Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The man who made 'the worst video game in history'

bbc.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 213 posts

Re: The man who made 'the worst video game in history'

#51

Post by jonathankoren »

freditup wrote: post #2

A couple of comments based off of the first ET poster/ad in the article: * Atari games like this cost $40? That seems expensive! * Why did Pennsylvania residents have to call a different number? * Funny that a point of advertising was getting the game before everyone else. It reminds you that these were real games people wanted and not just nostalgic blasts, how I view them now. (Link to poster: http://ichef.bbci.co.…

Yup. My grandmother bought me it for christmas, no doubt full retail. It was inordinately expensive. It would be inordinately expensive today with a retail cost of $100 inflation adjusted dollars.

Best 2600 title screen ever though. No one ever mentions that about the game though.

Re: The man who made 'the worst video game in history'

#52

Post by drfuchs »

brandonmenc wrote: post #11
freditup wrote: post #2

A couple of comments based off of the first ET poster/ad in the article: * Atari games like this cost $40? That seems expensive! * Why did Pennsylvania residents have to call a different number? * Funny that a point of advertising was getting the game before everyone else. It reminds you that these were real games people wanted and not just nostalgic blasts, how I view them now. (Link to poster: http://ichef.bbci.co.…

> Why did Pennsylvania residents have to call a different number? I remember seeing this sort of thing a lot back then. Probably a sales tax thing - maybe the fulfillment center was in PA.

Back in the day, AT&T had technological issues that meant that there were separate "in-state" and "out-of-state" 800 numbers, so every national advertisement always mentioned a main 800 number, plus a different one for the one particular state where they actually had their call center. Single-state institutions sometimes only had in-state 800 numbers, so, for instance, you literally couldn't call California's Franchise Tax Board (the state's IRS-like tax authority) from outside of California (as I learned from bitter experience). Look up "InWATS" in Wikipedia for more details. Now, get off my lawn.

Re: The man who made 'the worst video game in history'

#53

Post by jhallenworld »

VonGuard wrote: post #42
knieveltech wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. I played the hell out of that game when it came out. I mean, who in their right mind would rank "Skiing" or "Combat" higher that this game?

Combat is, frankly, one of the greatest videogames ever made. Easily in the top ten. If you don't understand why, you've missed out on a great deal of history. The Atari 2600 was designed, almost exclusively, to play Combat. It has the ability to animate only 3 sprites: player 1, player 2 and "ball". There are many hacks to get around this, but we're talking about the pre-release period of the Atari Video Computer Sy…

I remember playing combat at Sears in the mall when I was kid. The most recent game like this was Guitar Hero.

Re: The man who made 'the worst video game in history'

#54

Post by melling »

VonGuard wrote: post #44
mrspeaker wrote: post #3

Anyone who is in to Atari 2600 knows that ET is verrrrrry far from the worst game available on that system! And it's so sad making it a great game would have take so few tweaks! http://www.neocomputer.org/projects/et/

Howard is a brilliant programmer. In Yar's Revenge, that fuzzy barrier on the left side of the screen is the graphics code from the program literally reading the game's own code as graphical data, thus creating the crazy static pattern of chaotic colors. Talk about a cool and space saving hack! https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/8/85/A2600_Yars_Re...

The Atari: Game Over movie is on Netflix. It'll give people more insight. The guy was an exceptional programmer and good game designer who was dealt a death march with a hard deadline.

Re: The man who made 'the worst video game in history'

#55

Post by nkozyra »

The narrative has always been about hubris, to some degree, but shifting the blame to E.T. was always a distraction from some of the bigger lessons.

Atari had reached a point where it thought it could print money in perpetuity regardless of what it did. And that was true for a while. But you can't screw customers over forever. Eventually they bail, and that's what the big "video game collapse" was all about. Poor quality products being pushed at absurd prices. The lesson here is for startups with lock-in or few competitors: it doesn't take much to have it all fall apart. Make the best product you can.

I mostly marvel at the fact that this was done in 5 weeks. That's absurd. And while it was, objectively, a "bad" video game, there were far worse. They just weren't as high-profile. The second lesson is for developers: always appreciate the fact that you live in a world where patches, releases, and iterative development allow you to retroactively fix the things you had to do in a hurry.

Re: The man who made 'the worst video game in history'

#56

Post by jhallenworld »

hanasu wrote: post #45
VonGuard wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Combat is, frankly, one of the greatest videogames ever made. Easily in the top ten. If you don't understand why, you've missed out on a great deal of history. The Atari 2600 was designed, almost exclusively, to play Combat. It has the ability to animate only 3 sprites: player 1, player 2 and "ball". There are many hacks to get around this, but we're talking about the pre-release period of the Atari Video Computer Sy…

For my money, in terms of accessibility and fun while having a steep but manageable difficulty curve - the 2600 game that stands up the best today is Kaboom. It can induce an almost zen-like state that is very hard to capture in gaming.

River Raid was similar, but Kaboom was nice because it used the knobs.

Re: The man who made 'the worst video game in history'

#57

Post by protomyth »

nice_byte wrote: post #26
kintamanimatt wrote: post #9

> "It's awesome to be credited with single-handedly bringing down a billion-dollar industry with eight kilobytes of code. But the truth is a little more complex." Eight kilobytes?! How do you build anything meaningful, especially a game, with just eight kilobytes?

8K is 8192 bytes. Atari runs on MOS 6502, for which each instruction takes up between 1 and 3 bytes. This gives you about 2K instructions, give or take (you probably want to make space for some data). Given how simple most atari games are, I think you could reasonably get away with 1-1.5K instructions for code if you hand-write the assembly and optimize for size.

Actually, the Atari 2600 runs a 6507 which is a cheaper version of a 6502. Unlike the 64kbytes a 6502 can address, the 6507 is limited to 8kbytes. Worse, the cartridge design limited you to 4kbytes unless you bank switched.

But that was storages, which was huge compared to the 128 bytes of RAM. Further complications happen because you need to time things with the scan lines of the display.

Re: The man who made 'the worst video game in history'

#58

Post by protomyth »

jhallenworld wrote: post #53
VonGuard wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Combat is, frankly, one of the greatest videogames ever made. Easily in the top ten. If you don't understand why, you've missed out on a great deal of history. The Atari 2600 was designed, almost exclusively, to play Combat. It has the ability to animate only 3 sprites: player 1, player 2 and "ball". There are many hacks to get around this, but we're talking about the pre-release period of the Atari Video Computer Sy…

I remember playing combat at Sears in the mall when I was kid. The most recent game like this was Guitar Hero.

4 player Warlords was a favorite in the dorm during college. Many a night was spent on that game.

Re: The man who made 'the worst video game in history'

#59

Post by moonshinefe »

It's a cool story. I'm actually really amazed he managed to make a game that sold 1.5 million copies (@ $40 per unit that'd be $60mil) in _5 weeks_. As the sole programmer. In an era when programming was far more tricky and low level.

It isn't his fault the managers were being unreasonable in the timeline, and the company grossly over-manufactured the cartridges.

If I made something in just 5 weeks that sold 1.5 million units, I'd be proud of myself! hehe, and as others have pointed out, it isn't actually the worst game.

Post reply on HN