Gaming wasn’t always the solid industry it is today: in 1983, ET the Extra-Terrestrial flop bankrupted it.
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 licensing fees and it pushed an industry in an already precarious enough position off the precipice.
The game is ET the Extra-Terrestrial, a videogame adaptation of the film developed by Atari in hopes of monetizing the huge success of the film. After the North American release of Steven Spielberg’s classic, and its consequent popularity, it seems that Atari paid nearly $ 31 million to grab the rights to use the ET name. The problem was that the film was released in June 1982 and Atari was hoping to bring the game to store shelves for the holiday season.
Why was the game so bad? –
The time elapsed between Atari’s acquisition of ET rights and the game’s release was just three months. The company hired a single person to develop the entire title, and told him he only had five weeks to do it. Therefore, it is quite unfair that the blame for the decline of this multi-million dollar industry is being blamed all on Howard Scott Warshaw – this is the name of that person.
The game Warshaw created barely resembled the movie it was named after. You played as ET and collected various phone components that he needed to call home. In his mission, the alien was assisted by Elliot in exchange for Reese’s Pieces, a product placement left behind by the film, and thwarted by an FBI agent who stopped at nothing to capture our extraterrestrial friend. More frustrating than the agent were the holes placed on each screen, which ET would fall into at any moment. As if that weren’t enough, a bug meant that if ET tried to get out of the pit from anywhere outside the exact center, she would fall back into it.
How Atari “condemned” video games –
ET the Extra-Terrestrial is often described as frustrating and difficult due to the complete lack of tutorials in the game, but it was actually no more difficult than most Atari games. However, due to the very tight deadlines imposed on Warshaw, along with cartridge limitations, all game mechanics were explained in the manual. Due to the price and popularity of the license, Atari expected Warshaw to produce a game at least as big as the movie, which made it impossible to explain all of his in-game ideas to him.
Children and parents were at least as averse to reading manuals as they are today, and copies of the game were brought back to shops by disappointed families. Word of mouth did the rest and sales figures dropped steeply just a few weeks after the release. In our time, publishers rarely go bankrupt due to the commercial failure of a single game but, in the 1980s, when the industry was just starting out, the situation was quite different. The situation, in fact, was a self-sustaining Ponzi scheme. Developers often took the profits from their latest release and funneled them all into the development of their next big game. Of course, all while taking home hefty salaries for themselves. After the public and critical failure of Atari’s multi-million dollar game, the company closed. People who had made millions in industry found themselves unemployed virtually overnight.
The mystery of the buried copies –
Gaming journalist Julian Rignall at the time described the situation in the best possible way, saying in an interview that “they were (the games) very ambitious projects and production costs kept rising. Obviously, they (the developers) made promises to the distribution channels that they would be arrived in time for Christmas and this never happened. The companies ran out of money very quickly, and it all went upside down ”.
One of the most fascinating parts of the story is what happened to all the games left behind by Atari. 1983 reports claimed that returned or excess copies of ET had not been cheaply sold for quick profit as the company went bankrupt. On the contrary, they had all been buried in a landfill in New Mexico and covered with 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 copies had indeed been buried there, although not all of them were ET’s. The investigation team discovered only 1,300 copies, a small portion of what were said to be there. Of the games found, only about 100 were copies of ET
But was it really ET’s fault? –
While the huge licensing costs and rushed development of ET the Extra-Terrestrial is often blamed for the collapse of the then booming video game industry, its failure is only one piece of the puzzle. Because of the way companies operated at the time, they were bound to collapse sooner or later, and our alien friend was only the drop that broke the camel’s back.
Written by Georgina Young for GLHF
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