Tag: Howard Scott Warshaw

Howard Scott Warshaw: Once Upon Atari

I’m about halfway through Once Upon Atari: How I Made History By Killing an Industry by Howard Scott Warshaw, and loving it.

Howard Scott Warshaw, if you didn’t know, was a programmer for Atari in the early 80s. He worked in their console division, where he developed the games Yar’s Revenge, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial for the Atari 2600. These were groundbreaking games on the most popular home console of its day, and accomplished many “firsts”.

In 1983, the video game market suddenly collapsed, due to a combination of a multitude of factors, but at the time Warshaw’s E.T. was often given blame for causing what came to be known as the “Great Crash of ’83’. E.T. has often been referred to as “the worst video game of all time” but that is quite unfair to the game, which pushed the limits of the Atari 2600 hardware, and while not perfect, was by no means a bad game — although it was drastically over-produced by Atari, leading to a huge amount of unsold inventory, which hurt the company’s bottom line. Warshaw was given 5 weeks to develop the game, a feat thought by his managers to be impossible given that most Atari 2600 games took about 6 months to develop.

This is all well known and chronicled history for video game fans. Warshaw to his credit has been remarkably accessible and open about his story for some time, and has given numerous interviews over the years. He’s even been known to appear on the Atari Age facebook page and comment once in a while. He’s truly a legend of the industry, and a wonderful, brilliant human being. This book details his story, how he came to work for Atari, what went on there during his tenure (confirming a lot of the oft-retold stories about the workplace culture), and how he faced the indignity of being cast as the creator of the “worst game of all time”.

Warshaw left Atari and went on to become a licensed psychotherapist and has helped people like himself, who worked in the high tech field to deal with the immense pressures that they’re put under to be creative, be correct, and deliver products that will make billions of dollars for themselves or their shareholders.

I haven’t gotten to that part of the book yet, but from what I already know of his story, his approach to dealing with failure, or at least the perception that he had been responsible in large part for a massive and very public failure of what had just a year prior been the fastest growing company in the history of the world, is remarkable as it is instructive. He has embraced the label, but adds to it that his Yar’s Revenge is often cited as one of the best video games on the Atari, thus giving him the rightful claim to having the greatest range of any game developer. Turning a negative into a badge of pride, he has faced the critics, rebutted them with not just clever rhetoric, but also facts, figures, and sound reasoning, and provides us an example of how “failure” often isn’t failure, that perceptions matter, that what you tell yourself matters, and that above all it does not define us — we have the power, if we choose to use it, to define ourselves.

Warshaw’s writing style is accessible, not overly technical, candid, often quite humorous, warm and insightful. Reading his book makes me admire him even more than I did, and grateful for the handful of times that he’s Liked something that I’ve said on the Atari Age facebook page, and most of all, thankful for the many hours I spent as a young child engaging with, and enthralled by, his digital creations.

https://newonceuponatari.hswarshaw.com/

E.T. was not the worst game of all time.

I’ve talked about this before, but today NPR covered it again.

This is a well known story in the lore of videogame history… There’s a certain amount of misconception about it.

Howard Scott Warshaw likes to talk about how E.T. has the reputation of being the worst game ever, and how between it and the highly regarded Yar’s Revenge, it gives him the greatest range of any game developer. But even he doesn’t think E.T was really the worst of all time. As he carefully states, E.T. is “the game that is widely held to be the worst video game of all time.” That’s a bit distanced from accepting that it is the worst.

It makes for a good story, and he likes to tell the story, and he’s a good storyteller, and he likes to set the record straight when he tells the story, because telling the story takes away the power of the failure to hurt him. He’s a really good sport about it, and a good guy, and was a good game developer when that’s what he was doing. He has a great attitude about failure, and it’s served him well in life. So more power to him.

Howard Scott Warshaw’s game was actually pretty good. I owned E.T. and liked it. It was ambitious, and it definitely had its share of flaws, but it was a much more complicated game than the arcade style action games that Atari was known for, and that was a problem for a lot of gamers who weren’t ready for a deeper game design and complex puzzle solving. The game was difficult, and solving the puzzles was a bit arcane, and the pits that you fall into frequently were rather annoying, but it was not the “worst game of all time” that it has been labeled as.

What it was, it was a huge commercial failure — mainly because Atari overpaid Steven Spielberg $26 million for the license rights to make an exclusive ET videogame. It was one of the better selling games for the Atari, moving 1.5 million units. Unfortunately, Atari had produced 5 million copies, vastly overestimating the market. And reviews of the game were mostly bad, in spite of the high sales. The sales came through more through name recognition and the success of the film, but once people played the game, many of them felt like it wasn’t good enough. And it was rushed. But it’s a very impressive achievement to create something as big and complex as E.T. with the tools that Warshaw had at the time, in as little time as he was given.

Atari were counting on ET to drive more console sales, and it didn’t happen. By 1983, the VCS was a 7 year old dinosaur, and badly needed a replacement. But Atari had a hard time leading the launch of the next generation of hardware, because doing so would have obsoleted their market-dominating 2600 model. They tried with the 5200, but it had several design problems, and this combined with lack of backward compatibility (they did release an adapter later) and expense made it unpopular.

At the time, there wasn’t really a precedent for the idea of computer equipment becoming obsolete in just a few years time, and so many consumers of the day felt like buying a new console every few years, particularly if their old games wouldn’t play on it, was a ripoff. They viewed electronics like a radio or television or record player, which could last for decades if cared for, and newer models could continue to play old media. And old game consoles may still work four decades on, but they are obviously obsolete and can’t play newer games, and newer machines don’t play old Atari games (other than through emulation.)

Meanwhile, Atari corporate had alienated some of their best developers, by refusing to credit them for their work on the cover of the box, or pay royalties, They left to found Activision, which opened the door to any third party releasing games for the 2600, including many fly by night operators who could barely program for the 2600, who put out horrid garbage games that glutted store shelves and gave the Atari a poorer reputation than it deserved, and resulted in the Great Crash.

It’s popular to blame ET for being the cause of the great crash of ’83, but it wasn’t.