence, why isn't a reasonable guess, "as well as non-amazing programming back then" or "just as there is amazing programming today"?
First, most hackathon games are terrible. They don't even rise to the level of coherence of those former games, because they're mostly thrown together into the first vaguely "game-like" thing that compiles, with half the gameplay in orders of magnitude more space.
Second, those games are only possible due to the existence of frameworks, high-level languages and the proliferation of programming knowledge over the internet. Almost no one doing a weekend hackathon is cranking out a playable game in raw assembly.
Now to be fair, most games in the 80s were terrible as well - that's part of what led to the crash, and it's just Sturgeon's Law in effect. But what's being praised here isn't really design skill so much as a level of programming skill which simply isn't strictly necessary in the modern day to create a game.
> It isn't his fault the managers were being unreasonable in the timeline, and the company grossly over-manufactured the cartridges.
Yes, the real problem is that they expected something comparable in quality to his previous games with less time to develop it. He did agree to it, though. Watch "Atari: Game Over" and you'll be able to tell from interviews with him that he held a lot of guilt about it- for years.
The fact is that he was one of the best game developers in history that accepted a job that he couldn't do without making sacrifices that killed the game. He shouldn't take credit for killing Atari though. They ended up being split focused on computers (that did fairly well but were competing against giants) and consoles. And they messed up by releasing both the 5200, which was a bomb partially due to its controllers, and the 7800, which came too late. Even if Atari had done everything right, it would have been really difficult to compete with Nintendo.
I still love Atari, though. The NES was great, but the 2600, for its time, was the best thing that ever happened in the home gaming industry. It was the first proof that a home gaming console could be a staple to a first-world kid's life.
I suspect he may have meant the 'requiring all games to be licensed' thing, since a lot of older systems and home computers let pretty much anyone make games if they figured out how to get them working.
Or maybe the centralised content censorship thing. Nintendo waa pretty infamous for that in the olden days, and it may have been the inspiration for sometimes rather insane guidelines for modern day app stores and the likes.
No, the man who made the worst video game in history was Hideo Kojima with Metal Gear Solid 2. Hardcore fans of prior game(s) felt a combination of let down, shock, and anger at the details. Imagine my surprise when I find out it very well could've been an ingenius plot to screw with the players. As others noted, the games overall plot against the protagonist was what he was doing to the players. Start here on a nice analysis here if you're curious why MGS2 had the effects it did:
Postmodern is a word I heard a lot but didn't understand. That was a pretty good explanation. You could say I do post-modern INFOSEC here and elsewhere. :) The video was really good esp with its fake ending and vindication of Hideo's predictions via social media. Today, they call those echo chambers.
Altogether very interesting stuff that kept me up longer than I wanted to be. Thanks for the link and lack of sleep. :)
I had a feeling that link would be George Weidman before I clicked on it. Was not disappointed. =) Metal Gear Solid 2 is one of the more amazing things I've ever played, and George's video about MGS2 is awesome, if a little bit overwrought. I was a big fan of Metal Gear (I'd emulated an MSX to play the originals), loved MGS, and liked MGS2 when it came out, but that might have been because it was more Metal Gear Solid. Despite being a "hardcore fan", as the OP would put it, I never felt disappointed or betrayed by MGS2. And, in retrospect, I've learned to like it more by what it tried to do. Ambitious games deserve respect for their ambition insofar as attempts to push outward and expand gaming as an art form, and MGS2 pulls off its goals better than it probably should have.
Today, I find it's one of the better popular-gaming litmus tests for whether or not somebody treats games as experiences to which critical analysis can be applied. (One doesn't have to like the game, there are lots of reasons not to even if I happen to, but does one get the thrust of it?)
Ironically, after the revamp (pun...?) they gave him in MGS4, Raiden turned out to be a hit and they went on to make MGRising. There were fans who were sad you couldn't play as Raiden in MGS4 - talk about ultimate troll: replace a main character with someone who went on to be universally hated. Bash that character in the next game (MGS3) then make him awesome but unplayable in MGS4. (though they later introduced him to MGO)
Tie that into the above theory you get: destroy players perceived identity (Snake); connect player to nerd character that plays VR games (Raiden); let him win in a lame way furthering identification with him; bash him in next game; make player's new identity unplayable in MGS4. Yeah, the guy's an epic troll.
Well, the tale grew in the telling. Howard used to say that nobody else would take the project because the deadline was so short. He thought it was worth a try. Now the story is, he was hand-picked by Spielberg. Ok, Howard.
The units probably listed at 15-20 USD (corresponding to 50-60 USD at today's prices) and cost around 5-6 USD to produce.
Amazing facts if you have any idea on how the game industry work today.
In particular the little resources spent at development stands out. Showing that video game development back then probably was more akin to making a board game or a toy than the huge software development projects it is today.
I only recently watched the episode of Code Monkeys that tells this story. I did not know this was based on a true story. (I would not have suspected that a company would only assign a single programmer to such a big title, and on such a crazy schedule. Although, now that I think of it, I guess game industry veterans can tell lots and lots of these stories...)
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 211 ms ] thread* Atari games like this cost $40? That seems expensive!
* Why did Pennsylvania residents have to call a different number?
* Funny that a point of advertising was getting the game before everyone else. It reminds you that these were real games people wanted and not just nostalgic blasts, how I view them now.
(Link to poster: http://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/624/cpsprodpb/1972/production/_...)
I remember seeing this sort of thing a lot back then. Probably a sales tax thing - maybe the fulfillment center was in PA.
One of her jobs in the early 80s was to calculate the bills for WATS lines. There was a room full of mechanical counters, like odometers, that would increment while people were talking on their line. Every day she'd write down the new counts, subtract the previous day's counts, and they'd bill the difference.
Is it a 95% fun tax?
It's an 18% "fun tax".
95% I plucked out of my head, as an extreme percentual screwing value! :-)
Basically, we get screwed because there's precident establishing that we can. And it permiates almost anything that is produced overseas including phones and laptops but also all kinds of software, not just games.
Here's an article from when it was a hot topic in the news: http://www.smh.com.au/technology/technology-news/adobe-chief...
At the time it was literally cheaper to fly from Sydney to LA, buy the software in LA and fly home.
With the DLC and "Season passes" and other nickel and dime schemes they have, sure, but usually it's around $70-80 for AAA titles. I have an Aussie friend who I'd often gift games, then she'd pay me back on a 3rd party service what I paid, and end up saving money.
Australia really does just get screwed for whatever reason.
Best 2600 title screen ever though. No one ever mentions that about the game though.
Good read, interesting fixes.
I was quite young when ET came out. I loved ET, but the game was basically impossible for me to play because I couldn't get out of the pits very well; which was exacerbated by falling into them when I shouldn't have.
In contrast, Combat was easy to figure out and play and I could play it with loved ones.
The Atari 2600 was designed, almost exclusively, to play Combat. It has the ability to animate only 3 sprites: player 1, player 2 and "ball". There are many hacks to get around this, but we're talking about the pre-release period of the Atari Video Computer System, AKA VCS, the Atari 2600.
The only other game in mind for the system was Pong, which actually come out for the system in the form of Video Olympics, and it was created by one of the 2600's TIA chip designers, Joe Decuir. That chip literally synced up the processor with the television's refresh rate, and had each scan line drawn out of processing exactly when the electron beam was moving over the proper position on screen. The 2600 has no frame buffer. Essentially, when it's in the CPU, it's drawn on the screen. The machine only had 1024 bits, not bytes, of RAM.
But that's neither here nor there. For more info on the fascinating hardware that was the Atari 2600, read Racing the Beam by Ian Bogost and Nick Montefort. https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/racing-beam
Video Olympics could be considered to be the 100-in-1 of Pong games, with dozens of variants on the Pong theme. Combat takes the same sort of approach, with lots of game modes, but the actual gameplay was based on another arcade game. Rather than just recreating the arcade game, however, Combat expands on the theme, as Video Olympics did.
Combat is, to my mind, the only game on the 2600 that really holds up to this day. It's still fun, despite it's graphical limitations. For its day, it was the Super Mario Brothers of the Atari: that cart you could always turn to for fun.
It's elegant in its simplicity, extremely deep in its variations on a theme, and even offers a few asymmetrical playing options: one player can be given a different set of planes from the other.
Combat is the Go of computer games. Oh, and all the graphics are drawn in 1's and 0's. Same for the numbers on screen: big binary sprite maps. Here, look! http://benfry.com/distellamap/150dpi/combat-illus-150dpi.png
Thanks for the memory :)
80's kid here. My mom could always kick my butt in a small set of video games. Galaga, Ms. Pacman, Tetris. But she can't beat the first couple levels in Super Mario Brothers to save her lift.
Basically, just deferenced a pointer to OpenGL memory that I shouldn't have...
There's another neat hack which would cause the machine to run in slow motion. I don't know how it worked; I can't find any references now. Possibly it overloads the system with interrupts. But under its influence, clearing the screen would take several seconds. These two hacks combined beautifully, letting you see all the details of, e.g., Basic's heap management.
It does overload the system with interrupts, by making the (normally 100Hz) timer interrupt that the OS uses occur a lot more frequently.
I'm amazed that he shipped anything.
An initial run of 4 million copies is a lot of pressure on a single developer, the sort that can make you a legend or a catastrophe. I wonder if release management was considered to allow for bug fixes in subsequent production runs or phased production runs with hedged risk.
Probably adding to the pressure is the frustration that immediately following the production run you find a one-liner bug fix but you are 4 million copies too late.
Interestingly, Pac-Man also had millions of unsold cartridges left over. This candid Q&A talks more about the failure of ET, the frustrations and challenges:
http://www.denofgeek.com/games/howard-scott-warshaw/33708/ho...
There was a precursor to the BBC story in Playboy last September: The Guy Who Made the ‘Worst Game Ever’ Has Nothing to Apologize For http://www.playboy.com/articles/the-guy-who-made-the-worst-g...
They estimated 10 million consoles were actively being played, so they made 12 million copies. They sold 7 million, and that's before returns. 7 million people who would think twice before buying another Atari game.
Nothing beats game programming in the 80s. IMO, the golden age of programming.
That was he one thing I complained most about with the Atari PacMan. I don't think I ever noticed the flickering ghosts specifically, or even how different the bird layout was vs the arcade version.
But instead of a cherry/orange/pretzel that moved around the screen, the bonus fruit was a dark-brown square inside another slightly-larger light-brown square. It didn't move, it didn't look good, and as a kid I felt like this was the classic example of either the game designers cutting corners or limitations of the system.
I used to joke about this specific example as one of the key reasons to move on to better consoles when they came around.
Never beat it. Got extremely annoyed/bored with it after a short time. There were games with much worse graphics and sound that had a much better gameplay overall.
Then again, I had weird taste in video games when I was a kid.
Eight kilobytes?! How do you build anything meaningful, especially a game, with just eight kilobytes?
http://www.pouet.net/prodlist.php?platform%5B0%5D=Atari+VCS
Here's one of the higher-ranked 8k demos:
http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=32203 (YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WogMZn87hkk )
[1] Yes, I see what I did there.
- In 2600 coding you often don't need a stack, so you can use 'S' as a temp register. Very useful in the display kernel.
- The 2600 has a standard parallel port chip. There are configuration registers (e.g., port direction) that can be temporarily hijacked as RAM, when you don't care about input or output (which you generally only sample once a frame). That's a whole 8 more bits of RAM, not to be sneezed at.
One of my cow-orkers at Atari decided that he'd try to learn 2600 programming (he was mostly doing Atari Home Computer stuff). Over three or four months I saw him go through what I can only describe as deterioration and utter discouragement. The people who could get even an awful game out of the 2600 were pretty damned good hackers.
But that was storages, which was huge compared to the 128 bytes of RAM. Further complications happen because you need to time things with the scan lines of the display.
Btw: http://benfry.com/distellamap/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.kkrieger
Screenshot: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.kkrieger#/media/File:Kkrieger...
It doesn't even have a screen buffer, just a half a line buffer. You have to count scan lines and keep track of what's being drawn on a cycle by cycle basis, then update the line buffer live to get what you want on screen.
Often times you don't.
Think of how many computer programmers there were back then. How many notable 2600 programmers were there? 20? 25?
[1] http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/desert-bus-the-very-w... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nBr7EhL6Jpg
Also, Desert Bus for Hope raises money for charity: https://desertbus.org/
At time of writing, they've raised $3,112,329.72.
More info here: https://desertbus.org/about/
Big Rigs Over the Road Racing, meanwhile, was for all intents and purposes an alpha build sold as an actual game, in a box and everything.
A close friend of mine worked on PaintBrawl, which made the list (#2.11). PaintBrawl is a first person shooter but used paintball guns since WalMart wouldn't carry violent video games in the 90s.
> "I actually prefer it when people do identify it as the worst game of all time because I also did Yars Revenge and that's frequently identified as one of the best of all time. So between the two, I have the greatest range of any designer in history!"
I really liked Yars' Revenge. That constant droning sound -- it was really unlike anything I'd heard at that point.
Of course, not all of the time was coding, there was a lot of hand-drawing stuff, converting it to numbers, paper calculations, testing, etc
The problem was that the console games of the time were incredibly poor in graphics/sound, and typically also in game play.
Consumers wanted better games than what the console hardware at the time could produce, once something came along which was a technical leap compared to the Atari, Coleco etc, it did fantastically well, this was the NES.
Found out there are some other games in that genre, some quite a bit more shocking. :O
The worst movie ever made probably doesn't have enough Rotten Tomato or IMDB reviews to be considered. I was once told I had hosted the "worst program on television"[1], but being community tv there were probably 100 people watching each week and as far as I know no extant copy has survived - we'll never appear on a "worst TV shows of all time" list.
So almost by definition on a site like BBC.com, 'the worst video game in history' means 'which also sold tens of thousands of copies [2]', which is a measure of success and recognition most genuine failures won't achieve.
[1] Someone actually called the station and left a voicemail to that effect. I took it as a compliment - it meant he'd watched the whole show, because nobody calls to complain if they just changed the channel. [2] Or, in ET's case, 1.5 million.
I mean, what's the hardest game ever made? Probably if you're really picky, some ultra obscure shoot em up or kaizo esque Mario ROM hack. But the average list will only name titles like Battletoads, Dark Souls and I Wanna Be the Guy, because those are the ones many people (including the authors) have actually heard of.
Probably some bullet hell game which requires pixel perfect movement. Such as: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nscP9QpXoFM
I'm 99% sure near the end there (the last minute or so, last phase of the boss) it is literally unbeatable without buying more lives and if this wasn't an arcade game that allowed purchasing new lives, I don't think it'd be beaten by anything short of a tool-assisted run.
Same goes for movies: a "worst movies" list would probably be limited to movies that actually made theatrical release, not someone's home movie, or even a straight-to-DVD movie.
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Horrible/VideoGameGene...
And much of:
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Horrible/VideoGamesOth...
And everything on Hardcore Gaming 101's Weekly Kusoge series here:
http://www.hardcoregaming101.net/kusoge/kusoge.htm
There's also the fact a lot of games are distributed pretty well (and sometimes even sold), legality be damned. Is there any more legitimacy to a bad (and likely illegal) app store game featuring characters from Mario or Pokemon than a game mod or fan game featuring the same thing? People sold Doom Wad collections in boxes in shops at one point, does that count?
Even assuming only legal retail games, there's an awful lot of somewhat obscure shovelware that could fill up an entire (very long) list. Like the tons of PS2 and Wii shovelware (the latter's games were often ported from the former) by companies like Data Design and Phoenix Games.
Like:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UF8QzQp57oI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pk8qbSISQI4
A worst game ever list would be incredibly hard to make to any decent degree, simply because you have so many possible choices to include on it, especially if you go looking outside the most popular titles.
Atari had reached a point where it thought it could print money in perpetuity regardless of what it did. And that was true for a while. But you can't screw customers over forever. Eventually they bail, and that's what the big "video game collapse" was all about. Poor quality products being pushed at absurd prices. The lesson here is for startups with lock-in or few competitors: it doesn't take much to have it all fall apart. Make the best product you can.
I mostly marvel at the fact that this was done in 5 weeks. That's absurd. And while it was, objectively, a "bad" video game, there were far worse. They just weren't as high-profile. The second lesson is for developers: always appreciate the fact that you live in a world where patches, releases, and iterative development allow you to retroactively fix the things you had to do in a hurry.
It isn't his fault the managers were being unreasonable in the timeline, and the company grossly over-manufactured the cartridges.
If I made something in just 5 weeks that sold 1.5 million units, I'd be proud of myself! hehe, and as others have pointed out, it isn't actually the worst game.
In the same era, early 80s, kids across the UK were single-handedly writing games packed into 1-16k, some of which (Manic Miner being a prime example) sold in their hundreds of thousands in the UK market alone.
There was some pretty amazing programming skill going on back then.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_books_about_video_game...
:)
There's also a number of magazines devoted entirely to retro gaming, such as retroGAMER [2] that regularly have articles and interviews with the people involved.
[1] http://minotaurproject.co.uk/
[2] http://www.retrogamer.net/
I grew up in this era, first programming on an Aquarius. It was quite the hobby in the UK.
There is also diaries for Making of Prince of Persia and Karatek. http://www.jordanmechner.com/backstage/journals/
Both highly recommended, I reread it three times already.
IIRC when the Raspberry Pi was first announced, it was suggested it might inspire kids to program in the same way that computers did in the 80s, since teaching at UK schools apparently centres around how to use Microsoft applications.
Minecraft?
Skill is still here, it is just muted by the modern media. Back then a any game release was huge news, today such games are made all the time every day and don't even get noticed.
If programming from one era was good, why do you think that means programming from another era "must be bad"? Why can't good programming exist in both eras?
> But a reasonable guess is good compared to today
If you insist on guessing there's more to my final sentence, why isn't a reasonable guess, "as well as non-amazing programming back then" or "just as there is amazing programming today"?
Second, those games are only possible due to the existence of frameworks, high-level languages and the proliferation of programming knowledge over the internet. Almost no one doing a weekend hackathon is cranking out a playable game in raw assembly.
Now to be fair, most games in the 80s were terrible as well - that's part of what led to the crash, and it's just Sturgeon's Law in effect. But what's being praised here isn't really design skill so much as a level of programming skill which simply isn't strictly necessary in the modern day to create a game.
Yes, the real problem is that they expected something comparable in quality to his previous games with less time to develop it. He did agree to it, though. Watch "Atari: Game Over" and you'll be able to tell from interviews with him that he held a lot of guilt about it- for years.
The fact is that he was one of the best game developers in history that accepted a job that he couldn't do without making sacrifices that killed the game. He shouldn't take credit for killing Atari though. They ended up being split focused on computers (that did fairly well but were competing against giants) and consoles. And they messed up by releasing both the 5200, which was a bomb partially due to its controllers, and the 7800, which came too late. Even if Atari had done everything right, it would have been really difficult to compete with Nintendo.
I still love Atari, though. The NES was great, but the 2600, for its time, was the best thing that ever happened in the home gaming industry. It was the first proof that a home gaming console could be a staple to a first-world kid's life.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i08CVkBxvBM
Did I guess correctly?
Sidenote, somehow googling "youtube video nintendo marketing video game crash analysis boys" had the video I was thinking of at the very top.
Or maybe the centralised content censorship thing. Nintendo waa pretty infamous for that in the olden days, and it may have been the inspiration for sometimes rather insane guidelines for modern day app stores and the likes.
http://www.deltaheadtranslation.com/MGS2/DOTM3.htm
Altogether very interesting stuff that kept me up longer than I wanted to be. Thanks for the link and lack of sleep. :)
Today, I find it's one of the better popular-gaming litmus tests for whether or not somebody treats games as experiences to which critical analysis can be applied. (One doesn't have to like the game, there are lots of reasons not to even if I happen to, but does one get the thrust of it?)
[1] https://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html
- 5 weeks development time, one person.
- 5 mio 1980-USD marketing budget.
- 4 mio units produced
- 1.5 mio units sold
The units probably listed at 15-20 USD (corresponding to 50-60 USD at today's prices) and cost around 5-6 USD to produce.
Amazing facts if you have any idea on how the game industry work today.
In particular the little resources spent at development stands out. Showing that video game development back then probably was more akin to making a board game or a toy than the huge software development projects it is today.