Why 'E.T.' Was Called the 'Worst Video Game of All Time'
Howard Scott Warshaw had five weeks to design E.T. The Extra Terrestrial, Atari's Christmas-anticipating response to the 1982 Steven Spielberg film. The goal: develop the game by September to have on shelves by December. Most game development required eight months.
Warshaw was interviewed for the Netflix's new docuseries, High Score, which tells the story of early video game development, beginning with Tomohiro Nishikado's Space Invaders.
The former game designer explained that innovation, saying, "We're taking the TV, which has been a traditionally passive medium, and turning it into an active medium."
Unfortunately for Warshaw, and as he admits, his lasting contribution comes in the form of infamy: a video game that hit shelves at the height of the early video game boom and almost caused "game over."
Why did Atari's E.T. game fail?
Initial users found the gameplay mechanisms frustrating. Early reviews criticized the game, hurting successive release sales. (So many copies of E.T. went unsold that Atari began burying cartridges in a landfill.)
The game came to represent the video game industry's low-quality, cash-grabbing market strategies, adopting games based on successful movies and then rushing them through development. With too many games and consoles, the video game industry, with a peak revenue of $3.2 billion, saw a 97 percent (97 percent!) drop in revenue in 1983.
The so called "Atari shock" shifted market dominance to Japan, where there hadn't been a crash. The next company on the scene, and what would help the industry slowly recover, you can probably guess: Nintendo.
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