The crack of the entire video game industry is often blamed for the failure of a game. A game that cost the gaming giant Atari millions.
The collapse of the entire video game industry in 1983 is often blamed on the failure of a single game. A game that cost gaming giant Atari millions in license fees and pushed the industry, which was dangerously, over the precipice.
The game is ET the Extra-Terrestrial, a linked film developed by Atari in hopes of taking advantage of the film’s great success.
Following the American release of Steven Spielberg’s classic and its subsequent popularity, Atari paid nearly $ 31 million in fees for the use of the ET name. The problem was that the film was released in June 1982 and Atari was hoping to have a link game on the market ready for the holiday season.
The time between Atari acquiring the ET rights and the game hit stores was only three months. The company commissioned a man to develop the entire game and told him he only had five weeks to do so. As such, Howard Scott Warshaw is often unfairly blamed for the downfall of this multimillion-dollar industry.
The game created by Warshaw hardly resembled the movie for which it was named. In it you play as ET picking up various components of the phone with which you need to call home. In his search, Elliot helps him in exchange for Reese’s Pieces, a product placement left over from the film, and frustrated by an FBI agent who doesn’t stop at anything to capture our friend alien.
More frustrating than the agent are the holes in each screen into which ET can fall at any time. An error also meant that if ET tried to get out of the pit from anywhere except the exact center, it would fall again.
RELATED: Read more news and reviews about games
ET the Alien is often described as frustratingly difficult due to a complete lack of in-game tutoring, but it wasn’t harder than most Atari games. However, due to time constraints imposed on Warshaw, along with the limitations of the game cartridge, all of the game mechanics were explained in the manual.
Due to the cost and popularity of the license, Warshaw was expected to produce a game as large as the film, which meant that it was impossible to explain all of his ideas to the game.
Children and parents were so negative about reading textbooks back then as now, and the game was returned to stores en masse by disappointed families. Word of mouth spread and sales figures declined very few weeks after the game was released.
Today, publishers are rarely bankrupt by the financial failure of a single game, but in the 1980s, when the industry was just beginning, it was not.
The situation was a self-sustaining Ponzi scheme. The developers often took the big profits from their latest release and spent all the money on developing their next big game. That was, of course, as long as they paid very well along the way.
After the critical and commercial failure of the Atari billionaire game, the company withdrew. People who had made millions in the industry found themselves unemployed virtually overnight.
Gaming journalist Julian Rignall, who reported on the industry at the time, better described the situation, saying in an interview: “They (the games) were really ambitious projects and production costs continued. Obviously (the developers of games) had promised on the distribution channel that they would arrive in time for Christmas and it never happened. Very quickly, the companies ran out of money, and everything went downhill. “
One of the most fascinating parts of the story is what happened to all the games left by Atari. The 1983 reports claimed that the returned and overproduced copies of ET had not been sold at a good price for a quick profit as the company collapsed.
Instead, they had all been secretly buried in a New Mexico landfill and covered in concrete, never to be found again.
However, in 2014, 30 years after the collapse of the industry, an investigation was launched to recover the buried cassettes.
Former Atari manager James Heller confessed that 728,000 games had in fact been buried at the site, although not all were ET. The team discovered only 1300 games, a small portion of which had been reported there. Of the games found only a hundred were copies of ET
While the huge licensing costs and hasty development of ET the Extra Terrestrial is often blamed on the then booming video game industry, its failure is only part of the puzzle.
The way the companies operated at the time ensured that they were doomed to collapse at some point, and our error-eyed alien friend was just the final drop.
– written by Georgina Young on behalf of GLHF