November 18, 2023 • 41 mins
If you play video games you probably have an easy answer to worst game of all time: ET. But it turns out there are no easy answers, especially when you’re talking about a game so terrible it’s blamed for bringing the entire video game industry with it. Find out more in this classic episode.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Everyone. It's Joshua. For this week's select, I've chosen our
twenty eighteen episode on ET the video game. It's one
of those topics that you thought you knew about, but
after you hear this episode, you'll realize that you've been
grossly misinformed by the Internet. Who knew that could happen?
Enjoy this trip down nostalgia lane.
Speaker 2 (00:24):
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of Iheartradioy.
Speaker 1 (00:34):
And welcome to the podcast. I'm josh and there's Chuck
and there's Jerry, and it's like the holiday season. I
feel great.
Speaker 3 (00:43):
It is Holidays with a Z, and we're gonna do
what we almost did for a short stuff.
Speaker 1 (00:49):
Oh yes, Chuck, you're commended for that call.
Speaker 3 (00:53):
Well, I was just like I kind of wanted to
do this one. Always is a long stuff. We don't
have a show called mediums stuff yet.
Speaker 1 (01:00):
No, we have a so so stuffed called Stuff you
Should Know.
Speaker 3 (01:05):
Yeah, but yeah, I saw that documentary Atari game over
a few years ago.
Speaker 1 (01:12):
It's a good one.
Speaker 3 (01:13):
And I also guested on tech Stuff and did a
two part episode on the history of Atari.
Speaker 4 (01:19):
It's a good one with Strickland.
Speaker 3 (01:21):
He's great too, and we could probably do Atari on
its own at some point too.
Speaker 1 (01:26):
I agree, I think we definitely should.
Speaker 3 (01:28):
But this is I mean, I was about to say
if Strickland and I could get two episodes out of it,
but you know how that guy goes on.
Speaker 1 (01:33):
Oh my god, he's the hardest working man in podcast business.
I'll tell you that.
Speaker 4 (01:39):
Just ask.
Speaker 1 (01:41):
So we're talking today about what is widely believed to
be the worst video game of all time, except that
it's not. Except that it's not. Yes, it's true. I
love stories like this where it's like everything you thought
you knew was wrong, and really stop and ask yourself,
how did you even know that this truth that you
(02:01):
knew before. I love that man.
Speaker 3 (02:03):
Yeah, E t the Atari video game a lot of people.
Speaker 4 (02:08):
It's that whole.
Speaker 3 (02:09):
Internet bandwagon thing. I think, Yes, worst game of all time.
They tried to bury it in the desert. It was
so bad.
Speaker 4 (02:15):
Killed Atari, killed the whole stinking industry.
Speaker 1 (02:18):
Right, But it was just that bad of a game.
But you've played it.
Speaker 4 (02:21):
No, Yeah, I will say this, it may be one
of the one of the most disappointing games of all time.
It could be, Yes, because if you were a kid
back then like me, and you and you played Atari
like I did. It was it was a disappointment.
Speaker 1 (02:40):
It was greatly anticipated. I'm sure a lot.
Speaker 3 (02:43):
Of anticipation that was part, you know, that was that
was probably the biggest reason why it gets all the
attention because it was e t It wasn't what said,
dumb game sorcerer, yeah, or fast food. There were so
many bad video games for Atari.
Speaker 1 (02:58):
Yeah, there were a lot.
Speaker 4 (03:00):
It was awful.
Speaker 1 (03:01):
So will this come out and say, no, ET is
not the worst video game of all time. There were
a lot of worst, far far worst video games. Yes
than ET, But like you were saying, as far as
the anticipation went, as far as the letdown went, as
far as the loss of money went, you can understand
how people would say this is the worst of all time.
(03:23):
But also the timing of its failure was so utterly,
amazingly perfect that it just took it from worst video
game of all time to worst video game of all time.
Speaker 3 (03:38):
Yeah, it's like here Atari in video home console game industry,
you're not doing well, and I notice you're sinking. Let
me tie this anvil around your ankle that's shaped like ET.
Speaker 1 (03:50):
Yep, that's right.
Speaker 4 (03:51):
It's just really bad timing.
Speaker 1 (03:53):
So let's get into the story because it's one of
the more interesting ones, and it features a great guy
named Howard Scott wore Shaw, who if you've seen the
movie Game Over, you have probably come to really like
and admire good dude.
Speaker 4 (04:07):
Good dude, brilliant designer.
Speaker 1 (04:09):
Huh and like a just a genuinely great guy. He
The story begins back in nineteen eighty two, I believe, Yeah,
it was nineteen eighty two. He was a designer at Atari.
He'd apparently started out writing Coda Hewlett Packard and was
very unhappy, so he made the move over to Atari,
(04:29):
even though he had zero experience with game design, but
he was really an exciting game designer because he came
up with some really innovative ideas.
Speaker 3 (04:38):
Yes, he Yars Revenge is one of the best Atari
twenty six hundred games of all time.
Speaker 1 (04:45):
Did you have that one?
Speaker 4 (04:46):
Oh?
Speaker 1 (04:46):
Yeah, I never played it.
Speaker 4 (04:48):
It's great. It's great.
Speaker 1 (04:49):
It's kind of space invaderies or something. It's like a
shooter thing, kind of yeah, single screen shooter.
Speaker 4 (04:54):
Well, you're a I guess you were a Yar, and
you're this sort of bug like Reacher and instead of
shooting at something to chip away at it. You do
it so with your body, so you just fly into this.
Speaker 1 (05:09):
Oh I think I had that went You.
Speaker 4 (05:12):
Would fly into this. I mean, of course all this
stuff was supposed to represent like a spaceship or a planet,
but it was made up of you know, blocks and cubes,
so I don't even know what it was. But your
whole point was to make it.
Speaker 1 (05:24):
Smaller, gotcha, and you would fly into I know.
Speaker 4 (05:26):
You instead of yeah, shooting, you would fly into it.
Speaker 1 (05:28):
For my money, that kind of game the best of
all time with Centipede.
Speaker 4 (05:32):
Cinipede is great.
Speaker 1 (05:33):
It was great.
Speaker 3 (05:34):
I mean a lot of those games I played today
when I happened upon an arcade, Galagha and Frogger and
Centipede and Defender, like those are still really good challenging
jus sure, miss fun games, yeah, miss bac man, they
just stand up still. It's not like you go to
Galagha or Jousts now and you're like, this is easy.
Speaker 1 (05:54):
What was I thinking? I was such a kid.
Speaker 4 (05:56):
There are still hard challenging games, and I think that's
sort of they to a good video game is it's
got to be winnable, but it's got to be hard
because a kid didn't want to you know, a pushover, right,
but a kid also wants to win.
Speaker 1 (06:12):
So Howard Scott Warshaw knew this like he was a
game designer. He wasn't like a code monkey or anything
like that. He was a game designer, an artist. I'm
sure he considered himself, especially at the time, and he
should have. One of the other things he was known
for was he was the guy who realized that you
could make a game way more enjoyable if you created
(06:33):
a backstory for it. So rather than like, drive this
car there, you're actually running away from this gang of
you know, international mafia guys who are trying to kidnap
your girlfriend or whatever. Yeah, you make up a backstory
for it. The player reads this backstory and then plays,
they care that much more about the person because their
(06:53):
imagination is now kicked in. They're not just doing a
mindless task. They're imagining what's going on in computer world.
And he did that for games, and he was one
of the first, if not the first designer to create
backstories and biographies for his characters and games.
Speaker 3 (07:08):
Yeah, and you know what just now is sort of
hitting me that part of the appeal was the imagination
of the kid. So like when you got the game
Adventure or Asteroids and Asteroids, you were a pencil drawn
triangle shooting at pencil drawn shapes.
Speaker 1 (07:28):
Shooting pencils at pencil drawn shapes.
Speaker 3 (07:30):
Shooting dots at pencil drawn shapes. An Adventure, you are
a cube that flew around with an arrow attached to
you that was supposed to be your sword. But when
you look at the actual cartridge or the box that
it came in, they had this great artwork of this
night on a horse with his sword drawn in asteroids,
(07:52):
this han solo like pilot like cruising through a you know,
an asteroid field, and that would kickstarts. That starts the
imagination of a ten year old, right, and then they
forget they're a cube, right or an arrow?
Speaker 1 (08:05):
Yeah, it makes it that much more real.
Speaker 4 (08:07):
Yeah, it was really really cool.
Speaker 1 (08:08):
Because the imagination can do some pretty amazing stuff with
eight bytes of graphic.
Speaker 4 (08:12):
Yeah, you know for sure.
Speaker 1 (08:15):
So Warshaw figured.
Speaker 4 (08:18):
This out, Yeah, designing worlds.
Speaker 1 (08:19):
He would design easter eggs into his games too. Yeah
he wasn't the first, but yes, no, but he was
an early person to do that.
Speaker 4 (08:27):
Yeah, Adventure was the first, I think.
Speaker 1 (08:28):
And in addition to Yours Revenge, he also already had
a hit in the Raiders of the Lost Art game.
He had designed that and it's still laid so much.
I read you did. Oh yeah, so from what I
never played that one. From what I understand you, it
was extremely difficult. You it required both joy sticks. Yeah,
there was. I think I read somewhere that there were
thirty three screens, which is unheard of.
Speaker 4 (08:51):
I could buy that.
Speaker 1 (08:53):
And that like people still have trouble beating it today.
Speaker 3 (08:56):
Well, it's it was really hard. I remember very specifically.
There was one part where you were to parachute parachute
from one screen and it would all of a sudden,
you went to the bottom and it would pop up
and you're on the next screen going down and there's
a tree on the left, and you had to start
(09:16):
that jump early, going hard left and hook onto that
tree with your parachute. If you hit at the wrong angle,
it burst your parachute and you would die, and if
you didn't, you would hook onto it and slide perfectly.
And it was probably one of the hardest things I've
ever had to do in a video game.
Speaker 1 (09:34):
I know, you get to this day life.
Speaker 4 (09:36):
No, as far as video gameplay though.
Speaker 3 (09:37):
Really it was very, very challenging, but it was possible.
So when you tried it twenty seven times and you
nail it on that twenty eight, like you would run
around the neighborhood telling all your friends that you nailed
the parachute jump really really hard.
Speaker 1 (09:54):
But it was so hard that it was like you
would get frustrated or it kept you sucking.
Speaker 4 (09:59):
No, no, no, no, You're like, I know I can get it.
Speaker 1 (10:01):
There's the key and that's.
Speaker 4 (10:02):
Where ET messed up. But we'll get to that, okay.
Speaker 1 (10:05):
So on June, it's funny, he remembers us the date
on June twenty seventh, nineteen eighty two, Howard s Gott
Warshaw's hanging around Atari and he gets a phone call.
He gets a phone call from the CEO, Ray Casar himself.
That was a big deal back then. Oh sure, and
Ray Casar says, hey, kid, we know you, we love you.
(10:27):
We've got something going on with Steven Spielberg. He remembers
that you made the Raiders of the Lost Art game
for him. He thinks, you're a certifiable genius, but we
have a special assignment for you. We want you to
make the et video game. Can you do it? Wait,
don't answer yet. Can you do it in five weeks?
(10:47):
Then he went sure, yeah, he said yeah, which I
mean even today, you're like five weeks. That doesn't sounding
very long. That was less than a tenth of the
time that it would normally take.
Speaker 3 (11:00):
And he had the little secret is that he had
already called some other people in the company and said,
the CEO has this, like is this even possible? Or
am I just crazy for asking this guy to do
this in five weeks because it takes five or six months.
And they all said, no, it's not possible. And he said, well,
I'm going to ask him.
Speaker 1 (11:18):
Anyway, right, And Howard Scott Warshaw didn't realize that they'd
already told him like, no, this can't be done when
he said yes, but he was locked in the punch
and he was twenty four years old and sure, full
of full of exuberants and hubris and all sorts of stuff,
and said I can do this. So he did. And
the reason we should say, the reason why this this
(11:39):
schedule was so short and usually took five to six
months for a game to be developed, and he had
five weeks to do it, and The reason why is
because the haggling the deal to get the rights for
the et game for Atari to purchase them, which they
bought for twenty one million dollars, took way longer than expected,
(12:01):
and they really wanted this game out for in time
for Christmas.
Speaker 4 (12:05):
That was the whole deal.
Speaker 1 (12:07):
So because of the because the deal had worked all
the way up into the summer and Christmas was on
the other edge, they needed also several weeks to manufacture
the actual cartridges and get them into stores. Yeah, if
you lay it all this timeline out, they left five
weeks to develop a game from scratch. So they they
knew just the guy to do it, and it was
(12:27):
Howard's got Warshaw and Howard said I'll give it a shot.
I'm going to do it.
Speaker 4 (12:31):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (12:31):
And I should point out that when you say five
or six months is the usual time, five or six
months was fast.
Speaker 4 (12:38):
The usual time was more than that.
Speaker 1 (12:40):
Well, you also probably had a team working on it.
Speaker 4 (12:42):
Like five or six months was the Rush version?
Speaker 1 (12:44):
Right?
Speaker 4 (12:45):
Anyway? Yeah, I mean I think I think.
Speaker 1 (12:50):
That the pretty delightful prog Rock version.
Speaker 4 (12:53):
Did that have a they should add their own video game.
Speaker 1 (12:55):
I'm surprised they didn't. They were like, right there, they
did in that wheelhouse.
Speaker 4 (12:59):
We would like the twenty one to twelve game or something.
Speaker 1 (13:02):
We would know. Yeah, there's no way we wouldn't know
about the Rush twenty one to twelve Atari game.
Speaker 3 (13:08):
So Warshaw gets to meet with Steven Spielberg in la
and was not given direction or a brief. He meets
with Spielberg says, here's what I proposed, this adventure game
that follows a plot of the film somewhat where the
kid is et playing the game. You are et, right,
(13:28):
and you got to go around and collect all these
pieces to build a phone so you can phone home,
and the government's after you and these bad doctors are
after you. It's just like your movie, right, And Spielberg
was like, well, can't you just have him like running
around eating Reese's pieces like pac Man?
Speaker 4 (13:43):
Yeah, and he went, oh.
Speaker 1 (13:45):
There's this great there's this great quote where he's like, here,
here's one of my idols, Steven Spielberg asking me to
knock off pac Man for the ET game. And I thought, well, gee, Stephen,
couldn't you make something more like The Day of the earthstud?
Speaker 4 (13:59):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (14:00):
Burn right, burn? So he apparently had to do a
little fancy footwork to talk Spielberg into going with his
vision rather than a pac Man knockoff of ET, which
who knows, may have sold a lot better, but it
was he got him to agree to his vision for
this game. He said, no, this is a groundbreaking movie.
(14:20):
We need to make a groundbreaking game. And so Spielberg
agreed to it, and Warshaw started to get to work.
So we should probably take a break before Scott, Howard
Scott really jumps in it, all right, Chuck. So it's
(14:53):
basically the beginning of July nineteen eighty two, and Howard
Scott Warshaw is the sole programmer for an ET video game.
Atari's biggest bet. That they spent twenty one million dollars
on the rights too, that they're going to spend an
additional five million dollars on the advertising budget, for the
most anyone's ever spent on a video game up to
(15:15):
that point. He's the only programmer who's going to make
this game, and he has five weeks to do it,
which from what I understand, no one had ever done before.
Speaker 3 (15:24):
Yeah, and this was Atari was a giant at the time.
If video If the video game industry was beginning to slip.
It wasn't like the public didn't really realize that yet.
The industry may have, but Atari held about eighty percent
of the market. They were at about two billion in
(15:44):
annual sales and about three quarters of billion in profit,
which is just unheard of.
Speaker 1 (15:50):
About two billion in profit in today's money.
Speaker 4 (15:53):
Yeah, so a ton of money. But they saw the
writing on the wall.
Speaker 3 (15:57):
They knew that the personal computer like the Common or
sixty four that could play games but also do a
lot more, was a real genuine threat to the home console.
Speaker 1 (16:07):
So I read a contemporary article in the New York
Times from nineteen eighty three talking about this, and Atari
said they did not see the writing on the wall.
Speaker 4 (16:17):
Well, one of.
Speaker 1 (16:18):
Them said, the first six months of nineteen eighty three
was one way. The second six months it was like
we were in a totally different business.
Speaker 3 (16:26):
Yeah, but if you read interviews with him now, I
think that might have.
Speaker 1 (16:29):
Been, Oh, the guy covering is well, yeah.
Speaker 3 (16:32):
I don't think you want to go out in the
press in the moment and say, hey, everyone, we're super
scared investors.
Speaker 1 (16:37):
Don't freak out, don't panic, You're right, Chuck. I feel
a little foolish.
Speaker 3 (16:42):
So they what they did was they set Warshaw up
with everything he would have at work. They set him
up at home. So the only time he could not
be working on this game was his very short drive
over to the office. And he worked on it almost
NonStop for five weeks.
Speaker 1 (17:00):
He had a manager that was assigned to him to
make sure that he ate. That was I'm sure not
the manager's only duty, but it was. One of the
manager's new jobs was to make sure that Warshaw ate
every day.
Speaker 4 (17:11):
How about a waffle?
Speaker 1 (17:13):
Sure, whatever, Stop bothering me.
Speaker 4 (17:16):
ET's in the pit again.
Speaker 1 (17:18):
So for five weeks he worked almost like you said,
twenty four hours a day. He said, it's the hardest
he's ever worked in his entire life.
Speaker 4 (17:27):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (17:27):
And when five weeks came and went, he handed off
his He handed off the game. He finished it. He
completed it in time. And it wasn't done in his opinion,
or it would turn out in anybody's opinion, but it
was done. It was a complete game that he had
finished in five weeks, the et video game. And it
wasn't just something like a pac Man knockoff. He'd given
(17:50):
real thought to it and created a world that was
much different from a lot of the other games at
the time. At the time, it was a world like
it was a cube shape told with six screens, and
so if you walk to the left, you knew you
were going to end up on this other screen. If
you walked up, you wouldn't end up on the other screen.
It was a world that you were navigating, rather than
(18:11):
say like Yars Revenge, which is just one screen and
everything's happening on the one screen and it may imply
motion or something like this. With the Et game, you
were moving from one area of this world to the next. Yeah,
which is it was new. It wasn't new, but it was.
It wasn't. It wasn't standard to have six screens, especially
if you have five weeks to do it. Give a
(18:32):
guy a break.
Speaker 4 (18:33):
Yeah, yeah, No, I'm not saying it should. What I'm
saying is that.
Speaker 3 (18:38):
It wasn't like some big revolutionary thing like the Raiders
game was pre this and it had thirty something screened. Okay,
all right, fine, and adventure like kids were used to
this by this point. Okay, So it wasn't like, oh
wait till they get a load of six screens, like
leaving the screen.
Speaker 1 (18:53):
I see, but I think Howard Scott Warshaw should have
gone to everybody's house and been like, here's your copy
of et game as well. You know I made this
in five weeks.
Speaker 3 (19:04):
Well he designed Easter eggs in there too, and I
kind of wondered, like, how much time did he spend
doing that with his own initials and like the little
Yards Revenge Flower.
Speaker 1 (19:13):
I hadn't really thought about that.
Speaker 3 (19:14):
I don't know, so he says time was of the essence,
though I just maybe put that last on the list.
Speaker 1 (19:20):
He says today that had he had one more week
to just troubleshoot, he could have worked out all the kinks.
Speaker 4 (19:26):
He could have worked out the kinks and one more
Easter egg.
Speaker 1 (19:28):
But he handed it out. He handed it off to Atari,
and Atari said genius. They gave it to Steven Spielberg
to play. Spielberg apparently liked it. And in the game
it wasn't it wasn't just some dumb clunky game. It
was a mediocre game, but it was a game, and
it was done, and it was out the door, and
(19:49):
they got it out in time for Christmas. The cartridges shipped.
If you go back onto YouTube and search ET game
ad or commercial of some extraordinarily nostalgic ads of ET
dressed to Santa Claus playing his own video game of
a kid like receiving the ET video game from ET
(20:10):
out in the shed. Amazing stuff. So not only is
it like Christmas time feeling, but like Christmas time nineteen
eighty two.
Speaker 4 (20:17):
Feeling Christmas plus ET who over the top.
Speaker 1 (20:20):
It's nice. It's just like the the taste of ice
sugar cookies swells from the inside of your mouth. You
almost gag on it. It's so overpowering.
Speaker 3 (20:29):
So they produce, well, we don't know for sure how many,
maybe as many as twelve million copies of this, at
least four million.
Speaker 1 (20:39):
That's part of the urban legend.
Speaker 3 (20:41):
Yeah, I mean, I don't think there's an exact exact number,
but millions of copies of these were produced. Twenty one
million dollars invested in the licensing, plus five five million
dollars in advertising and marketing, not just I mean, who
knows what they paid Warshaw or for the actual production.
I mean, I doubt if it was millions of dollars.
Speaker 1 (21:02):
But he was probably salaried.
Speaker 4 (21:04):
They sunk a.
Speaker 3 (21:04):
Whole lot of money into this thing and sold. Okay,
at first they sold about a half a million copies.
And then and I remember, oh you do oh yeah,
oh nice. Word got around And this was obviously long
before the internet, uh huh, like you could still sell
some stuff back then, before everyone realized it stunk. But
(21:25):
and that's what was going on. But literally, kid to
kid to kid in cul de sacs and classrooms got
the word that the ET game stunk and it killed it.
Speaker 4 (21:37):
It did it is little kids killed it.
Speaker 1 (21:39):
They sold like a half a million copies right out
of the gate, almost and then it peaked right there
very quickly, right around the Christmas season, right yeah, I.
Speaker 4 (21:46):
Mean, just think about that. Though. It was children led
to the demise.
Speaker 3 (21:50):
It's not like kids read an article in the newspaper,
even a review on the ET game.
Speaker 4 (21:55):
It was kids going, man, that game stinks. Yeah what
you bought that? Oh, don't buy it. It stinks.
Speaker 1 (22:01):
Yeah, it's terrible.
Speaker 4 (22:02):
And that happened like a game of telephone all around
the country.
Speaker 1 (22:05):
That's really cool.
Speaker 4 (22:06):
Simultaneously, kids get things done, they do, man.
Speaker 1 (22:10):
So, like you said, it happened pretty fast. They peaked
at a half a million copies, and over time it
managed to sell another million on top of that, So
a million and a half copies success. I think it's
like actually inn Atari's top ten of best sellers. But
the problem is, if this story is a story of
everything or anything, it's not the story of a over
(22:34):
over confident game designer making a terrible game. It's a
very confident game designer making a middling game. If it's
a story of anything, it is of executives being drunk
with confidence in Hubris. Yes that no matter what they
put out, if it's tied to a hot property of
(22:57):
like a movie or something, it's gonna sell. Doesn't matter
what the game is, it's gonna sell. Problem one. Problem
two was they forecasted based on that Hubris too. So
not only did they say it's gonna sell no matter
what we put out, it's gonna sell bigger than anything
we've ever put out before, and they ordered four million cartridges.
(23:18):
Well again, it sold a million and a half and
two and a half million cartridges were sitting in warehouses.
Not to mention ones that we're starting to be taken back,
because not only did did kids go I don't want
this game, I want to take it back, and took
it to the stores. The stores started taking their games
back to Atari. So Atari's like, wait, wait a minute, everybody,
(23:40):
this is et the game. What are you doing? Put
this in your twenty six hundred and shut up and
people then listen.
Speaker 3 (23:48):
Yeah, And you can hardly blame the executives. I mean
they were like, Warshaw plus Spielberg is going to be
another hit because we had it in Raiders, so sort
of get it. But it was it was just it
was that timeline, right, like that was that was the
big problem. It was all the timeline. He could have
created a game as good as Raiders.
Speaker 1 (24:10):
Right, Yeah, given five six months, I'm sure. Yeah, even
given two months, he probably probably could have made an
even better game. But it was It was kind of
a boring game. It wasn't that fun. There's a very
famous quote from a New York Times article in nineteen
eighty two where a little ten year old said, it
wasn't that fun.
Speaker 4 (24:30):
Yeah, that was kind of it.
Speaker 1 (24:32):
Yeah, that's all you need to say.
Speaker 3 (24:34):
And it wasn't. And not only was it not fun,
but and I don't know, I guess you could call
it a bug.
Speaker 1 (24:40):
It was a bug.
Speaker 3 (24:43):
It seems more like bad design than just a mistake.
But what would happen as Et would fall into these
pits and then he could levitate back out. But depending
on which way you were or even how you were
holding the joystick, the slightest little move would cause Et
to fall back into that pit.
Speaker 1 (25:04):
No matter what direction you went. Sometimes.
Speaker 3 (25:07):
Yeah, but it wasn't like all the time it was.
It happened enough though to where as a kid, Remember
you asked me earlier if it was frustrating trying to
parachute as Indy. Yeah, it was not, because you knew
you could do it. This was frustrating. Kids got frustrated
because Et was falling in the pit and he would
(25:27):
get out and he would fall in the pit.
Speaker 4 (25:29):
And then you do that enough times and.
Speaker 3 (25:31):
You're like, I'm going to play Yards Revenge or any
of my other games.
Speaker 1 (25:35):
Do you have fast food?
Speaker 3 (25:36):
And kids put it down? Yeah, you know they put down. Well,
they didn't put down the joystick and go outside and play.
That would be like the movie ending.
Speaker 4 (25:45):
They just popped it out and put in the game
that they liked exactly.
Speaker 1 (25:49):
So this was a big deal for Atari because it
came at the worst possible time. And speaking of the
worst possible time, let's take a break and do an
ad breaking. We'll come right back, all right, Chuck. So,
(26:27):
like I was saying, this came at a really terrible
time for Atari. You kind of talked about how the
personal computer industry was starting to eat into their profits
big time and they really needed this ET bet to
pay off. And not only did it not pay off,
they lost tens of millions of dollars on this. It
was a huge catastrophic bet for Atari. And the numbers
(26:51):
are just stunning. In like you said, in nineteen eighty two,
Atari's profits were two billion dollars.
Speaker 4 (27:00):
Well in today's money.
Speaker 1 (27:03):
No, that was yeah, the profits, I'm sorry, in today's money. Yeah,
their gross was two billion. Yeah. In the second quarter
of nineteen eighty three, they posted a loss of three
hundred and ten million dollars five hundred and thirty six
million dollar loss for the whole year. By nineteen eighty four,
the company had been sold. So it went from two
(27:23):
billion dollars in profits to a loss of five hundred
and thirty six million dollars over the course of a year.
Speaker 4 (27:31):
Yes, and it was not because of ET.
Speaker 1 (27:33):
But this is the thing, Okay, So it gets even
worse hold on, We're not there yet. I'm getting excited.
The whole video game industry actually went down. Oh yeah,
So there's something called the North American video Game Crash
of nineteen eighty three, where not only did the did
Atari go under, basically the industry did so the whole.
(27:54):
The whole industry in nineteen eighty three had a three
point two billion dollars in sales. By nineteen eighty five,
two years later, they had one hundred million dollars in sales.
It was a crash, like that is a catastrophic crash.
And like you're saying, no, it wasn't because of ET,
but imagine this. Think about this. All of that has
(28:16):
been laid ever since then at the feet of ET
the video game and Howard Scott Warshaw. People look at
him and say, you ruined the video game industry single handedly.
That's how he's thought of.
Speaker 4 (28:29):
I think that was the case.
Speaker 1 (28:30):
Up until like twenty fourteen or fifteen, right.
Speaker 3 (28:33):
Yeah, I mean I think people in the know knew
that that was not the case, but.
Speaker 1 (28:37):
The popular pop culture opinion of him.
Speaker 4 (28:40):
Yeah maybe.
Speaker 1 (28:41):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (28:41):
But let's say ET was a big hit. It would
not have saved Atari.
Speaker 1 (28:46):
No, it might have like staved the bleeding a little bit.
Maybe it would have been a drop in the bucket basically.
Speaker 3 (28:52):
Yeah, I mean, I certainly feel bad for Warshaw, but
he's a good inning, so stick around for that.
Speaker 1 (29:03):
Don't go anywhere.
Speaker 3 (29:04):
After ET, he took some time off. He said that
he just needed to sort of recover. I believe was
the words he used. He went into real estate and
did not enjoy that at all, and eventually he became
a psychotherapist and that's what he does today. He's labeled
the Silicon Valley psychotherapist and sort of specializes in talking.
(29:27):
He jokes that he's fluent in English and NERD, so
I think kind of specializes in talking to Silicon Valley types.
Speaker 4 (29:35):
About their work problems. Certainly a man.
Speaker 3 (29:38):
That can identify Yeah, yeah, I bet he's a great psychotherapist.
Speaker 1 (29:43):
It seems like he definitely would be.
Speaker 4 (29:45):
Yeah, so he.
Speaker 1 (29:46):
Definitely made peace with the whole thing. And I think
he very frequently jokes. I've seen it in more than
one article that he says he kind of enjoys it
when people say that ET's the worst video game of
all time, because people also say that Yours Revenge is
one of the best video games of all time. So
he has the greatest range of any video designer ever.
(30:06):
So he definitely has like a I think it took
him a little while, that's the impression, I have to
make peace with it. But he made peace with it.
And I think one of the reasons he was able
to make peace with it, and I'm just armchair psychologizing here,
but he came to realize, yeah, I've used it before
and you said the exact same thing. I think too. Yeah,
(30:27):
he realized that it wasn't the worst video game of
all time, and that a lot of the people who
were saying it was the worst video game of all
time didn't know what they were talking about, which has
to be super liberating. Sure, and the whole world's like
you ruined everything. And then you realize, like they don't
even know what they're saying, you can just kind of
lay roll off your back a little more easily.
Speaker 3 (30:45):
So the cherry on top of this story, we mentioned
this documentary Atari game Over. It is about the legend
of the story of the et game, which continued after
its demise, with this urban legend that Atari was so
distraught and embarrassed by this game that they had all
(31:05):
the remaining boxes shipped out and buried in the desert
under cement. Initially, You're like, that doesn't make any sense.
Why would Atari spend all this money to do this
when they could just burn them, sell them in the
dollar bin, do anything other than this weird plan to
(31:26):
bury them out in the desert of New Mexico.
Speaker 1 (31:28):
Yeah, And a lot of people took it when it
was kind of an initial rumor that like, Atari was
trying to bury their shame. That's all right, It just
went that much further to point out how bad the
video game was. Atari was trying to bury it and
forget about it.
Speaker 4 (31:42):
Right.
Speaker 3 (31:43):
So in twenty eleven, there was a party where there
was an Atari former Atari person there and a guy
named Mike Burns was talking to him and said something about, yeah,
the urban legend that you guys did this, and apparently
the answer was just sheepish enough to where he was like,
(32:03):
wait a minute, is that true?
Speaker 4 (32:05):
Right? So did he did he fund this documentary? Is
that how that worked?
Speaker 1 (32:12):
I think he's a guy who makes things happen, he
brings people together. Okay, I think yes, he definitely puts
some of his own money into it. But I think
he also got others to put money into it as well.
Speaker 3 (32:23):
Okay, I didn't know if he was involved in the
dock itself. Yes, yes he was, or just financing the
dig both. But Zach Penn made this documentary. Zack Penn,
a great, great writer, ironically wrote the movie Ready Player
one which talks about adventure and Easter eggs and all
that fun stuff. So he's written a bunch of movies,
(32:44):
a bunch of the Marvel movies and stuff, and it was.
Speaker 4 (32:47):
Clearly a labor of love.
Speaker 3 (32:48):
This this documentary, if you've seen it, you know Zach
Penn is like super excited about all this stuff.
Speaker 1 (32:54):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (32:54):
So the old Alamagordo landfill in New Mexico has three
it's three hundred acres and then one hundred cells, which
are these it says holes, but they're just these big square,
deep pits where you you know, if you listen to
Our Landfills episode, then you know what goes on there.
Speaker 4 (33:13):
They just dump stuff in there and cover it up.
Speaker 3 (33:16):
And the legend was that the ET is in one
of these cells, and these days they chart it and
it's mapped out, so they know what's where generally sure,
and if a cop comes and says, hey, there's some
evidence from four years ago. They could say, oh, well
that's going to be in this cell because it was
from this area of town where it was picked up
(33:36):
and we buried it here. Back then, they didn't have
anything like that.
Speaker 1 (33:39):
No, it was like they just dug a hole, put
garbage in it, covered it up, and went home. According
to a guy named joe Leewandowski, and Mike Burns lucked
out that a guy named joe Leewandowski worked at the
Alamagordo City Waste department because he is basically the institutional
memory of Alamagordo's waist, and he worked at the dump
(34:04):
for so long that he had a pretty good chance
of remembering where the stuff was put. But he was
kind of like, no, we didn't document it. I have
no idea, leave me alone. And apparently Mike Burns is
not the type to just be like, oh, okay, thanks,
didn't mean to bother you. He'll keep pestering you until
you do what he wants from what I understand, and
so he finally got joe Leewandowski on board, and in
(34:27):
just an astounding turn of good luck, joe Leewandowski's wife
had made a scrap book of Joe's time working for
Alamagordo's waste department that included pictures of the dump from
around this time. So they were able to narrow down
these hundred cells over three hundred acres to two to
(34:49):
just two, which narrowed the search enough that they could
actually start taking samples to try.
Speaker 4 (34:54):
To fgd that. That was a very big breakthrough.
Speaker 3 (34:56):
And if you watch this documentary when when they're taking
these samples and they come across like newspaper clippings from
that year and that month where these cartridges were supposedly buried,
it's really exciting.
Speaker 1 (35:07):
It is.
Speaker 3 (35:08):
I gotta admit, it's like, oh my gosh, it's like
finding buried treasure. So they narrowed it down. All of
these people showed up, fans the what's his name, Ernest Klein,
who wrote the book Ready Player one, he showed up
in his Back to the Future DeLorean, and.
Speaker 4 (35:29):
It was a very big deal.
Speaker 3 (35:30):
They Howard Warshaw came in and he was there and
people were just like embracing this guy instead of like
it's not like he showed up and people are.
Speaker 4 (35:40):
Like, there he is, get him.
Speaker 3 (35:43):
He's like this beloved cherished, dude, And I get the
sense that this was a very big deal for his closure,
which is interesting because burying something is usually the closure.
In this case, digging it up was the closure.
Speaker 1 (35:56):
Yeah, good point.
Speaker 3 (35:58):
And they did find uh thirteen hundred game cartridges. Yeah,
which it makes you wonder like how this how they
got there, how the rumor got started to begin with?
Speaker 4 (36:11):
Well, then the fact that there is some truth to it.
Speaker 1 (36:13):
Yeah, they feel like it definitely confirms that urban legend,
like Atari definitely did cover up. They did dump these
these cartridges, but it wasn't just et cartridges, and it
wasn't like the millions that they supposedly dumped, but they
probably buried some elsewhere in either California or Texas or both.
But it confirmed that, yes, this actually did happen. The
(36:34):
urban legend was real, and at the very least, it
gave Howard Scott Warshaw that closure year he got to see,
you know, thirty something years on, people were still vibing
out on his creation, although in ways he could not
have possibly predicted when he was spending that five weeks
programming this game.
Speaker 4 (36:54):
Yeah, he said, he was full of gratitude.
Speaker 1 (36:56):
That's really cool.
Speaker 4 (36:57):
That's a very cool way to go through life.
Speaker 1 (37:00):
My friends. Oh man, you know, if you can remember
to have gratitude, it truly does make you happy. Yeah,
it's insane. It's just remembering to be grateful is the trick.
Speaker 3 (37:09):
So they ended up a lot of these went on
eBay auctioned off. I think they sold about one hundred
thousand dollars worth of these things that went to the
city of Alamagordo. Of course they owned them. It's not
like they just gave them out to everyone that.
Speaker 1 (37:23):
Was there as a party gift.
Speaker 4 (37:25):
They should have. Sure, they should have given everyone one copy.
Speaker 1 (37:28):
I think some of the like Mike Burns and some
of his crew got some, and Almagordo kept some. But
I think the ones that were auctioned were auctioned by
Alamgordo to go to a fund of museum.
Speaker 4 (37:38):
I would love a copy assigned cartridge for moreshaw.
Speaker 1 (37:42):
I mean, the most I think one went for was
fifteen hundred bucks, So.
Speaker 4 (37:46):
We don't want it that bad.
Speaker 1 (37:47):
But no that I'm saying like that's the most. That's
the highest any of them went for. So you could
probably give them for a couple hundred bucks if you tried.
Speaker 4 (37:54):
I wonder if he listens to the show.
Speaker 1 (37:56):
I hope so you never know. I hope so. I
hope we cleared it up for you. Warshaw, your legend, sir, Yes,
hets off to you.
Speaker 3 (38:03):
Send me a signed cartridge, Josh needs one.
Speaker 1 (38:06):
Thank you, buddy. You got anything else?
Speaker 3 (38:09):
No, it did. ET was not the worst game there were.
There were games that were so bad that you don't
they were just in the dustbin of history.
Speaker 4 (38:18):
They were so bad.
Speaker 1 (38:19):
Yeah, like Sorcer, like you said, Manjo's apparently pretty bad.
Speaker 3 (38:22):
Yeah, they were terrible, like all these not knockoff companies.
But you know, ari Atari opened it up to where
anyone could could design a game that fit their console.
Speaker 1 (38:33):
And some people say that that was one of the
reasons why Atari lost market shares, because there's so much
crudd on the shelves, right, people were tired of buying
Creddy games for twenty five bucks. Yeah, and that they
just oversaturated the market themselves. But they oversaturated with terrible
stuff oversatched well at any rate, that's ET the game
(38:53):
not the worst video game of all time, but a
heck of a story. I'll tell you what good one
and gave you a little bit of nostalgia this holiday season. Yeah, great,
feel that warm tingling. It's either a bladder infection or
a nostalgia. Let's see. Since I said bladder infection, everybody,
it's time for listener man, this.
Speaker 4 (39:15):
Is about bird poop.
Speaker 3 (39:17):
Hey, guys, listen to the Olive Oil podcast and loved
it very much. Living in Italy, they use it every day.
That's my wonderful complexion and youthful looks. I want to
tell you about a problem though, that we have it
in Rome every year and directly caused by olives. Every winter,
the city center is home to millions of migrating starlings
who spend their days out in the local countryside, eating
(39:38):
olives and having a great time. In the evening, they
come back to our warmer city center and sleep in
the city center trees for the night. Great news for
bird watchers, but bad news if you'd like to avoid
being pooed on. The city gets covered in the stuff.
And he sent me a video and of these cars
parked on the street and it's literally looks like it
(40:01):
was painted with bird poop growth, completely solid every square inch.
Speaker 1 (40:06):
That's gotta be bad for the paint.
Speaker 3 (40:08):
And yes, it's really bad, he said, What has this
got to do with olive oil? While the olive stones
may not come out of the starling bird's bottoms, but
the olive oil infused greasy pooh does, and it makes
driving along the roads almost impossible.
Speaker 4 (40:23):
I've fallen off my scooter.
Speaker 3 (40:24):
Twice in the past few years, Oh my god, because
of this, So I guess it's it's slippery oily poop.
Speaker 1 (40:29):
Oh my god.
Speaker 4 (40:31):
And that is from James in Rome.
Speaker 1 (40:33):
Well thanks James. That email's kind of petered out at
the end there. Yeah, I was expecting a big finish,
just oily poop. All right. Well, thanks regardless, and stay
stay safe on your scooter.
Speaker 4 (40:44):
There, James, he said, people use umbrellas.
Speaker 1 (40:46):
And hats off to you living in Rome. Have you
been around?
Speaker 4 (40:49):
Sure?
Speaker 1 (40:49):
When I went, I was like I could live here.
Pretty great, I told Jumie.
Speaker 3 (40:53):
She's like, maybe it's lovely city. It really is old
world charm cats. What's what else?
Speaker 4 (41:00):
Wine food, beautiful people.
Speaker 3 (41:02):
Yeah, and I've never seen men and women at every
turn that looked like runway models.
Speaker 4 (41:08):
Sure, and they were just regular newspaper boys.
Speaker 1 (41:11):
Well, the fact that they do like a little twirl
every once in a while as they were walking. Really
kind of sold it.
Speaker 4 (41:16):
To Yeah and go Chell, Chell Bell Chow Bed.
Speaker 1 (41:20):
Wow, Let's turned out weird. If you want to get
in touch with us, you can go on to stuff
youshould Know dot com and hit us up through our
social links, or you can just send us a good
old fashioned email to stuff podcast HowStuffWorks dot com.
Speaker 2 (41:38):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Everyone. It's Joshua. For this week's select, I've chosen our
twenty eighteen episode on ET the video game. It's one
of those topics that you thought you knew about, but
after you hear this episode, you'll realize that you've been
grossly misinformed by the Internet. Who knew that could happen?
Enjoy this trip down nostalgia lane.
Speaker 2 (00:24):
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of Iheartradioy.
Speaker 1 (00:34):
And welcome to the podcast. I'm josh and there's Chuck
and there's Jerry, and it's like the holiday season. I
feel great.
Speaker 3 (00:43):
It is Holidays with a Z, and we're gonna do
what we almost did for a short stuff.
Speaker 1 (00:49):
Oh yes, Chuck, you're commended for that call.
Speaker 3 (00:53):
Well, I was just like I kind of wanted to
do this one. Always is a long stuff. We don't
have a show called mediums stuff yet.
Speaker 1 (01:00):
No, we have a so so stuffed called Stuff you
Should Know.
Speaker 3 (01:05):
Yeah, but yeah, I saw that documentary Atari game over
a few years ago.
Speaker 1 (01:12):
It's a good one.
Speaker 3 (01:13):
And I also guested on tech Stuff and did a
two part episode on the history of Atari.
Speaker 4 (01:19):
It's a good one with Strickland.
Speaker 3 (01:21):
He's great too, and we could probably do Atari on
its own at some point too.
Speaker 1 (01:26):
I agree, I think we definitely should.
Speaker 3 (01:28):
But this is I mean, I was about to say
if Strickland and I could get two episodes out of it,
but you know how that guy goes on.
Speaker 1 (01:33):
Oh my god, he's the hardest working man in podcast business.
I'll tell you that.
Speaker 4 (01:39):
Just ask.
Speaker 1 (01:41):
So we're talking today about what is widely believed to
be the worst video game of all time, except that
it's not. Except that it's not. Yes, it's true. I
love stories like this where it's like everything you thought
you knew was wrong, and really stop and ask yourself,
how did you even know that this truth that you
(02:01):
knew before. I love that man.
Speaker 3 (02:03):
Yeah, E t the Atari video game a lot of people.
Speaker 4 (02:08):
It's that whole.
Speaker 3 (02:09):
Internet bandwagon thing. I think, Yes, worst game of all time.
They tried to bury it in the desert. It was
so bad.
Speaker 4 (02:15):
Killed Atari, killed the whole stinking industry.
Speaker 1 (02:18):
Right, But it was just that bad of a game.
But you've played it.
Speaker 4 (02:21):
No, Yeah, I will say this, it may be one
of the one of the most disappointing games of all time.
It could be, Yes, because if you were a kid
back then like me, and you and you played Atari
like I did. It was it was a disappointment.
Speaker 1 (02:40):
It was greatly anticipated. I'm sure a lot.
Speaker 3 (02:43):
Of anticipation that was part, you know, that was that
was probably the biggest reason why it gets all the
attention because it was e t It wasn't what said,
dumb game sorcerer, yeah, or fast food. There were so
many bad video games for Atari.
Speaker 1 (02:58):
Yeah, there were a lot.
Speaker 4 (03:00):
It was awful.
Speaker 1 (03:01):
So will this come out and say, no, ET is
not the worst video game of all time. There were
a lot of worst, far far worst video games. Yes
than ET, But like you were saying, as far as
the anticipation went, as far as the letdown went, as
far as the loss of money went, you can understand
how people would say this is the worst of all time.
(03:23):
But also the timing of its failure was so utterly,
amazingly perfect that it just took it from worst video
game of all time to worst video game of all time.
Speaker 3 (03:38):
Yeah, it's like here Atari in video home console game industry,
you're not doing well, and I notice you're sinking. Let
me tie this anvil around your ankle that's shaped like ET.
Speaker 1 (03:50):
Yep, that's right.
Speaker 4 (03:51):
It's just really bad timing.
Speaker 1 (03:53):
So let's get into the story because it's one of
the more interesting ones, and it features a great guy
named Howard Scott wore Shaw, who if you've seen the
movie Game Over, you have probably come to really like
and admire good dude.
Speaker 4 (04:07):
Good dude, brilliant designer.
Speaker 1 (04:09):
Huh and like a just a genuinely great guy. He
The story begins back in nineteen eighty two, I believe, Yeah,
it was nineteen eighty two. He was a designer at Atari.
He'd apparently started out writing Coda Hewlett Packard and was
very unhappy, so he made the move over to Atari,
(04:29):
even though he had zero experience with game design, but
he was really an exciting game designer because he came
up with some really innovative ideas.
Speaker 3 (04:38):
Yes, he Yars Revenge is one of the best Atari
twenty six hundred games of all time.
Speaker 1 (04:45):
Did you have that one?
Speaker 4 (04:46):
Oh?
Speaker 1 (04:46):
Yeah, I never played it.
Speaker 4 (04:48):
It's great. It's great.
Speaker 1 (04:49):
It's kind of space invaderies or something. It's like a
shooter thing, kind of yeah, single screen shooter.
Speaker 4 (04:54):
Well, you're a I guess you were a Yar, and
you're this sort of bug like Reacher and instead of
shooting at something to chip away at it. You do
it so with your body, so you just fly into this.
Speaker 1 (05:09):
Oh I think I had that went You.
Speaker 4 (05:12):
Would fly into this. I mean, of course all this
stuff was supposed to represent like a spaceship or a planet,
but it was made up of you know, blocks and cubes,
so I don't even know what it was. But your
whole point was to make it.
Speaker 1 (05:24):
Smaller, gotcha, and you would fly into I know.
Speaker 4 (05:26):
You instead of yeah, shooting, you would fly into it.
Speaker 1 (05:28):
For my money, that kind of game the best of
all time with Centipede.
Speaker 4 (05:32):
Cinipede is great.
Speaker 1 (05:33):
It was great.
Speaker 3 (05:34):
I mean a lot of those games I played today
when I happened upon an arcade, Galagha and Frogger and
Centipede and Defender, like those are still really good challenging
jus sure, miss fun games, yeah, miss bac man, they
just stand up still. It's not like you go to
Galagha or Jousts now and you're like, this is easy.
Speaker 1 (05:54):
What was I thinking? I was such a kid.
Speaker 4 (05:56):
There are still hard challenging games, and I think that's
sort of they to a good video game is it's
got to be winnable, but it's got to be hard
because a kid didn't want to you know, a pushover, right,
but a kid also wants to win.
Speaker 1 (06:12):
So Howard Scott Warshaw knew this like he was a
game designer. He wasn't like a code monkey or anything
like that. He was a game designer, an artist. I'm
sure he considered himself, especially at the time, and he
should have. One of the other things he was known
for was he was the guy who realized that you
could make a game way more enjoyable if you created
(06:33):
a backstory for it. So rather than like, drive this
car there, you're actually running away from this gang of
you know, international mafia guys who are trying to kidnap
your girlfriend or whatever. Yeah, you make up a backstory
for it. The player reads this backstory and then plays,
they care that much more about the person because their
(06:53):
imagination is now kicked in. They're not just doing a
mindless task. They're imagining what's going on in computer world.
And he did that for games, and he was one
of the first, if not the first designer to create
backstories and biographies for his characters and games.
Speaker 3 (07:08):
Yeah, and you know what just now is sort of
hitting me that part of the appeal was the imagination
of the kid. So like when you got the game
Adventure or Asteroids and Asteroids, you were a pencil drawn
triangle shooting at pencil drawn shapes.
Speaker 1 (07:28):
Shooting pencils at pencil drawn shapes.
Speaker 3 (07:30):
Shooting dots at pencil drawn shapes. An Adventure, you are
a cube that flew around with an arrow attached to
you that was supposed to be your sword. But when
you look at the actual cartridge or the box that
it came in, they had this great artwork of this
night on a horse with his sword drawn in asteroids,
(07:52):
this han solo like pilot like cruising through a you know,
an asteroid field, and that would kickstarts. That starts the
imagination of a ten year old, right, and then they
forget they're a cube, right or an arrow?
Speaker 1 (08:05):
Yeah, it makes it that much more real.
Speaker 4 (08:07):
Yeah, it was really really cool.
Speaker 1 (08:08):
Because the imagination can do some pretty amazing stuff with
eight bytes of graphic.
Speaker 4 (08:12):
Yeah, you know for sure.
Speaker 1 (08:15):
So Warshaw figured.
Speaker 4 (08:18):
This out, Yeah, designing worlds.
Speaker 1 (08:19):
He would design easter eggs into his games too. Yeah
he wasn't the first, but yes, no, but he was
an early person to do that.
Speaker 4 (08:27):
Yeah, Adventure was the first, I think.
Speaker 1 (08:28):
And in addition to Yours Revenge, he also already had
a hit in the Raiders of the Lost Art game.
He had designed that and it's still laid so much.
I read you did. Oh yeah, so from what I
never played that one. From what I understand you, it
was extremely difficult. You it required both joy sticks. Yeah,
there was. I think I read somewhere that there were
thirty three screens, which is unheard of.
Speaker 4 (08:51):
I could buy that.
Speaker 1 (08:53):
And that like people still have trouble beating it today.
Speaker 3 (08:56):
Well, it's it was really hard. I remember very specifically.
There was one part where you were to parachute parachute
from one screen and it would all of a sudden,
you went to the bottom and it would pop up
and you're on the next screen going down and there's
a tree on the left, and you had to start
(09:16):
that jump early, going hard left and hook onto that
tree with your parachute. If you hit at the wrong angle,
it burst your parachute and you would die, and if
you didn't, you would hook onto it and slide perfectly.
And it was probably one of the hardest things I've
ever had to do in a video game.
Speaker 1 (09:34):
I know, you get to this day life.
Speaker 4 (09:36):
No, as far as video gameplay though.
Speaker 3 (09:37):
Really it was very, very challenging, but it was possible.
So when you tried it twenty seven times and you
nail it on that twenty eight, like you would run
around the neighborhood telling all your friends that you nailed
the parachute jump really really hard.
Speaker 1 (09:54):
But it was so hard that it was like you
would get frustrated or it kept you sucking.
Speaker 4 (09:59):
No, no, no, no, You're like, I know I can get it.
Speaker 1 (10:01):
There's the key and that's.
Speaker 4 (10:02):
Where ET messed up. But we'll get to that, okay.
Speaker 1 (10:05):
So on June, it's funny, he remembers us the date
on June twenty seventh, nineteen eighty two, Howard s Gott
Warshaw's hanging around Atari and he gets a phone call.
He gets a phone call from the CEO, Ray Casar himself.
That was a big deal back then. Oh sure, and
Ray Casar says, hey, kid, we know you, we love you.
(10:27):
We've got something going on with Steven Spielberg. He remembers
that you made the Raiders of the Lost Art game
for him. He thinks, you're a certifiable genius, but we
have a special assignment for you. We want you to
make the et video game. Can you do it? Wait,
don't answer yet. Can you do it in five weeks?
(10:47):
Then he went sure, yeah, he said yeah, which I
mean even today, you're like five weeks. That doesn't sounding
very long. That was less than a tenth of the
time that it would normally take.
Speaker 3 (11:00):
And he had the little secret is that he had
already called some other people in the company and said,
the CEO has this, like is this even possible? Or
am I just crazy for asking this guy to do
this in five weeks because it takes five or six months.
And they all said, no, it's not possible. And he said, well,
I'm going to ask him.
Speaker 1 (11:18):
Anyway, right, And Howard Scott Warshaw didn't realize that they'd
already told him like, no, this can't be done when
he said yes, but he was locked in the punch
and he was twenty four years old and sure, full
of full of exuberants and hubris and all sorts of stuff,
and said I can do this. So he did. And
the reason we should say, the reason why this this
(11:39):
schedule was so short and usually took five to six
months for a game to be developed, and he had
five weeks to do it, and The reason why is
because the haggling the deal to get the rights for
the et game for Atari to purchase them, which they
bought for twenty one million dollars, took way longer than expected,
(12:01):
and they really wanted this game out for in time
for Christmas.
Speaker 4 (12:05):
That was the whole deal.
Speaker 1 (12:07):
So because of the because the deal had worked all
the way up into the summer and Christmas was on
the other edge, they needed also several weeks to manufacture
the actual cartridges and get them into stores. Yeah, if
you lay it all this timeline out, they left five
weeks to develop a game from scratch. So they they
knew just the guy to do it, and it was
(12:27):
Howard's got Warshaw and Howard said I'll give it a shot.
I'm going to do it.
Speaker 4 (12:31):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (12:31):
And I should point out that when you say five
or six months is the usual time, five or six
months was fast.
Speaker 4 (12:38):
The usual time was more than that.
Speaker 1 (12:40):
Well, you also probably had a team working on it.
Speaker 4 (12:42):
Like five or six months was the Rush version?
Speaker 1 (12:44):
Right?
Speaker 4 (12:45):
Anyway? Yeah, I mean I think I think.
Speaker 1 (12:50):
That the pretty delightful prog Rock version.
Speaker 4 (12:53):
Did that have a they should add their own video game.
Speaker 1 (12:55):
I'm surprised they didn't. They were like, right there, they
did in that wheelhouse.
Speaker 4 (12:59):
We would like the twenty one to twelve game or something.
Speaker 1 (13:02):
We would know. Yeah, there's no way we wouldn't know
about the Rush twenty one to twelve Atari game.
Speaker 3 (13:08):
So Warshaw gets to meet with Steven Spielberg in la
and was not given direction or a brief. He meets
with Spielberg says, here's what I proposed, this adventure game
that follows a plot of the film somewhat where the
kid is et playing the game. You are et, right,
(13:28):
and you got to go around and collect all these
pieces to build a phone so you can phone home,
and the government's after you and these bad doctors are
after you. It's just like your movie, right, And Spielberg
was like, well, can't you just have him like running
around eating Reese's pieces like pac Man?
Speaker 4 (13:43):
Yeah, and he went, oh.
Speaker 1 (13:45):
There's this great there's this great quote where he's like, here,
here's one of my idols, Steven Spielberg asking me to
knock off pac Man for the ET game. And I thought, well, gee, Stephen,
couldn't you make something more like The Day of the earthstud?
Speaker 4 (13:59):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (14:00):
Burn right, burn? So he apparently had to do a
little fancy footwork to talk Spielberg into going with his
vision rather than a pac Man knockoff of ET, which
who knows, may have sold a lot better, but it
was he got him to agree to his vision for
this game. He said, no, this is a groundbreaking movie.
(14:20):
We need to make a groundbreaking game. And so Spielberg
agreed to it, and Warshaw started to get to work.
So we should probably take a break before Scott, Howard
Scott really jumps in it, all right, Chuck. So it's
(14:53):
basically the beginning of July nineteen eighty two, and Howard
Scott Warshaw is the sole programmer for an ET video game.
Atari's biggest bet. That they spent twenty one million dollars
on the rights too, that they're going to spend an
additional five million dollars on the advertising budget, for the
most anyone's ever spent on a video game up to
(15:15):
that point. He's the only programmer who's going to make
this game, and he has five weeks to do it,
which from what I understand, no one had ever done before.
Speaker 3 (15:24):
Yeah, and this was Atari was a giant at the time.
If video If the video game industry was beginning to slip.
It wasn't like the public didn't really realize that yet.
The industry may have, but Atari held about eighty percent
of the market. They were at about two billion in
(15:44):
annual sales and about three quarters of billion in profit,
which is just unheard of.
Speaker 1 (15:50):
About two billion in profit in today's money.
Speaker 4 (15:53):
Yeah, so a ton of money. But they saw the
writing on the wall.
Speaker 3 (15:57):
They knew that the personal computer like the Common or
sixty four that could play games but also do a
lot more, was a real genuine threat to the home console.
Speaker 1 (16:07):
So I read a contemporary article in the New York
Times from nineteen eighty three talking about this, and Atari
said they did not see the writing on the wall.
Speaker 4 (16:17):
Well, one of.
Speaker 1 (16:18):
Them said, the first six months of nineteen eighty three
was one way. The second six months it was like
we were in a totally different business.
Speaker 3 (16:26):
Yeah, but if you read interviews with him now, I
think that might have.
Speaker 1 (16:29):
Been, Oh, the guy covering is well, yeah.
Speaker 3 (16:32):
I don't think you want to go out in the
press in the moment and say, hey, everyone, we're super
scared investors.
Speaker 1 (16:37):
Don't freak out, don't panic, You're right, Chuck. I feel
a little foolish.
Speaker 3 (16:42):
So they what they did was they set Warshaw up
with everything he would have at work. They set him
up at home. So the only time he could not
be working on this game was his very short drive
over to the office. And he worked on it almost
NonStop for five weeks.
Speaker 1 (17:00):
He had a manager that was assigned to him to
make sure that he ate. That was I'm sure not
the manager's only duty, but it was. One of the
manager's new jobs was to make sure that Warshaw ate
every day.
Speaker 4 (17:11):
How about a waffle?
Speaker 1 (17:13):
Sure, whatever, Stop bothering me.
Speaker 4 (17:16):
ET's in the pit again.
Speaker 1 (17:18):
So for five weeks he worked almost like you said,
twenty four hours a day. He said, it's the hardest
he's ever worked in his entire life.
Speaker 4 (17:27):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (17:27):
And when five weeks came and went, he handed off
his He handed off the game. He finished it. He
completed it in time. And it wasn't done in his opinion,
or it would turn out in anybody's opinion, but it
was done. It was a complete game that he had
finished in five weeks, the et video game. And it
wasn't just something like a pac Man knockoff. He'd given
(17:50):
real thought to it and created a world that was
much different from a lot of the other games at
the time. At the time, it was a world like
it was a cube shape told with six screens, and
so if you walk to the left, you knew you
were going to end up on this other screen. If
you walked up, you wouldn't end up on the other screen.
It was a world that you were navigating, rather than
(18:11):
say like Yars Revenge, which is just one screen and
everything's happening on the one screen and it may imply
motion or something like this. With the Et game, you
were moving from one area of this world to the next. Yeah,
which is it was new. It wasn't new, but it was.
It wasn't. It wasn't standard to have six screens, especially
if you have five weeks to do it. Give a
(18:32):
guy a break.
Speaker 4 (18:33):
Yeah, yeah, No, I'm not saying it should. What I'm
saying is that.
Speaker 3 (18:38):
It wasn't like some big revolutionary thing like the Raiders
game was pre this and it had thirty something screened. Okay,
all right, fine, and adventure like kids were used to
this by this point. Okay, So it wasn't like, oh
wait till they get a load of six screens, like
leaving the screen.
Speaker 1 (18:53):
I see, but I think Howard Scott Warshaw should have
gone to everybody's house and been like, here's your copy
of et game as well. You know I made this
in five weeks.
Speaker 3 (19:04):
Well he designed Easter eggs in there too, and I
kind of wondered, like, how much time did he spend
doing that with his own initials and like the little
Yards Revenge Flower.
Speaker 1 (19:13):
I hadn't really thought about that.
Speaker 3 (19:14):
I don't know, so he says time was of the essence,
though I just maybe put that last on the list.
Speaker 1 (19:20):
He says today that had he had one more week
to just troubleshoot, he could have worked out all the kinks.
Speaker 4 (19:26):
He could have worked out the kinks and one more
Easter egg.
Speaker 1 (19:28):
But he handed it out. He handed it off to Atari,
and Atari said genius. They gave it to Steven Spielberg
to play. Spielberg apparently liked it. And in the game
it wasn't it wasn't just some dumb clunky game. It
was a mediocre game, but it was a game, and
it was done, and it was out the door, and
(19:49):
they got it out in time for Christmas. The cartridges shipped.
If you go back onto YouTube and search ET game
ad or commercial of some extraordinarily nostalgic ads of ET
dressed to Santa Claus playing his own video game of
a kid like receiving the ET video game from ET
(20:10):
out in the shed. Amazing stuff. So not only is
it like Christmas time feeling, but like Christmas time nineteen
eighty two.
Speaker 4 (20:17):
Feeling Christmas plus ET who over the top.
Speaker 1 (20:20):
It's nice. It's just like the the taste of ice
sugar cookies swells from the inside of your mouth. You
almost gag on it. It's so overpowering.
Speaker 3 (20:29):
So they produce, well, we don't know for sure how many,
maybe as many as twelve million copies of this, at
least four million.
Speaker 1 (20:39):
That's part of the urban legend.
Speaker 3 (20:41):
Yeah, I mean, I don't think there's an exact exact number,
but millions of copies of these were produced. Twenty one
million dollars invested in the licensing, plus five five million
dollars in advertising and marketing, not just I mean, who
knows what they paid Warshaw or for the actual production.
I mean, I doubt if it was millions of dollars.
Speaker 1 (21:02):
But he was probably salaried.
Speaker 4 (21:04):
They sunk a.
Speaker 3 (21:04):
Whole lot of money into this thing and sold. Okay,
at first they sold about a half a million copies.
And then and I remember, oh you do oh yeah,
oh nice. Word got around And this was obviously long
before the internet, uh huh, like you could still sell
some stuff back then, before everyone realized it stunk. But
(21:25):
and that's what was going on. But literally, kid to
kid to kid in cul de sacs and classrooms got
the word that the ET game stunk and it killed it.
Speaker 4 (21:37):
It did it is little kids killed it.
Speaker 1 (21:39):
They sold like a half a million copies right out
of the gate, almost and then it peaked right there
very quickly, right around the Christmas season, right yeah, I.
Speaker 4 (21:46):
Mean, just think about that. Though. It was children led
to the demise.
Speaker 3 (21:50):
It's not like kids read an article in the newspaper,
even a review on the ET game.
Speaker 4 (21:55):
It was kids going, man, that game stinks. Yeah what
you bought that? Oh, don't buy it. It stinks.
Speaker 1 (22:01):
Yeah, it's terrible.
Speaker 4 (22:02):
And that happened like a game of telephone all around
the country.
Speaker 1 (22:05):
That's really cool.
Speaker 4 (22:06):
Simultaneously, kids get things done, they do, man.
Speaker 1 (22:10):
So, like you said, it happened pretty fast. They peaked
at a half a million copies, and over time it
managed to sell another million on top of that, So
a million and a half copies success. I think it's
like actually inn Atari's top ten of best sellers. But
the problem is, if this story is a story of
everything or anything, it's not the story of a over
(22:34):
over confident game designer making a terrible game. It's a
very confident game designer making a middling game. If it's
a story of anything, it is of executives being drunk
with confidence in Hubris. Yes that no matter what they
put out, if it's tied to a hot property of
(22:57):
like a movie or something, it's gonna sell. Doesn't matter
what the game is, it's gonna sell. Problem one. Problem
two was they forecasted based on that Hubris too. So
not only did they say it's gonna sell no matter
what we put out, it's gonna sell bigger than anything
we've ever put out before, and they ordered four million cartridges.
(23:18):
Well again, it sold a million and a half and
two and a half million cartridges were sitting in warehouses.
Not to mention ones that we're starting to be taken back,
because not only did did kids go I don't want
this game, I want to take it back, and took
it to the stores. The stores started taking their games
back to Atari. So Atari's like, wait, wait a minute, everybody,
(23:40):
this is et the game. What are you doing? Put
this in your twenty six hundred and shut up and
people then listen.
Speaker 3 (23:48):
Yeah, And you can hardly blame the executives. I mean
they were like, Warshaw plus Spielberg is going to be
another hit because we had it in Raiders, so sort
of get it. But it was it was just it
was that timeline, right, like that was that was the
big problem. It was all the timeline. He could have
created a game as good as Raiders.
Speaker 1 (24:10):
Right, Yeah, given five six months, I'm sure. Yeah, even
given two months, he probably probably could have made an
even better game. But it was It was kind of
a boring game. It wasn't that fun. There's a very
famous quote from a New York Times article in nineteen
eighty two where a little ten year old said, it
wasn't that fun.
Speaker 4 (24:30):
Yeah, that was kind of it.
Speaker 1 (24:32):
Yeah, that's all you need to say.
Speaker 3 (24:34):
And it wasn't. And not only was it not fun,
but and I don't know, I guess you could call
it a bug.
Speaker 1 (24:40):
It was a bug.
Speaker 3 (24:43):
It seems more like bad design than just a mistake.
But what would happen as Et would fall into these
pits and then he could levitate back out. But depending
on which way you were or even how you were
holding the joystick, the slightest little move would cause Et
to fall back into that pit.
Speaker 1 (25:04):
No matter what direction you went. Sometimes.
Speaker 3 (25:07):
Yeah, but it wasn't like all the time it was.
It happened enough though to where as a kid, Remember
you asked me earlier if it was frustrating trying to
parachute as Indy. Yeah, it was not, because you knew
you could do it. This was frustrating. Kids got frustrated
because Et was falling in the pit and he would
(25:27):
get out and he would fall in the pit.
Speaker 4 (25:29):
And then you do that enough times and.
Speaker 3 (25:31):
You're like, I'm going to play Yards Revenge or any
of my other games.
Speaker 1 (25:35):
Do you have fast food?
Speaker 3 (25:36):
And kids put it down? Yeah, you know they put down. Well,
they didn't put down the joystick and go outside and play.
That would be like the movie ending.
Speaker 4 (25:45):
They just popped it out and put in the game
that they liked exactly.
Speaker 1 (25:49):
So this was a big deal for Atari because it
came at the worst possible time. And speaking of the
worst possible time, let's take a break and do an
ad breaking. We'll come right back, all right, Chuck. So,
(26:27):
like I was saying, this came at a really terrible
time for Atari. You kind of talked about how the
personal computer industry was starting to eat into their profits
big time and they really needed this ET bet to
pay off. And not only did it not pay off,
they lost tens of millions of dollars on this. It
was a huge catastrophic bet for Atari. And the numbers
(26:51):
are just stunning. In like you said, in nineteen eighty two,
Atari's profits were two billion dollars.
Speaker 4 (27:00):
Well in today's money.
Speaker 1 (27:03):
No, that was yeah, the profits, I'm sorry, in today's money. Yeah,
their gross was two billion. Yeah. In the second quarter
of nineteen eighty three, they posted a loss of three
hundred and ten million dollars five hundred and thirty six
million dollar loss for the whole year. By nineteen eighty four,
the company had been sold. So it went from two
(27:23):
billion dollars in profits to a loss of five hundred
and thirty six million dollars over the course of a year.
Speaker 4 (27:31):
Yes, and it was not because of ET.
Speaker 1 (27:33):
But this is the thing, Okay, So it gets even
worse hold on, We're not there yet. I'm getting excited.
The whole video game industry actually went down. Oh yeah,
So there's something called the North American video Game Crash
of nineteen eighty three, where not only did the did
Atari go under, basically the industry did so the whole.
(27:54):
The whole industry in nineteen eighty three had a three
point two billion dollars in sales. By nineteen eighty five,
two years later, they had one hundred million dollars in sales.
It was a crash, like that is a catastrophic crash.
And like you're saying, no, it wasn't because of ET,
but imagine this. Think about this. All of that has
(28:16):
been laid ever since then at the feet of ET
the video game and Howard Scott Warshaw. People look at
him and say, you ruined the video game industry single handedly.
That's how he's thought of.
Speaker 4 (28:29):
I think that was the case.
Speaker 1 (28:30):
Up until like twenty fourteen or fifteen, right.
Speaker 3 (28:33):
Yeah, I mean I think people in the know knew
that that was not the case, but.
Speaker 1 (28:37):
The popular pop culture opinion of him.
Speaker 4 (28:40):
Yeah maybe.
Speaker 1 (28:41):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (28:41):
But let's say ET was a big hit. It would
not have saved Atari.
Speaker 1 (28:46):
No, it might have like staved the bleeding a little bit.
Maybe it would have been a drop in the bucket basically.
Speaker 3 (28:52):
Yeah, I mean, I certainly feel bad for Warshaw, but
he's a good inning, so stick around for that.
Speaker 1 (29:03):
Don't go anywhere.
Speaker 3 (29:04):
After ET, he took some time off. He said that
he just needed to sort of recover. I believe was
the words he used. He went into real estate and
did not enjoy that at all, and eventually he became
a psychotherapist and that's what he does today. He's labeled
the Silicon Valley psychotherapist and sort of specializes in talking.
(29:27):
He jokes that he's fluent in English and NERD, so
I think kind of specializes in talking to Silicon Valley types.
Speaker 4 (29:35):
About their work problems. Certainly a man.
Speaker 3 (29:38):
That can identify Yeah, yeah, I bet he's a great psychotherapist.
Speaker 1 (29:43):
It seems like he definitely would be.
Speaker 4 (29:45):
Yeah, so he.
Speaker 1 (29:46):
Definitely made peace with the whole thing. And I think
he very frequently jokes. I've seen it in more than
one article that he says he kind of enjoys it
when people say that ET's the worst video game of
all time, because people also say that Yours Revenge is
one of the best video games of all time. So
he has the greatest range of any video designer ever.
(30:06):
So he definitely has like a I think it took
him a little while, that's the impression, I have to
make peace with it. But he made peace with it.
And I think one of the reasons he was able
to make peace with it, and I'm just armchair psychologizing here,
but he came to realize, yeah, I've used it before
and you said the exact same thing. I think too. Yeah,
(30:27):
he realized that it wasn't the worst video game of
all time, and that a lot of the people who
were saying it was the worst video game of all
time didn't know what they were talking about, which has
to be super liberating. Sure, and the whole world's like
you ruined everything. And then you realize, like they don't
even know what they're saying, you can just kind of
lay roll off your back a little more easily.
Speaker 3 (30:45):
So the cherry on top of this story, we mentioned
this documentary Atari game Over. It is about the legend
of the story of the et game, which continued after
its demise, with this urban legend that Atari was so
distraught and embarrassed by this game that they had all
(31:05):
the remaining boxes shipped out and buried in the desert
under cement. Initially, You're like, that doesn't make any sense.
Why would Atari spend all this money to do this
when they could just burn them, sell them in the
dollar bin, do anything other than this weird plan to
(31:26):
bury them out in the desert of New Mexico.
Speaker 1 (31:28):
Yeah, And a lot of people took it when it
was kind of an initial rumor that like, Atari was
trying to bury their shame. That's all right, It just
went that much further to point out how bad the
video game was. Atari was trying to bury it and
forget about it.
Speaker 4 (31:42):
Right.
Speaker 3 (31:43):
So in twenty eleven, there was a party where there
was an Atari former Atari person there and a guy
named Mike Burns was talking to him and said something about, yeah,
the urban legend that you guys did this, and apparently
the answer was just sheepish enough to where he was like,
(32:03):
wait a minute, is that true?
Speaker 4 (32:05):
Right? So did he did he fund this documentary? Is
that how that worked?
Speaker 1 (32:12):
I think he's a guy who makes things happen, he
brings people together. Okay, I think yes, he definitely puts
some of his own money into it. But I think
he also got others to put money into it as well.
Speaker 3 (32:23):
Okay, I didn't know if he was involved in the
dock itself. Yes, yes he was, or just financing the
dig both. But Zach Penn made this documentary. Zack Penn,
a great, great writer, ironically wrote the movie Ready Player
one which talks about adventure and Easter eggs and all
that fun stuff. So he's written a bunch of movies,
(32:44):
a bunch of the Marvel movies and stuff, and it was.
Speaker 4 (32:47):
Clearly a labor of love.
Speaker 3 (32:48):
This this documentary, if you've seen it, you know Zach
Penn is like super excited about all this stuff.
Speaker 1 (32:54):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (32:54):
So the old Alamagordo landfill in New Mexico has three
it's three hundred acres and then one hundred cells, which
are these it says holes, but they're just these big square,
deep pits where you you know, if you listen to
Our Landfills episode, then you know what goes on there.
Speaker 4 (33:13):
They just dump stuff in there and cover it up.
Speaker 3 (33:16):
And the legend was that the ET is in one
of these cells, and these days they chart it and
it's mapped out, so they know what's where generally sure,
and if a cop comes and says, hey, there's some
evidence from four years ago. They could say, oh, well
that's going to be in this cell because it was
from this area of town where it was picked up
(33:36):
and we buried it here. Back then, they didn't have
anything like that.
Speaker 1 (33:39):
No, it was like they just dug a hole, put
garbage in it, covered it up, and went home. According
to a guy named joe Leewandowski, and Mike Burns lucked
out that a guy named joe Leewandowski worked at the
Alamagordo City Waste department because he is basically the institutional
memory of Alamagordo's waist, and he worked at the dump
(34:04):
for so long that he had a pretty good chance
of remembering where the stuff was put. But he was
kind of like, no, we didn't document it. I have
no idea, leave me alone. And apparently Mike Burns is
not the type to just be like, oh, okay, thanks,
didn't mean to bother you. He'll keep pestering you until
you do what he wants from what I understand, and
so he finally got joe Leewandowski on board, and in
(34:27):
just an astounding turn of good luck, joe Leewandowski's wife
had made a scrap book of Joe's time working for
Alamagordo's waste department that included pictures of the dump from
around this time. So they were able to narrow down
these hundred cells over three hundred acres to two to
(34:49):
just two, which narrowed the search enough that they could
actually start taking samples to try.
Speaker 4 (34:54):
To fgd that. That was a very big breakthrough.
Speaker 3 (34:56):
And if you watch this documentary when when they're taking
these samples and they come across like newspaper clippings from
that year and that month where these cartridges were supposedly buried,
it's really exciting.
Speaker 1 (35:07):
It is.
Speaker 3 (35:08):
I gotta admit, it's like, oh my gosh, it's like
finding buried treasure. So they narrowed it down. All of
these people showed up, fans the what's his name, Ernest Klein,
who wrote the book Ready Player one, he showed up
in his Back to the Future DeLorean, and.
Speaker 4 (35:29):
It was a very big deal.
Speaker 3 (35:30):
They Howard Warshaw came in and he was there and
people were just like embracing this guy instead of like
it's not like he showed up and people are.
Speaker 4 (35:40):
Like, there he is, get him.
Speaker 3 (35:43):
He's like this beloved cherished, dude, And I get the
sense that this was a very big deal for his closure,
which is interesting because burying something is usually the closure.
In this case, digging it up was the closure.
Speaker 1 (35:56):
Yeah, good point.
Speaker 3 (35:58):
And they did find uh thirteen hundred game cartridges. Yeah,
which it makes you wonder like how this how they
got there, how the rumor got started to begin with?
Speaker 4 (36:11):
Well, then the fact that there is some truth to it.
Speaker 1 (36:13):
Yeah, they feel like it definitely confirms that urban legend,
like Atari definitely did cover up. They did dump these
these cartridges, but it wasn't just et cartridges, and it
wasn't like the millions that they supposedly dumped, but they
probably buried some elsewhere in either California or Texas or both.
But it confirmed that, yes, this actually did happen. The
(36:34):
urban legend was real, and at the very least, it
gave Howard Scott Warshaw that closure year he got to see,
you know, thirty something years on, people were still vibing
out on his creation, although in ways he could not
have possibly predicted when he was spending that five weeks
programming this game.
Speaker 4 (36:54):
Yeah, he said, he was full of gratitude.
Speaker 1 (36:56):
That's really cool.
Speaker 4 (36:57):
That's a very cool way to go through life.
Speaker 1 (37:00):
My friends. Oh man, you know, if you can remember
to have gratitude, it truly does make you happy. Yeah,
it's insane. It's just remembering to be grateful is the trick.
Speaker 3 (37:09):
So they ended up a lot of these went on
eBay auctioned off. I think they sold about one hundred
thousand dollars worth of these things that went to the
city of Alamagordo. Of course they owned them. It's not
like they just gave them out to everyone that.
Speaker 1 (37:23):
Was there as a party gift.
Speaker 4 (37:25):
They should have. Sure, they should have given everyone one copy.
Speaker 1 (37:28):
I think some of the like Mike Burns and some
of his crew got some, and Almagordo kept some. But
I think the ones that were auctioned were auctioned by
Alamgordo to go to a fund of museum.
Speaker 4 (37:38):
I would love a copy assigned cartridge for moreshaw.
Speaker 1 (37:42):
I mean, the most I think one went for was
fifteen hundred bucks, So.
Speaker 4 (37:46):
We don't want it that bad.
Speaker 1 (37:47):
But no that I'm saying like that's the most. That's
the highest any of them went for. So you could
probably give them for a couple hundred bucks if you tried.
Speaker 4 (37:54):
I wonder if he listens to the show.
Speaker 1 (37:56):
I hope so you never know. I hope so. I
hope we cleared it up for you. Warshaw, your legend, sir, Yes,
hets off to you.
Speaker 3 (38:03):
Send me a signed cartridge, Josh needs one.
Speaker 1 (38:06):
Thank you, buddy. You got anything else?
Speaker 3 (38:09):
No, it did. ET was not the worst game there were.
There were games that were so bad that you don't
they were just in the dustbin of history.
Speaker 4 (38:18):
They were so bad.
Speaker 1 (38:19):
Yeah, like Sorcer, like you said, Manjo's apparently pretty bad.
Speaker 3 (38:22):
Yeah, they were terrible, like all these not knockoff companies.
But you know, ari Atari opened it up to where
anyone could could design a game that fit their console.
Speaker 1 (38:33):
And some people say that that was one of the
reasons why Atari lost market shares, because there's so much
crudd on the shelves, right, people were tired of buying
Creddy games for twenty five bucks. Yeah, and that they
just oversaturated the market themselves. But they oversaturated with terrible
stuff oversatched well at any rate, that's ET the game
(38:53):
not the worst video game of all time, but a
heck of a story. I'll tell you what good one
and gave you a little bit of nostalgia this holiday season. Yeah, great,
feel that warm tingling. It's either a bladder infection or
a nostalgia. Let's see. Since I said bladder infection, everybody,
it's time for listener man, this.
Speaker 4 (39:15):
Is about bird poop.
Speaker 3 (39:17):
Hey, guys, listen to the Olive Oil podcast and loved
it very much. Living in Italy, they use it every day.
That's my wonderful complexion and youthful looks. I want to
tell you about a problem though, that we have it
in Rome every year and directly caused by olives. Every winter,
the city center is home to millions of migrating starlings
who spend their days out in the local countryside, eating
(39:38):
olives and having a great time. In the evening, they
come back to our warmer city center and sleep in
the city center trees for the night. Great news for
bird watchers, but bad news if you'd like to avoid
being pooed on. The city gets covered in the stuff.
And he sent me a video and of these cars
parked on the street and it's literally looks like it
(40:01):
was painted with bird poop growth, completely solid every square inch.
Speaker 1 (40:06):
That's gotta be bad for the paint.
Speaker 3 (40:08):
And yes, it's really bad, he said, What has this
got to do with olive oil? While the olive stones
may not come out of the starling bird's bottoms, but
the olive oil infused greasy pooh does, and it makes
driving along the roads almost impossible.
Speaker 4 (40:23):
I've fallen off my scooter.
Speaker 3 (40:24):
Twice in the past few years, Oh my god, because
of this, So I guess it's it's slippery oily poop.
Speaker 1 (40:29):
Oh my god.
Speaker 4 (40:31):
And that is from James in Rome.
Speaker 1 (40:33):
Well thanks James. That email's kind of petered out at
the end there. Yeah, I was expecting a big finish,
just oily poop. All right. Well, thanks regardless, and stay
stay safe on your scooter.
Speaker 4 (40:44):
There, James, he said, people use umbrellas.
Speaker 1 (40:46):
And hats off to you living in Rome. Have you
been around?
Speaker 4 (40:49):
Sure?
Speaker 1 (40:49):
When I went, I was like I could live here.
Pretty great, I told Jumie.
Speaker 3 (40:53):
She's like, maybe it's lovely city. It really is old
world charm cats. What's what else?
Speaker 4 (41:00):
Wine food, beautiful people.
Speaker 3 (41:02):
Yeah, and I've never seen men and women at every
turn that looked like runway models.
Speaker 4 (41:08):
Sure, and they were just regular newspaper boys.
Speaker 1 (41:11):
Well, the fact that they do like a little twirl
every once in a while as they were walking. Really
kind of sold it.
Speaker 4 (41:16):
To Yeah and go Chell, Chell Bell Chow Bed.
Speaker 1 (41:20):
Wow, Let's turned out weird. If you want to get
in touch with us, you can go on to stuff
youshould Know dot com and hit us up through our
social links, or you can just send us a good
old fashioned email to stuff podcast HowStuffWorks dot com.
Speaker 2 (41:38):
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