December 20, 2018 • 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.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know from how Stuff Works
dot com. You 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. It is Holidays with a
(00:22):
Z and we're gonna do what we almost did for
a short stuff. Oh yes, Chuck, you're commended for for
that call. 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 medium stuff, yet we
have a so so stuffed called Stuff you should Know. Yeah, um,
(00:44):
but yeah, I saw that documentary Atari game over a
few years ago, and I also guested on tech Stuff
and did a two part episode on the history of Atari.
It's a good one with Strickland's great too, and um,
we could probably do Atari on its own at some
point too. I agree. I think we definitely should. But
(01:05):
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. Oh my god,
he's the hardest working man in podcast business. I'll tell
you that. Just ask um. So we're talking today about
what is widely believed to be the worst video game
(01:25):
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 knew before? I love that man. Yeah,
et the Atari video game. A lot of people it's
(01:46):
that whole internet bandwagon thing. I think, Yes, worst game
of all time. They try to bury it in the desert.
It was so bad killed Atari killed the whole stinking industry, right,
But it was just that bad of a game. But
you've played it, no, Yeah, um, I will say this,
it may be one of the one of the most
disappointing games of all time. It could be, yes, um,
(02:08):
because if you were a kid back then like me
and you and you played Atari like I did, um,
it was. It was a disappointment. It was greatly anticipated.
I'm sure a lot of anticipation that was partial, you know,
that was That was probably the biggest reason why it
gets all the attention because it was et. It wasn't
(02:28):
uh what was that game? Yeah? Or fast Food? There
were so many bad video games for Atari. Yeah, there
were a lot. It was awful. So will this come
out and say, no, ET is not the worst video
game of all time. There were a lot of worse,
far far worse video games uh than ET. But like
(02:51):
you were saying, as far as the anticipation went, as
far as the lighttown went, as far as the loss
of money, when you can understand how people would say
this is the worst of all the time, but also
the timing of its failure was so utterly, amazingly perfect
that it just took it from worst video game of
(03:11):
all time to worst video game of all time. 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 shaped like
ET's right. It's just really bad timing. So let's get
into the story because it's one of the more interesting ones,
(03:34):
and it features a great guy named Howard Scott Warshaw, who,
if you've seen the movie Game Over you have probably
come to really like and admire good dude, good dude,
brilliant designer and like a just a genuinely great guy.
Uh he um this the story begins back in two
(03:54):
I believe. Um. Yeah, it was Uh. He was a
design ord Atari. He'd apparently started out writing code at
Hewlett Packard and it was very unhappy, so he made
the move over to Atari, 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.
(04:16):
Yes he Uh, Yours Revenge is one of the best
Atari games of all time. Did you have that one? Oh? Yeah,
I never played it. It's great. Great. It's kind of
space invaderies or something. It's like a shooter thing, kind
of yeah, single screen shooter. Well you're a h um.
I guess you're a yar and you're this sort of
(04:36):
bug like creature and um, instead of shooting at something
to to chip away at it, you do it so
with your body, so you just fly into this. Oh
I think that went. Uh, you 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 tubes, so I
(04:58):
don't even know what it was. But your whole point
was to make it smaller and you would fly into
I know you're instead of yeah, shooting, you would fly
into it. For my money, that kind of game the
best of all time with Centipede. Cinnipede is great, it
was great. I mean a lot of those games I
played at ay when I happened upon an arcade, Galagha
and Frogger and Cinipede and Defender like those are still
(05:21):
really good challenging joun games. Yeah, ms pac Man, they
just stand up still for sure. It's not like you
go to Galagha or jous now and you're like, this
is easy. What was I thinking? I was such a kid.
There's still hard challenging games. And I think that's sort
of the key to a good video game is it's
got to be winnable, but it's got to be hard
(05:44):
because the kid didn't want to, you know, a pushover,
but a kid also wants to win. So Howard Scott
warsaw knew this like he was a 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, um
(06:04):
was he was the guy who realized that you could
make a game way more enjoyable if you created a
backstory for it. So rather than like, uh, 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, you make up a backstory for it.
(06:25):
The player reads this backstory and then plays, they care
that much more about the person because their 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 for games, and he was one of
the first, if not the first designer to create backstories
and biographies for his characters and games. Yeah, and you
(06:46):
know what just now is sort of hitting me that
um part of the appeal was the imagination of the kids.
So like when you got the game Adventure or Asteroids
and Asteroids you are a pencil drawn triangle right, shooting
at pencil drawn um shapes, shooting pencils at pencil drawn shapes,
(07:08):
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 or in
(07:28):
in asteroids. This han solo like pilot, like cruising through
a you know, an asteroid field, and that would kick starts.
That kick starts the imagination of a ten year old
and then they forget they're a cube or an arrow. Yeah,
it makes it that much more real. Yeah, it was
really really cool because the imagination can do some pretty
amazing stuff with eight bites of graphic. Yeah, you know
(07:51):
for sure, um so uh. Warshaw figured this out, Yeah,
designing worlds. He would design easter eggs into his games too. Yeah,
he was in the first, but yes, no, but he
he was an early person to do that. The Adventure
was the first, I think, And in addition to Yours Revenge,
he also already had a hit um in the Raiders
of the Lost Art game. He had designed that and
(08:12):
it's still play that so much. I read you did
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 on
heard of. I could buy that um and that like
people still have trouble beating it today. Well, it's really
(08:34):
it was really hard. Um. I remember very specifically. There
was one part where you were to parachute um parachute
from one screen and it would all of a sudden
you went to the bottom and you 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 that jump early, going hard left and hook onto
(08:57):
that tree with your parachute. If you hit it 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,
you know, as far as video gameplay though. Really it
was very very challenging, but it was possible. So when
(09:19):
you tried it twenty seven times and you nailed it
on that like, you would run around the neighborhood telling
all your friends that you nailed the parachute jump really
really hard. But it was so hard that it was like, um,
you would get frustrated. It kept you sucked. No, no, no,
You're like, I know you can get it and that's
where et messed up. But we'll get to that, okay,
(09:43):
so um on June, it's funny. He remembers this the
date on Juneo Howard's got warsaw I was hanging around
Otari and he gets a phone call. He gets a
phone call from the CEO, Ray Kassar himself. That was
a big deal back it and Rake Star says, hey, kid,
we know you, we love you. We've got something going
(10:05):
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 e T
video game. Can you do it? Wait, don't answer yet.
Can you do it in five weeks? Then he went sure, Yeah,
(10:27):
he said yeah, which I mean even today, you're like
five weeks. That doesn't sound very long. That was less
than a tenth of the time that it would normally take. Yeah.
And he had the little secret is that he had
already called some other people in the company and said
the CEO he has this, like, is this even possible?
(10:47):
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.
Then he said, all, I'm gonna ask him anyway, right,
And and Howard Scott Warsaw didn't realize that they had
already told them like no, they can't be done when
he said yes, But he was locked in the punch
and he was twenty four years old and full of
(11:08):
full of exuberance and hubrists and all sorts of stuff,
and said I can do this. So he did. And
the reason we should say the reason why this the
schedule was so shortened. Usually took five to six months
for a game to be to be developed, and he
had five weeks to do it. And the reason why
it was because the haggling the deal um to get
(11:29):
the rights for the et game for Atorry to purchase them,
which they bought for twenty one million dollars, took way
longer than expected, and they really wanted this game out
for in time for Christmas. The whole deal. So because
of the because the deal had worked all the way
up into the summer and Christmas was on the other edge,
(11:51):
they needed also several weeks to manufacture the actual cartridges
and get them into stores. If you lay it all
this timeline out, they left five weeks to develop a
game from scratch, so they knew just the guy to
do it, and it was Howard's got Warshaw, and Howard said,
I'll give it a shot. I'm gonna do it. Yeah.
And um, I should point out that when you say
(12:11):
five or six months is the usual time, five or
six months was fast. The usual time was more than that.
Well you also probably had a team working on it,
Like five or six months was the Rush version anyway?
I mean, I think I think that the pretty delightful
prog Rock version did that have a they should add
(12:32):
their own video game. I'm surprised they didn't. They were like,
right there, they did that wheelhouse, we would like game
or something. We would know. There's no way we wouldn't
know about the Rush twelve Atari game. So Warshaw gets
to meet with Steven Spielberg in the l A and
(12:52):
was not given direction or a brief. He meets with
Spielberg says, here's what I proposed, this adventure game that
follows the plot of the film somewhat where the kid
is et playing the game. You are et 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.
(13:13):
It's just like your movie. And Spielberg was like, well,
can't you just have him like running around eating Reese's
pieces like pac Man? And he went, oh, 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,
(13:33):
g Stephen, couldn't you make something more like The Day
of the Earth's to Burn Burn Um? So he 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 may
have sold a lot better, but it was he got
(13:53):
him to agree to his vision for this game. He said, no,
this is a groundbreaking movie. 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, alright, Chuck.
(14:30):
So it's basically the beginning of July 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 to 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
(14:52):
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 I'd ever done before. Yeah,
and this was Atari was a giant at the time.
Um if video if the video game industry was beginning
to slip. It wasn't like the public didn't really realize
(15:12):
that yet. The industry may have, but Atari held about
eight of the market. Um they were at about two
billion in annual sales, about three quarters of billion in profit,
which is just unheard of. About two billion in profit
in today's money. Yeah, so a ton of money. But
(15:33):
they saw the writing on the wall. 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. So I
read a contemporary article in The New York Times in
from Night three talking about this, and Atari said they
did not see the writing on the wall. Well, one
(15:55):
of them said, the first six months of UH three
was one way. The second six months it was like
we were in a totally different business. Yeah, but if
you if you read interviews with him now, I think
that might have been Oh the guy covering is well, yeah,
I don't think you want to go out in the
press in the moment and say, hey, everyone, we're super
scared investors, don't freak out, don't panic, You're right, Chuck.
(16:17):
I feel a little foolish. Uh So they what they
did was they set Warshaw up with um 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.
He had a manager that was assigned to him to
(16:39):
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. How about a waffle? Sure, whatever, Stop bothering me.
Eats in the pit again. So for five weeks he
worked almost like you said, twenty four hours a day.
(17:01):
He said, it's the hardest he's ever worked in his
entire life. And when five weeks came and went, he
handed off his He handed off the game. He finished it.
He 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,
(17:23):
and it wasn't just something like like a pac Man knockoff.
He given real thoughts to it and created a world
that was much different from a lot of the other
games at the time. At the time, he it was
a world like it was a cube shaped world with
six screens, and so if you walked to the left,
you knew you were going to end up on this
other screen. If you walked up, you wouldn't end up
(17:45):
on the other screen. It was a world that you
were navigating, rather than say like Yar's Revenge, which is
just one screen and everything's happening on the one screen,
and it may imply motion or something like this. With
with the e T game, you were moving from one
area of this world to the next X. Yeah, which
is it wasn't. It wasn't new, but it was. It wasn't.
(18:05):
It wasn't standard to have six screens, especially if you
had five weeks to do it. Give we gut a break. Yeah. Yeah, No,
I'm not saying it should. What I'm saying is that, um,
it wasn't like some big revolutionary thing like the Raiders
game was pre this and it had thirty something screen
an adventure like kids were used to this by this point,
(18:26):
so it wasn't like, oh wait, do they get a
load of six screens? Like leaving the screen? I see,
But I think he Scott Howard Scot Worshaw should have
gone to everybody's house and been like, here's your copy
of ETV games. Well, you know I made this in
five weeks. Well he designed Easter Eggs in there too,
And I kind of wondered, like how much time did
he spen doing that with his own initials and like
(18:48):
the Little Yards Revenge Flower. I hadn't really thought about that.
I don't know. So he says the time was of
the essence, though I just maybe put that last on
the list. He says today that Hetty had one more
week to just troubleshoot. He could have worked out all
the kinks. He could have worked out the kinks in
one more Easter egg. But he handed it out. He
handed it off to Atari, and Atari said genius. They
(19:11):
gave it to Steven Spielberg to play. Spielberg apparently liked
it and in the game, Um, 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 they got it out
in time for Christmas. The cartridges shipped. Um. If you
go back onto YouTube and search ET game add or commercial,
(19:37):
it brings up some extraordinarily nostalgic ads of ET dressed
to Santa Claus playing his own video game. Um of
a kid like receiving the ET video game from ET
out in the shed. Just amazing stuff. So not only
is it like Christmas time feeling, but like Christmas time
feeling Chris. It's nice. It's just like the the taste
(20:01):
of ice sugar cookies swells from the inside of your mouth.
You almost gag on it. It's so overpowering. So they
they produce well, we don't know for sure how many,
maybe as many as twelve million copies of this at
least four million. That's part of the urban legend. Yeah,
I mean, I don't think there's an exact exact number,
(20:21):
but millions of copies of these were produced. Twenty one
million dollars invested in the licensing, five million dollars in
advertising and marketing, not just I mean, who knows what
they paid Worshaw or for the actual production. I mean,
I doubt if it was millions of dollars, but he's
probably salaried. They sunk a whole lot of money into
(20:43):
this thing and sold Okay, at first they sold about
a half a million copies and then and I remember,
you know you do oh yeah, oh, word got around
and this was obviously long before the internet, like you
could still sell some stuff back then, but where everyone
realized it stunk. But and that's what was going on.
(21:04):
But literally kid two kid two kid and cul de
sacs and classrooms got the word that the ET game stunk,
and it killed it. It did it is little kids
killed it. They sold like a half a million copies
right out of the gate almost and then it it
peaked right there very quickly, right around the Christmas season, right, yeah,
(21:24):
I mean, just think about that. Though. It was children
led to the demise. It's not like kids read an
article in the newspaper, even a review on the et game.
It was kids going, man, that game stinks. What you
bought that? Oh, don't buy it at stinks? Yeah, it's
it's terrible. And that happened like a game of telephone
all around the country. That's really cool. Simultaneously, kids get
(21:45):
things done, they do, man. 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 a Natari's top ten of
best sellers. But the problem is, if this story is
(22:06):
a story of everything or anything, it's not the story
of a over overconfident 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
(22:26):
being drunk with confidence in hubrists that no matter what
they put out. If it's tied to a hot property
of like a movie or something, it's gonna sell. It
doesn't matter what the game is, it's gonna sell. Problem one.
Problem two was they forecasted based on that Hubrist too.
So not only did they say it's gonna sell no
(22:48):
matter what we put out, it's gonna sell bigger than
anything we've ever put out before. And they ordered four
million cartridges. Well again, it's sold a million and a
half and two and a half million cartridges were sitting
in warehouses. Not to mention once 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
(23:09):
back and took it, took it to the stores. The
store started taking their games back to Atari. So Aster
is like, wait, wait a minute, everybody, this is et
the game. What are you doing? Put this in your
and shut up? And people didn't listen. Yeah, and you
can hardly blame the executives. I mean they were like,
(23:30):
Warshaw plus Spielberg is going to be another hit because
we had it in Raiders, So I 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. Right, Yeah, I've given five six months.
I'm sure even given two months, you probably probably could
(23:52):
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 the New York Times
um article in two where a little ten year old said,
it wasn't that fun, which was kind of it. Yeah,
that's all you need to say. And it wasn't. And
not only was it not fun, but um, and I
(24:15):
don't even I guess you could call it a bug.
It was. It seems more like bad design than just
a mistake. Um. But what would happen as E T
would fall into these pits and then he could levitate
back out, But depending on which way you were or
even how you're holding the joystick, the slightest little move
(24:39):
would cause ET to fall back down into that pit,
no matter what direction you went. Sometimes. Yeah, but it
wasn't like all the time it was. Um. It happened
enough though to where as a kid, Remember you asked
me earlier if it was frustrating trying to parachute is indy?
It was not because you knew you could do it.
This was frustrating. Kids got frustrated because E T was
(25:03):
falling in the pit and he would get out and
he would fall in the pit. And then you do
that enough times and you're like, I'm gonna play Yards
Revenge or any of my other games. Do you have
fast food? And kids put it down? Yea, you know
they put down. Well, he didn't put down the joystick
and go outside and play. That would be like the
movie ending. They just popped it out and put in
(25:24):
the game that they liked. So, um, this was this
was a big deal for Atari, um because it came
at at the worst possible time. And um, speaking of
the worst possible time, let's take a break and do
ad breaking. We'll come right back alright, Chuck. So, like
(26:05):
I was saying, this came at a really terrible time
for Attar, you kind of talked about how the personal
computer industry was starting to eat into their profits big time,
and um, 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 this It was
a huge catastrophic bet for Atari, and the numbers are
(26:29):
just stunning. In like you said in nineteen eighty two,
Atari's profits were two billion dollars in UM in today's money. No,
that was yeah, the profits, I'm sorry, in today's money.
Their gross was two billions UM. In the second quarter
of nineteen eighty three, they posted a loss of three
(26:51):
d ten million dollars five thirty six million dollar lost
for the whole year. By four the company had been sold.
So it went from two billion dollars in profits to
a loss of five hundred and thirty six million dollars
over the course of a year. Yes, and it was
not because of ET. But this is the thing. Okay,
(27:12):
so it gets even worse. Hold on, we're not there yet.
I'm getting excited. The whole video game industry actually went down.
So there's something called the North American video game Crash
of three, where not only did the did Atari go under,
basically the industry did so the whole the whole industry
in three had a three point two billion dollars in sales.
(27:36):
By two years later they had a 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 been laid ever since then at the feet
of ET the video game and Howard Scott Warshaw. People
(28:00):
look at him and say, you ruined the video game
industry single handedly. That's how he's thought of. I think
that was the case up until like two thousand fourteen
or fifteen, right, Yeah, I mean I think people in
the know knew that that was not the case. But
the popular pop culture opinion of him. Yeah maybe. But um,
(28:20):
let's say E was a big hit. It would not
have saved Atari. No, it might have like staved the
bleeding a little bit, but would have been a drop
in the bucket basically. Yeah. Um, I mean, I certainly
feel bad for Warshaw. Um, but he has he's a
good inning, So stick around for that. Don't go anywhere.
(28:42):
After ET, he took some time off. He said that, uh,
he just needed to sort of recover, I believe was
the words he used. He went into real estate, uh
and did not enjoy that at all. Um. And eventually
he became a psychotherapist, and that's what he does today.
He's a he's labeled the Silicon Valley Psychotherapists and sort
(29:02):
of specializes in talking. He jokes that he's fluent in
English and NERD, so I think kind of specializes in
talking to Silicon Valley types, um about their work problems. Yeah,
certainly a man that can identify you know. Yeah, Yeah,
he's a great psychotherapist. It seems like he definitely would be. Yeah.
(29:23):
So he definitely made peace with the whole thing, and
I think he um. He very frequently jokes. I've seen
it in more than one article that he says, Um,
he kind of enjoys it when people say that Eats
the worst video game of all time, because people also
say that you yours Revenge is one of the best
video games of all time. So he has the greatest
range of any video designer ever. So he definitely has
(29:44):
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 um, realize, Yeah,
I've used it before and you said the exact same thing.
I think too. Yeah, Um, he realized that it wasn't
(30:05):
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, 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 let it roll off your back a
little more easily. So the the cherry on top of
this story, we mentioned this documentary Atari Game over Um.
(30:29):
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 the remaining boxes shipped out
and buried in the desert under submit. Initially, you're like,
(30:51):
that doesn't make any sense. Why would it already spend
all this money to do this when they could just
burn them, sell them in the dollar been, do anything
other than this weird plan to bury them out in
the desert of New Mexico. 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.
(31:12):
That's how it just went that much further to point
out how bad the each video game was. Atari was
trying to bury it and forget about it. Uh So,
in two thousand eleven, there was um a party where
there was an Atari former Atari person there and a
guy named Mike Burns. I was talking to him and
(31:32):
said something about, yeah, this urban legend that you guys
did this, and apparently the answer was just sheepish enough
to where he was like, wait a minute, that true?
So did he did he fund this documentary? Is that
how that worked? I think he he's a guy who
makes things happen, he brings people together. I think yes,
(31:55):
he definitely put some of his own money into it,
but I think he also got others to to put
money into it as well. Okay, I didn't know if
he was involved in the dock itself or just financing
the dig, but Zack Pinn made this documentary. Um. Zack
pan a great, great writer. Um ironically wrote the movie
Ready Player one, which talks about adventure and Easter eggs
(32:19):
and all that fun stuff. So he's he's written a
bunch of movies, a bunch of the Marvel movies and stuff. Um,
And it was clearly a labor of love. This this
documentary if you've seen it, uh, you know, Zack benn
is like super excited about all this stuff. So the
old Alama Gordo landfill in New Mexico has three hundred
it's three hundred acres and then a hundred cells, which
(32:40):
are these uh his 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.
And they just dump stuff in there and cover it up.
And the legend was that the e T is in
one of these cells. And these days they chart it
and it's mapped out so they know what's where generally,
(33:03):
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
and we buried it here. Back then, they didn't have
anything like that. 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 Lee Wandowski
(33:24):
and Mike Burns lucked out that a guy named Joe
Leewandowski worked at the Alama Gordo um City waste department
because he is basically the institutional memory of Alama Gordo's
waste and he worked at the dump for so long
that he had a pretty good chance of remembering what
(33:44):
where the stuff was put. Um. But he was kind
of like, no, we don't, we didn't document it. I
have no idea, Leave me alone. And apparently Mike Burns
is not the type to just be like, okay, I'll thanks,
didn't mean to bother you. He'll keep pestering you until
you do what he wants from what I under stand, um.
And so he finally got Joelie Wandowski on board, and
in just an astounding turn of good luck, Jolie Wandowski's
(34:10):
wife had made a scrap book of Joe's time working
for Alama Gordo's UM waste department that included pictures of
the dump from around this time. So they were able
to narrow down these hundred cells over three acres to
two to just to which narrowed the search enough that
they could actually start taking samples to try to Yeah,
(34:31):
that was a very big breakthrough. And if you watch
this documentary when they're 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,
it is, I gotta admit, it's like, oh my gosh.
Like they it's like finding buried treasure. So they narrowed
(34:52):
it down. Uh, all of these people showed up, um
fans the what's his name, Ernest Ernest Klein who wrote
the book Ready Player one, He showed up in his
uh Back to the Future DeLorean and Uh, it was
a very big deal. They Howard uh Warshaw came in
and he was there and people were just like embracing
(35:13):
this guy instead of like it's not like he showed
up and people are like, there is He's like this beloved,
cherished dude. And I get the sense that this was
a very big deal for his closure. Um, which is
interesting because burying something is usually the closure. In this case,
digging it up was the closure. And they did find
(35:37):
uh game cartridges, which it makes you wonder like how
this how they got there, how the rumor got started
to begin with. Well, then the fact that there is
some truth to it. Yeah, they feel like it definitely
confirms the urban legend, Like Atari definitely did cover up.
They did dump these these cartridges, but it wasn't just
(35:58):
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 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
(36:20):
years on UM 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. Yeah,
he said he was full of gratitude. That's really cool.
That's a very cool way to go through life, my friends.
So let's oh man, you know, if you can remember
(36:40):
to have gratitude, it truly does make you happy. It's insane.
It's just remembering to be grateful is the trick. So
they ended up a lot of these one on eBay,
UM auctioned off. I think they sold about a hundred
thousand dollars worth of these things that went to the
city of Elama Gordo. Of course, they owned him. It's
not like they just gave him out to everyone that
(37:01):
was there. They should have they should have given everyone
one copy. I think some of the like Mike Burns
and some of his crew, got some in. Alma Gordo
kept some, but I think the ones that were auctioned
were auctioned by Alma Gordo to go to a fund
of museum. I would love a copy assigned cartridge, Warshaw.
I mean, the most I think one went for was bucks,
(37:23):
so we don't want it that bad. But no, then
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. I wonder
if he listens to the show. I hope so you
never know, I hope so. I hope we cleared it
up for your Warshaw, your legend, sir. Yes, hats off
to send me assigned cartridge. Send to Josh needs one
(37:43):
and thank you, buddy. Um you got anything else? No,
it did. E T was not the worst game. They were.
There were games that were so bad that you don't
they were just in the dustbin of history. They were
so bad, like Sorcerer, like you said, Manga is apparently
pretty bad. Yeah, they were terrible, like all these not
knockoff companies, but you know, ari Atari opened it up
(38:06):
to where anyone could could design a game that fits.
And some people say that that was one of the
reasons why Atari lost market shares, because there's so much
crud on the shelves and people were tired of buying
Creddy games for bucks, and that they just oversaturated the
market themselves. But they oversaturated with terrible stuff, oversetched well
(38:28):
at any rate, that's e t the game. Not the
worst video game of all time, but a heck of
a story, I'll tell you what good one and hopefully
gave you a little bit of nostalgia this holiday season. Yeah,
feel that warm tingling. It's either a bladder infection or nostalgia. Uh,
let's see, since I said bladder infection, everybody, it's time
(38:49):
for listener man. Uh, this is a about bird poop. Hey, guys,
listen to the Olive Oil podcast and loved it very much.
Living in Italy, I use it every day. That's my
wonderful complexion and youthful looks. I want to tell you
about a problem though, that we haven't rome every year
and directly caused by olives. Every winter, the city center
(39:11):
is home to millions of migrating starlings who spend their
days out of the local countryside, eating 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 like to avoid being pooed on.
The city gets covered in the stuff. And he sent
(39:32):
me a video and of these cars parked on the
street and it's literally looks like it was painted with
bird poop, completely solid every square inch. That's gotta be
bad for the paint. And yeah, it's really bad. H
He said, what what has this got to do with
olive oil? While the olive stones may not come out
of the starling birds bottoms, but the olive oil infuse
(39:56):
greasy pood does, and it makes driving along the roads
almost some possible. I've fallen off my scooter twice in
the past few years. Oh my god because of this,
So I guess it's it's slippery oily poop. Oh my god.
And that is from James in Room. Wow. Thanks James.
That emails kind of petered out at the end there. Yeah,
I was expecting a big finish, just oily poop. All right, Well,
(40:18):
thanks regardless, and stay stay safe on your scooter there, James,
he said, people use umbrellas and hats off to you
living in Rome. Have you been around? Sure? When I went,
I was like I could live here. Pretty great, I
told Jimmie. She's like, maybe it's lovely city. It really
is old world charm cats. What's what else? Wine food,
(40:38):
beautiful people and seeing men and women at every turn
that looked like runway models and they were just regular
newspaper boys. Well, the fact that they do like a
little twirl every once in war as they were walking
really kind of sold it too. Yeah, and go challab bed. Wow,
let's turn out weird. Um. If you want to get
(41:01):
in touch with us, you can go on to stuff
you should know dot com and hit us up through
our social links. You can go to the Josh Clarkway
dot com, or you can just send us a good
old fashioned email to stuff podcast how stuff Works dot
com for more on this and thousands of other topics.
(41:21):
Is it how stuff Works dot com
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know from how Stuff Works
dot com. You 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. It is Holidays with a
(00:22):
Z and we're gonna do what we almost did for
a short stuff. Oh yes, Chuck, you're commended for for
that call. 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 medium stuff, yet we
have a so so stuffed called Stuff you should Know. Yeah, um,
(00:44):
but yeah, I saw that documentary Atari game over a
few years ago, and I also guested on tech Stuff
and did a two part episode on the history of Atari.
It's a good one with Strickland's great too, and um,
we could probably do Atari on its own at some
point too. I agree. I think we definitely should. But
(01:05):
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. Oh my god,
he's the hardest working man in podcast business. I'll tell
you that. Just ask um. So we're talking today about
what is widely believed to be the worst video game
(01:25):
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 knew before? I love that man. Yeah,
et the Atari video game. A lot of people it's
(01:46):
that whole internet bandwagon thing. I think, Yes, worst game
of all time. They try to bury it in the desert.
It was so bad killed Atari killed the whole stinking industry, right,
But it was just that bad of a game. But
you've played it, no, Yeah, um, I will say this,
it may be one of the one of the most
disappointing games of all time. It could be, yes, um,
(02:08):
because if you were a kid back then like me
and you and you played Atari like I did, um,
it was. It was a disappointment. It was greatly anticipated.
I'm sure a lot of anticipation that was partial, you know,
that was That was probably the biggest reason why it
gets all the attention because it was et. It wasn't
(02:28):
uh what was that game? Yeah? Or fast Food? There
were so many bad video games for Atari. Yeah, there
were a lot. It was awful. So will this come
out and say, no, ET is not the worst video
game of all time. There were a lot of worse,
far far worse video games uh than ET. But like
(02:51):
you were saying, as far as the anticipation went, as
far as the lighttown went, as far as the loss
of money, when you can understand how people would say
this is the worst of all the time, but also
the timing of its failure was so utterly, amazingly perfect
that it just took it from worst video game of
(03:11):
all time to worst video game of all time. 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 shaped like
ET's right. It's just really bad timing. So let's get
into the story because it's one of the more interesting ones,
(03:34):
and it features a great guy named Howard Scott Warshaw, who,
if you've seen the movie Game Over you have probably
come to really like and admire good dude, good dude,
brilliant designer and like a just a genuinely great guy.
Uh he um this the story begins back in two
(03:54):
I believe. Um. Yeah, it was Uh. He was a
design ord Atari. He'd apparently started out writing code at
Hewlett Packard and it was very unhappy, so he made
the move over to Atari, 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.
(04:16):
Yes he Uh, Yours Revenge is one of the best
Atari games of all time. Did you have that one? Oh? Yeah,
I never played it. It's great. Great. It's kind of
space invaderies or something. It's like a shooter thing, kind
of yeah, single screen shooter. Well you're a h um.
I guess you're a yar and you're this sort of
(04:36):
bug like creature and um, instead of shooting at something
to to chip away at it, you do it so
with your body, so you just fly into this. Oh
I think that went. Uh, you 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 tubes, so I
(04:58):
don't even know what it was. But your whole point
was to make it smaller and you would fly into
I know you're instead of yeah, shooting, you would fly
into it. For my money, that kind of game the
best of all time with Centipede. Cinnipede is great, it
was great. I mean a lot of those games I
played at ay when I happened upon an arcade, Galagha
and Frogger and Cinipede and Defender like those are still
(05:21):
really good challenging joun games. Yeah, ms pac Man, they
just stand up still for sure. It's not like you
go to Galagha or jous now and you're like, this
is easy. What was I thinking? I was such a kid.
There's still hard challenging games. And I think that's sort
of the key to a good video game is it's
got to be winnable, but it's got to be hard
(05:44):
because the kid didn't want to, you know, a pushover,
but a kid also wants to win. So Howard Scott
warsaw knew this like he was a 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, um
(06:04):
was he was the guy who realized that you could
make a game way more enjoyable if you created a
backstory for it. So rather than like, uh, 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, you make up a backstory for it.
(06:25):
The player reads this backstory and then plays, they care
that much more about the person because their 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 for games, and he was one of
the first, if not the first designer to create backstories
and biographies for his characters and games. Yeah, and you
(06:46):
know what just now is sort of hitting me that
um part of the appeal was the imagination of the kids.
So like when you got the game Adventure or Asteroids
and Asteroids you are a pencil drawn triangle right, shooting
at pencil drawn um shapes, shooting pencils at pencil drawn shapes,
(07:08):
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 or in
(07:28):
in asteroids. This han solo like pilot, like cruising through
a you know, an asteroid field, and that would kick starts.
That kick starts the imagination of a ten year old
and then they forget they're a cube or an arrow. Yeah,
it makes it that much more real. Yeah, it was
really really cool because the imagination can do some pretty
amazing stuff with eight bites of graphic. Yeah, you know
(07:51):
for sure, um so uh. Warshaw figured this out, Yeah,
designing worlds. He would design easter eggs into his games too. Yeah,
he was in the first, but yes, no, but he
he was an early person to do that. The Adventure
was the first, I think, And in addition to Yours Revenge,
he also already had a hit um in the Raiders
of the Lost Art game. He had designed that and
(08:12):
it's still play that so much. I read you did
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 on
heard of. I could buy that um and that like
people still have trouble beating it today. Well, it's really
(08:34):
it was really hard. Um. I remember very specifically. There
was one part where you were to parachute um parachute
from one screen and it would all of a sudden
you went to the bottom and you 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 that jump early, going hard left and hook onto
(08:57):
that tree with your parachute. If you hit it 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,
you know, as far as video gameplay though. Really it
was very very challenging, but it was possible. So when
(09:19):
you tried it twenty seven times and you nailed it
on that like, you would run around the neighborhood telling
all your friends that you nailed the parachute jump really
really hard. But it was so hard that it was like, um,
you would get frustrated. It kept you sucked. No, no, no,
You're like, I know you can get it and that's
where et messed up. But we'll get to that, okay,
(09:43):
so um on June, it's funny. He remembers this the
date on Juneo Howard's got warsaw I was hanging around
Otari and he gets a phone call. He gets a
phone call from the CEO, Ray Kassar himself. That was
a big deal back it and Rake Star says, hey, kid,
we know you, we love you. We've got something going
(10:05):
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 e T
video game. Can you do it? Wait, don't answer yet.
Can you do it in five weeks? Then he went sure, Yeah,
(10:27):
he said yeah, which I mean even today, you're like
five weeks. That doesn't sound very long. That was less
than a tenth of the time that it would normally take. Yeah.
And he had the little secret is that he had
already called some other people in the company and said
the CEO he has this, like, is this even possible?
(10:47):
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.
Then he said, all, I'm gonna ask him anyway, right,
And and Howard Scott Warsaw didn't realize that they had
already told them like no, they can't be done when
he said yes, But he was locked in the punch
and he was twenty four years old and full of
(11:08):
full of exuberance and hubrists and all sorts of stuff,
and said I can do this. So he did. And
the reason we should say the reason why this the
schedule was so shortened. Usually took five to six months
for a game to be to be developed, and he
had five weeks to do it. And the reason why
it was because the haggling the deal um to get
(11:29):
the rights for the et game for Atorry to purchase them,
which they bought for twenty one million dollars, took way
longer than expected, and they really wanted this game out
for in time for Christmas. The whole deal. So because
of the because the deal had worked all the way
up into the summer and Christmas was on the other edge,
(11:51):
they needed also several weeks to manufacture the actual cartridges
and get them into stores. If you lay it all
this timeline out, they left five weeks to develop a
game from scratch, so they knew just the guy to
do it, and it was Howard's got Warshaw, and Howard said,
I'll give it a shot. I'm gonna do it. Yeah.
And um, I should point out that when you say
(12:11):
five or six months is the usual time, five or
six months was fast. The usual time was more than that.
Well you also probably had a team working on it,
Like five or six months was the Rush version anyway?
I mean, I think I think that the pretty delightful
prog Rock version did that have a they should add
(12:32):
their own video game. I'm surprised they didn't. They were like,
right there, they did that wheelhouse, we would like game
or something. We would know. There's no way we wouldn't
know about the Rush twelve Atari game. So Warshaw gets
to meet with Steven Spielberg in the l A and
(12:52):
was not given direction or a brief. He meets with
Spielberg says, here's what I proposed, this adventure game that
follows the plot of the film somewhat where the kid
is et playing the game. You are et 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.
(13:13):
It's just like your movie. And Spielberg was like, well,
can't you just have him like running around eating Reese's
pieces like pac Man? And he went, oh, 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,
(13:33):
g Stephen, couldn't you make something more like The Day
of the Earth's to Burn Burn Um? So he 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 may
have sold a lot better, but it was he got
(13:53):
him to agree to his vision for this game. He said, no,
this is a groundbreaking movie. 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, alright, Chuck.
(14:30):
So it's basically the beginning of July 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 to 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
(14:52):
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 I'd ever done before. Yeah,
and this was Atari was a giant at the time.
Um if video if the video game industry was beginning
to slip. It wasn't like the public didn't really realize
(15:12):
that yet. The industry may have, but Atari held about
eight of the market. Um they were at about two
billion in annual sales, about three quarters of billion in profit,
which is just unheard of. About two billion in profit
in today's money. Yeah, so a ton of money. But
(15:33):
they saw the writing on the wall. 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. So I
read a contemporary article in The New York Times in
from Night three talking about this, and Atari said they
did not see the writing on the wall. Well, one
(15:55):
of them said, the first six months of UH three
was one way. The second six months it was like
we were in a totally different business. Yeah, but if
you if you read interviews with him now, I think
that might have been Oh the guy covering is well, yeah,
I don't think you want to go out in the
press in the moment and say, hey, everyone, we're super
scared investors, don't freak out, don't panic, You're right, Chuck.
(16:17):
I feel a little foolish. Uh So they what they
did was they set Warshaw up with um 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.
He had a manager that was assigned to him to
(16:39):
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. How about a waffle? Sure, whatever, Stop bothering me.
Eats in the pit again. So for five weeks he
worked almost like you said, twenty four hours a day.
(17:01):
He said, it's the hardest he's ever worked in his
entire life. And when five weeks came and went, he
handed off his He handed off the game. He finished it.
He 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,
(17:23):
and it wasn't just something like like a pac Man knockoff.
He given real thoughts to it and created a world
that was much different from a lot of the other
games at the time. At the time, he it was
a world like it was a cube shaped world with
six screens, and so if you walked to the left,
you knew you were going to end up on this
other screen. If you walked up, you wouldn't end up
(17:45):
on the other screen. It was a world that you
were navigating, rather than say like Yar's Revenge, which is
just one screen and everything's happening on the one screen,
and it may imply motion or something like this. With
with the e T game, you were moving from one
area of this world to the next X. Yeah, which
is it wasn't. It wasn't new, but it was. It wasn't.
(18:05):
It wasn't standard to have six screens, especially if you
had five weeks to do it. Give we gut a break. Yeah. Yeah, No,
I'm not saying it should. What I'm saying is that, um,
it wasn't like some big revolutionary thing like the Raiders
game was pre this and it had thirty something screen
an adventure like kids were used to this by this point,
(18:26):
so it wasn't like, oh wait, do they get a
load of six screens? Like leaving the screen? I see,
But I think he Scott Howard Scot Worshaw should have
gone to everybody's house and been like, here's your copy
of ETV games. Well, you know I made this in
five weeks. Well he designed Easter Eggs in there too,
And I kind of wondered, like how much time did
he spen doing that with his own initials and like
(18:48):
the Little Yards Revenge Flower. I hadn't really thought about that.
I don't know. So he says the time was of
the essence, though I just maybe put that last on
the list. He says today that Hetty had one more
week to just troubleshoot. He could have worked out all
the kinks. He could have worked out the kinks in
one more Easter egg. But he handed it out. He
handed it off to Atari, and Atari said genius. They
(19:11):
gave it to Steven Spielberg to play. Spielberg apparently liked
it and in the game, Um, 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 they got it out
in time for Christmas. The cartridges shipped. Um. If you
go back onto YouTube and search ET game add or commercial,
(19:37):
it brings up some extraordinarily nostalgic ads of ET dressed
to Santa Claus playing his own video game. Um of
a kid like receiving the ET video game from ET
out in the shed. Just amazing stuff. So not only
is it like Christmas time feeling, but like Christmas time
feeling Chris. It's nice. It's just like the the taste
(20:01):
of ice sugar cookies swells from the inside of your mouth.
You almost gag on it. It's so overpowering. So they
they produce well, we don't know for sure how many,
maybe as many as twelve million copies of this at
least four million. That's part of the urban legend. Yeah,
I mean, I don't think there's an exact exact number,
(20:21):
but millions of copies of these were produced. Twenty one
million dollars invested in the licensing, five million dollars in
advertising and marketing, not just I mean, who knows what
they paid Worshaw or for the actual production. I mean,
I doubt if it was millions of dollars, but he's
probably salaried. They sunk a whole lot of money into
(20:43):
this thing and sold Okay, at first they sold about
a half a million copies and then and I remember,
you know you do oh yeah, oh, word got around
and this was obviously long before the internet, like you
could still sell some stuff back then, but where everyone
realized it stunk. But and that's what was going on.
(21:04):
But literally kid two kid two kid and cul de
sacs and classrooms got the word that the ET game stunk,
and it killed it. It did it is little kids
killed it. They sold like a half a million copies
right out of the gate almost and then it it
peaked right there very quickly, right around the Christmas season, right, yeah,
(21:24):
I mean, just think about that. Though. It was children
led to the demise. It's not like kids read an
article in the newspaper, even a review on the et game.
It was kids going, man, that game stinks. What you
bought that? Oh, don't buy it at stinks? Yeah, it's
it's terrible. And that happened like a game of telephone
all around the country. That's really cool. Simultaneously, kids get
(21:45):
things done, they do, man. 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 a Natari's top ten of
best sellers. But the problem is, if this story is
(22:06):
a story of everything or anything, it's not the story
of a over overconfident 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
(22:26):
being drunk with confidence in hubrists that no matter what
they put out. If it's tied to a hot property
of like a movie or something, it's gonna sell. It
doesn't matter what the game is, it's gonna sell. Problem one.
Problem two was they forecasted based on that Hubrist too.
So not only did they say it's gonna sell no
(22:48):
matter what we put out, it's gonna sell bigger than
anything we've ever put out before. And they ordered four
million cartridges. Well again, it's sold a million and a
half and two and a half million cartridges were sitting
in warehouses. Not to mention once 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
(23:09):
back and took it, took it to the stores. The
store started taking their games back to Atari. So Aster
is like, wait, wait a minute, everybody, this is et
the game. What are you doing? Put this in your
and shut up? And people didn't listen. Yeah, and you
can hardly blame the executives. I mean they were like,
(23:30):
Warshaw plus Spielberg is going to be another hit because
we had it in Raiders, So I 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. Right, Yeah, I've given five six months.
I'm sure even given two months, you probably probably could
(23:52):
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 the New York Times
um article in two where a little ten year old said,
it wasn't that fun, which was kind of it. Yeah,
that's all you need to say. And it wasn't. And
not only was it not fun, but um, and I
(24:15):
don't even I guess you could call it a bug.
It was. It seems more like bad design than just
a mistake. Um. But what would happen as E T
would fall into these pits and then he could levitate
back out, But depending on which way you were or
even how you're holding the joystick, the slightest little move
(24:39):
would cause ET to fall back down into that pit,
no matter what direction you went. Sometimes. Yeah, but it
wasn't like all the time it was. Um. It happened
enough though to where as a kid, Remember you asked
me earlier if it was frustrating trying to parachute is indy?
It was not because you knew you could do it.
This was frustrating. Kids got frustrated because E T was
(25:03):
falling in the pit and he would get out and
he would fall in the pit. And then you do
that enough times and you're like, I'm gonna play Yards
Revenge or any of my other games. Do you have
fast food? And kids put it down? Yea, you know
they put down. Well, he didn't put down the joystick
and go outside and play. That would be like the
movie ending. They just popped it out and put in
(25:24):
the game that they liked. So, um, this was this
was a big deal for Atari, um because it came
at at the worst possible time. And um, speaking of
the worst possible time, let's take a break and do
ad breaking. We'll come right back alright, Chuck. So, like
(26:05):
I was saying, this came at a really terrible time
for Attar, you kind of talked about how the personal
computer industry was starting to eat into their profits big time,
and um, 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 this It was
a huge catastrophic bet for Atari, and the numbers are
(26:29):
just stunning. In like you said in nineteen eighty two,
Atari's profits were two billion dollars in UM in today's money. No,
that was yeah, the profits, I'm sorry, in today's money.
Their gross was two billions UM. In the second quarter
of nineteen eighty three, they posted a loss of three
(26:51):
d ten million dollars five thirty six million dollar lost
for the whole year. By four the company had been sold.
So it went from two billion dollars in profits to
a loss of five hundred and thirty six million dollars
over the course of a year. Yes, and it was
not because of ET. But this is the thing. Okay,
(27:12):
so it gets even worse. Hold on, we're not there yet.
I'm getting excited. The whole video game industry actually went down.
So there's something called the North American video game Crash
of three, where not only did the did Atari go under,
basically the industry did so the whole the whole industry
in three had a three point two billion dollars in sales.
(27:36):
By two years later they had a 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 been laid ever since then at the feet
of ET the video game and Howard Scott Warshaw. People
(28:00):
look at him and say, you ruined the video game
industry single handedly. That's how he's thought of. I think
that was the case up until like two thousand fourteen
or fifteen, right, Yeah, I mean I think people in
the know knew that that was not the case. But
the popular pop culture opinion of him. Yeah maybe. But um,
(28:20):
let's say E was a big hit. It would not
have saved Atari. No, it might have like staved the
bleeding a little bit, but would have been a drop
in the bucket basically. Yeah. Um, I mean, I certainly
feel bad for Warshaw. Um, but he has he's a
good inning, So stick around for that. Don't go anywhere.
(28:42):
After ET, he took some time off. He said that, uh,
he just needed to sort of recover, I believe was
the words he used. He went into real estate, uh
and did not enjoy that at all. Um. And eventually
he became a psychotherapist, and that's what he does today.
He's a he's labeled the Silicon Valley Psychotherapists and sort
(29:02):
of specializes in talking. He jokes that he's fluent in
English and NERD, so I think kind of specializes in
talking to Silicon Valley types, um about their work problems. Yeah,
certainly a man that can identify you know. Yeah, Yeah,
he's a great psychotherapist. It seems like he definitely would be. Yeah.
(29:23):
So he definitely made peace with the whole thing, and
I think he um. He very frequently jokes. I've seen
it in more than one article that he says, Um,
he kind of enjoys it when people say that Eats
the worst video game of all time, because people also
say that you yours Revenge is one of the best
video games of all time. So he has the greatest
range of any video designer ever. So he definitely has
(29:44):
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 um, realize, Yeah,
I've used it before and you said the exact same thing.
I think too. Yeah, Um, he realized that it wasn't
(30:05):
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, 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 let it roll off your back a
little more easily. So the the cherry on top of
this story, we mentioned this documentary Atari Game over Um.
(30:29):
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 the remaining boxes shipped out
and buried in the desert under submit. Initially, you're like,
(30:51):
that doesn't make any sense. Why would it already spend
all this money to do this when they could just
burn them, sell them in the dollar been, do anything
other than this weird plan to bury them out in
the desert of New Mexico. 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.
(31:12):
That's how it just went that much further to point
out how bad the each video game was. Atari was
trying to bury it and forget about it. Uh So,
in two thousand eleven, there was um a party where
there was an Atari former Atari person there and a
guy named Mike Burns. I was talking to him and
(31:32):
said something about, yeah, this urban legend that you guys
did this, and apparently the answer was just sheepish enough
to where he was like, wait a minute, that true?
So did he did he fund this documentary? Is that
how that worked? I think he he's a guy who
makes things happen, he brings people together. I think yes,
(31:55):
he definitely put some of his own money into it,
but I think he also got others to to put
money into it as well. Okay, I didn't know if
he was involved in the dock itself or just financing
the dig, but Zack Pinn made this documentary. Um. Zack
pan a great, great writer. Um ironically wrote the movie
Ready Player one, which talks about adventure and Easter eggs
(32:19):
and all that fun stuff. So he's he's written a
bunch of movies, a bunch of the Marvel movies and stuff. Um,
And it was clearly a labor of love. This this
documentary if you've seen it, uh, you know, Zack benn
is like super excited about all this stuff. So the
old Alama Gordo landfill in New Mexico has three hundred
it's three hundred acres and then a hundred cells, which
(32:40):
are these uh his 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.
And they just dump stuff in there and cover it up.
And the legend was that the e T is in
one of these cells. And these days they chart it
and it's mapped out so they know what's where generally,
(33:03):
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
and we buried it here. Back then, they didn't have
anything like that. 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 Lee Wandowski
(33:24):
and Mike Burns lucked out that a guy named Joe
Leewandowski worked at the Alama Gordo um City waste department
because he is basically the institutional memory of Alama Gordo's
waste and he worked at the dump for so long
that he had a pretty good chance of remembering what
(33:44):
where the stuff was put. Um. But he was kind
of like, no, we don't, we didn't document it. I
have no idea, Leave me alone. And apparently Mike Burns
is not the type to just be like, okay, I'll thanks,
didn't mean to bother you. He'll keep pestering you until
you do what he wants from what I under stand, um.
And so he finally got Joelie Wandowski on board, and
in just an astounding turn of good luck, Jolie Wandowski's
(34:10):
wife had made a scrap book of Joe's time working
for Alama Gordo's UM waste department that included pictures of
the dump from around this time. So they were able
to narrow down these hundred cells over three acres to
two to just to which narrowed the search enough that
they could actually start taking samples to try to Yeah,
(34:31):
that was a very big breakthrough. And if you watch
this documentary when they're 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,
it is, I gotta admit, it's like, oh my gosh.
Like they it's like finding buried treasure. So they narrowed
(34:52):
it down. Uh, all of these people showed up, um
fans the what's his name, Ernest Ernest Klein who wrote
the book Ready Player one, He showed up in his
uh Back to the Future DeLorean and Uh, it was
a very big deal. They Howard uh Warshaw came in
and he was there and people were just like embracing
(35:13):
this guy instead of like it's not like he showed
up and people are like, there is He's like this beloved,
cherished dude. And I get the sense that this was
a very big deal for his closure. Um, which is
interesting because burying something is usually the closure. In this case,
digging it up was the closure. And they did find
(35:37):
uh game cartridges, which it makes you wonder like how
this how they got there, how the rumor got started
to begin with. Well, then the fact that there is
some truth to it. Yeah, they feel like it definitely
confirms the urban legend, Like Atari definitely did cover up.
They did dump these these cartridges, but it wasn't just
(35:58):
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 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
(36:20):
years on UM 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. Yeah,
he said he was full of gratitude. That's really cool.
That's a very cool way to go through life, my friends.
So let's oh man, you know, if you can remember
(36:40):
to have gratitude, it truly does make you happy. It's insane.
It's just remembering to be grateful is the trick. So
they ended up a lot of these one on eBay,
UM auctioned off. I think they sold about a hundred
thousand dollars worth of these things that went to the
city of Elama Gordo. Of course, they owned him. It's
not like they just gave him out to everyone that
(37:01):
was there. They should have they should have given everyone
one copy. I think some of the like Mike Burns
and some of his crew, got some in. Alma Gordo
kept some, but I think the ones that were auctioned
were auctioned by Alma Gordo to go to a fund
of museum. I would love a copy assigned cartridge, Warshaw.
I mean, the most I think one went for was bucks,
(37:23):
so we don't want it that bad. But no, then
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. I wonder
if he listens to the show. I hope so you
never know, I hope so. I hope we cleared it
up for your Warshaw, your legend, sir. Yes, hats off
to send me assigned cartridge. Send to Josh needs one
(37:43):
and thank you, buddy. Um you got anything else? No,
it did. E T was not the worst game. They were.
There were games that were so bad that you don't
they were just in the dustbin of history. They were
so bad, like Sorcerer, like you said, Manga is apparently
pretty bad. Yeah, they were terrible, like all these not
knockoff companies, but you know, ari Atari opened it up
(38:06):
to where anyone could could design a game that fits.
And some people say that that was one of the
reasons why Atari lost market shares, because there's so much
crud on the shelves and people were tired of buying
Creddy games for bucks, and that they just oversaturated the
market themselves. But they oversaturated with terrible stuff, oversetched well
(38:28):
at any rate, that's e t the game. Not the
worst video game of all time, but a heck of
a story, I'll tell you what good one and hopefully
gave you a little bit of nostalgia this holiday season. Yeah,
feel that warm tingling. It's either a bladder infection or nostalgia. Uh,
let's see, since I said bladder infection, everybody, it's time
(38:49):
for listener man. Uh, this is a about bird poop. Hey, guys,
listen to the Olive Oil podcast and loved it very much.
Living in Italy, I use it every day. That's my
wonderful complexion and youthful looks. I want to tell you
about a problem though, that we haven't rome every year
and directly caused by olives. Every winter, the city center
(39:11):
is home to millions of migrating starlings who spend their
days out of the local countryside, eating 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 like to avoid being pooed on.
The city gets covered in the stuff. And he sent
(39:32):
me a video and of these cars parked on the
street and it's literally looks like it was painted with
bird poop, completely solid every square inch. That's gotta be
bad for the paint. And yeah, it's really bad. H
He said, what what has this got to do with
olive oil? While the olive stones may not come out
of the starling birds bottoms, but the olive oil infuse
(39:56):
greasy pood does, and it makes driving along the roads
almost some possible. I've fallen off my scooter twice in
the past few years. Oh my god because of this,
So I guess it's it's slippery oily poop. Oh my god.
And that is from James in Room. Wow. Thanks James.
That emails kind of petered out at the end there. Yeah,
I was expecting a big finish, just oily poop. All right, Well,
(40:18):
thanks regardless, and stay stay safe on your scooter there, James,
he said, people use umbrellas and hats off to you
living in Rome. Have you been around? Sure? When I went,
I was like I could live here. Pretty great, I
told Jimmie. She's like, maybe it's lovely city. It really
is old world charm cats. What's what else? Wine food,
(40:38):
beautiful people and seeing men and women at every turn
that looked like runway models and they were just regular
newspaper boys. Well, the fact that they do like a
little twirl every once in war as they were walking
really kind of sold it too. Yeah, and go challab bed. Wow,
let's turn out weird. Um. If you want to get
(41:01):
in touch with us, you can go on to stuff
you should know dot com and hit us up through
our social links. You can go to the Josh Clarkway
dot com, or you can just send us a good
old fashioned email to stuff podcast how stuff Works dot
com for more on this and thousands of other topics.
(41:21):
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