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

111–120 of 213 posts

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

#111

Post by [deleted] »

spdustin wrote: post #66
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 played combat ... With my mother . The day we got our 2600. It was accessible, simple, and as a child, made me see my mom in a whole new light. I'm 40 now, but feel like a little boy realizing that his mom is fun whenever I see that game come up. Thanks for the memory :)

[deleted]

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

#112

Post by yomly »

nickpsecurity wrote: post #64

No, the man who made the worst video game in history was Hideo Kojima with Metal Gear Solid 2. Hardcore fans of prior game(s) felt a combination of let down, shock, and anger at the details. Imagine my surprise when I find out it very well could've been an ingenius plot to screw with the players. As others noted, the games overall plot against the protagonist was what he was doing to the players. Start here on a nice…

Ironically, after the revamp (pun...?) they gave him in MGS4, Raiden turned out to be a hit and they went on to make MGRising. There were fans who were sad you couldn't play as Raiden in MGS4 - talk about ultimate troll: replace a main character with someone who went on to be universally hated. Bash that character in the next game (MGS3) then make him awesome but unplayable in MGS4. (though they later introduced him to MGO)

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

#113

Post by SeanDav »

m-i-l wrote: post #102
SeanDav wrote: post #98

Talk 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…

It is not the loss for 1 game that is important here, but the decision making and approach that Atari took for this game and probably elsewhere as well. If Atari were making strange decisions here, they were likely doing it elsewhere, ultimately leading to their downfall.

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

#114

Post by harel »

To be fair, people have made worst games in recent times. The fact we are hanging on to ET as The Worst of all, is a bit unjust. If someone can screw up a game with today's technology they deserve the title even more than a game created in 5 weeks on very limited tech.

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

#116

Post by alblue »

There was an interesting write up in 2013 of someone who reverse engineered the game to develop a fix for the main flaws in the gameplay:

http://hackaday.com/2013/04/06/fixing-the-worst-video-game-e...

It's quite an interesting read and exposes some of the concerns that must have been present in designing games for incredibly limited memory at the time, including where to put the patched instructions.

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

#117

Post by detaro »

pmarreck wrote: post #75
Patrick_Devine wrote: post #48

Custer'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?

Wikipedia claims 80,000 sold copies...

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

#118

Post by scholia »

aleem wrote: post #91
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/

Psychotherapy must be up his alley, he seems to have come to terms with it quite well and taken it with a sense of humor. An initial run of 4 million copies is a lot of pressure on a single developer, the sort that can make you a legend or a catastrophe. I wonder if release management was considered to allow for bug fixes in subsequent production runs or phased production runs with hedged risk. Probably adding to the…

He sounds like a cool guy. He did an interview on Soundcast /r/retrogaming Podcast Episode 05: Howard Scott Warshaw Talks Programming And Psychology https://soundcloud.com/retrogamingreddit/rretrogaming-podcas...

There was a precursor to the BBC story in Playboy last September: The Guy Who Made the ‘Worst Game Ever’ Has Nothing to Apologize For http://www.playboy.com/articles/the-guy-who-made-the-worst-g...

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

#119

Post by makomk »

hartpuff wrote: post #79
moonshinefe wrote: post #59

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 mill…

> 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.

In some ways it was probably easier to write a game solo than it is now, because expectations were lower and there were such tight limits on what was technically possible. These days people expect high-quality graphics, music and sound effects as well as good gameplay, and they expect much bigger games too. I'm not sure anyone's managed to develop a commercially-successful game solo, and even developing most of one solo requires years of work and a wide set of skills.

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

#120

Post by purpled_haze »

moonshinefe wrote: post #59

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 mill…

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

Yes, the real problem is that they expected something comparable in quality to his previous games with less time to develop it. He did agree to it, though. Watch "Atari: Game Over" and you'll be able to tell from interviews with him that he held a lot of guilt about it- for years.

The fact is that he was one of the best game developers in history that accepted a job that he couldn't do without making sacrifices that killed the game. He shouldn't take credit for killing Atari though. They ended up being split focused on computers (that did fairly well but were competing against giants) and consoles. And they messed up by releasing both the 5200, which was a bomb partially due to its controllers, and the 7800, which came too late. Even if Atari had done everything right, it would have been really difficult to compete with Nintendo.

I still love Atari, though. The NES was great, but the 2600, for its time, was the best thing that ever happened in the home gaming industry. It was the first proof that a home gaming console could be a staple to a first-world kid's life.

Post reply on HN