So Atari spent $21,000,000 to buy the rights and $5,000,000 on marketing but having more than 1 developer on the project was too much...
The man who made 'the worst video game in history'
101–110 of 213 posts
Re: The man who made 'the worst video game in history'
#102Talk about screwed up priorities. Atari spent $21 million on ET video game rights, $5 million on an advertising campaign and gave 1 programmer, 5 weeks to deliver something that would justify that cost. No wonder they went bankrupt!
I wonder how much they paid the 1 programmer for the 5 weeks of development time. I'm sure nowhere near the $5m they spent on advertising or $21m on game rights.
Also, if they did indeed sell 1.5m copies at $40 per copy, that's $60m. Even allowing for large amounts of unsold stock that surely can't have been too far off covering costs, and can't have been the only reason for their subsequent $310m loss.
EDIT: Fair points about distributors margins, retailers margins, manufacturing costs etc. But even if they only saw $10m-$20m of the $60m in retails sales, that is still a reasonable amount, and mean their losses on that one game would only be in the millions or low 10s of millions, so there must have been additional reasons for the company's $310m loss.
Re: The man who made 'the worst video game in history'
#103Custer's Revenge has to be the worst Atari 2600 game ever created. Overt racism and sexism combine with bad game play in one rape-y package.
Except that it was never really distributed per se and mainly became available via illegal ROM downloading channels. So whatcha been up to?
I actually knew someone who had this piece of garbage. In rural mid-America. It sure as hell was distributed!
Re: The man who made 'the worst video game in history'
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think all lower-level programmers have done similar mistakes at one time or other. I managed to do it several times while learning assembler on the Atari ST/STE/Falcon :-)
Most BBC Micro games loaded like this: game data would spill into memory mapped video and then dealt with after.
The BBC Micro also allows you to change the address of the video framebuffer. A particularly neat trick was to remap it to 0x0000, so you get to see the OS workspace, stacks, program storage etc. You can watch the bits twiddle in realtime as you do things.
There's another neat hack which would cause the machine to run in slow motion. I don't know how it worked; I can't find any references now. Possibly it overloads the system with interrupts. But under its influence, clearing the screen would take several seconds. These two hacks combined beautifully, letting you see all the details of, e.g., Basic's heap management.
Re: The man who made 'the worst video game in history'
#105Talk about screwed up priorities. Atari spent $21 million on ET video game rights, $5 million on an advertising campaign and gave 1 programmer, 5 weeks to deliver something that would justify that cost. No wonder they went bankrupt!
I wonder how much they paid the 1 programmer for the 5 weeks of development time. I'm sure nowhere near the $5m they spent on advertising or $21m on game rights. Also, if they did indeed sell 1.5m copies at $40 per copy, that's $60m. Even allowing for large amounts of unsold stock that surely can't have been too far off covering costs, and can't have been the only reason for their subsequent $310m loss. EDIT: Fair po…
$40 would be the retail price, no? After retailer's margin and distributor's margin, maybe Atari got max $15 per cartridge. Making the whole debacle a money-losing affair.
Re: The man who made 'the worst video game in history'
#106Talk about screwed up priorities. Atari spent $21 million on ET video game rights, $5 million on an advertising campaign and gave 1 programmer, 5 weeks to deliver something that would justify that cost. No wonder they went bankrupt!
I wonder how much they paid the 1 programmer for the 5 weeks of development time. I'm sure nowhere near the $5m they spent on advertising or $21m on game rights. Also, if they did indeed sell 1.5m copies at $40 per copy, that's $60m. Even allowing for large amounts of unsold stock that surely can't have been too far off covering costs, and can't have been the only reason for their subsequent $310m loss. EDIT: Fair po…
That's $60 mil retail, not what Atari took, I'd be surprised if they hit breakeven since you need you factor in manufacturing costs and they likely took maybe a third of the retail price.
Re: The man who made 'the worst video game in history'
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wow. That's really expensive. Is it a 95% fun tax?
Where did you get 95% from? The normal new game price on Amazon seems to be $60. The Division and Far Cry Primal are both $60 for both systems. It's an 18% "fun tax".
It was just an observation that Ozzies seem to get screwed by both corporations and their own government these days.
95% I plucked out of my head, as an extreme percentual screwing value! :-)
Re: The man who made 'the worst video game in history'
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
> As the sole programmer. In an era when programming was far more tricky and low level. In the same era, early 80s, kids across the UK were single-handedly writing games packed into 1-16k, some of which (Manic Miner being a prime example) sold in their hundreds of thousands in the UK market alone. There was some pretty amazing programming skill going on back then.
That sounds pretty interesting. Do you know if anyone has written on that history yet? It sounds like it'd make a great article in one of the tech magazines.
It's behind you - the making of a computer game: http://bizzley.imbahost.com/ is great
There is also diaries for Making of Prince of Persia and Karatek. http://www.jordanmechner.com/backstage/journals/
Both highly recommended, I reread it three times already.
Re: The man who made 'the worst video game in history'
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
We played 4 player Warlords in our dorm at Ga Tech years after its era. There was a trick move for each castle and we abused the hell out of 'em. :-)
Re: The man who made 'the worst video game in history'
#110[deleted]