World’s Worst Video Game

On April 25, 2014, a bulldozer dug into a landfill in Alamogordo, New Mexico, revealing old Atari video games from 30 years ago. Fans gathered to see E. T. the Extra-Terrestrial, a game blamed for the 1983 video game crash. Its creator, Howard Scott Warshaw, reflects on his past and the lessons of corporate greed and valuing quantity over quality.

Growing up, Warshaw created his own rules for board games like Monopoly and Risk. As a teenager in the early 1970s, he saw the start of the commercial video game industry with popular arcade games like Atari’s Pong and the launch of the first home console, the Magnavox Odyssey. He fell in love with computers while studying economics at Tulane University because it meant no long papers or heavy reading. He earned a master’s in engineering and worked as a programmer at Hewlett-Packard but the appeal of writing video games meant he was about to take a different route.

Encouraged by a friend, he applied to Atari, which had rapidly grown into a leading company in the video game market. The company was thriving during a golden age for video games and on January 11, 1981, Warshaw left HP to join Atari as a programmer even though it was less money.

Warshaw, 24, had no game development experience but was assigned to create new games on microchips using real-time programming. His goal was to make a significant contribution and wished for his games to be the best sellers ever.

His first game, Yars' Revenge, about mutated houseflies, took 7 months to develop and another 5 months for testing. Released in May 1982, it became Atari's best-selling game for the 2600, selling over 1 million copies. This success led to his next project: the video game based on the film Raiders of the Lost Ark, which also sold 1 million copies after 10 months of development.

As Warshaw gained fame and earned around $1 million per year, Atari shifted its strategy to focus on licensing film rights instead of allowing programmers enough time to innovate. This change affected the culture, prioritizing sales over quality, and posed challenges to Warshaw's ongoing success.

Speilberg’s E. T. the Extra-Terrestrial debuted in theatres in June 1982 and was a huge success, earning $322 million in its first year, the highest at that time. A bidding war for the video game rights ensued, with Warner ultimately paying around $20-25 million.

On July 27, Warshaw received a call from Atari's CEO, Ray Kassar, who invited him to present his game design to Spielberg the following Thursday. Atari wanted to release the game by Christmas, requiring completion by September 1st. Normally, a game takes about 1,000 hours and six months to develop, but Warshaw had less than 36 hours to create a concept and only five weeks to finish the game.

With limited time, Warshaw aimed to develop a small, simple, and re-playable game. He pitched the idea of guiding E. T. through a landscape to collect phone pieces while avoiding FBI agents, which Spielberg initially questioned but eventually approved. Over the next 35 days, Warshaw worked 14-hour days, totalling around 500 hours on the game. In December 1983, five million E. T. cartridges were released, but the outcome was unexpected.

The E. T. video game initially sold well due to a popular craze, with parents buying many copies for their children. However, by early 1983, players found the game frustrating and disorienting, especially because of the pits that caused repeated falls. One reviewer noted the difficulty of avoiding these holes, which contributed to the game's problems. Warshaw pointed out a key distinction between frustrating gameplay that players can understand and disorientation that leaves them confused.

After being priced at $38, the game quickly dropped to $7. 99, leading to millions of unsold and returned copies. This decline coincided with the significant video game crash of 1983, where the industry’s revenue plummeted by 97%. Atari faced massive losses, reducing its workforce from 10,000 to 2,000 employees and seeing its stock value decline sharply.

While E. T. became a symbol of the industry's issues, insiders recognized it was just a symptom rather than the direct cause. Nolan Bushnell noted that multiple missteps led to the crash, indicating that such complex issues are often oversimplified in storytelling.

In 1983, Atari dumped 20 truckloads of games, including unsold copies of E. T., in a landfill in Alamogordo, New Mexico. This act became an urban legend. In April 2014, a crew excavated the site and found 1,300 games, with E. T. cartridges selling for up to $1,500 at auction. For David Warshaw, the creator of E. T., this was a form of vindication. After Atari's downfall, Warshaw worked as a real estate broker and later became a psychotherapist. On the day of the excavation, he felt proud and preferred E. T. being called the worst game ever, as it highlighted his range as a designer.

Reference

The Husstle by Zachary Crockett – The Man Who Made the “Worst” Video Game in HistoryAvailable at- https://getpocket.com/explore/item/the-man-who-made-the-worst-video-game-in-history?utm_source=firefox-newtab-en-gb

(Assessed: 12th March 2025)