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

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

#121

Post by andrewingram »

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...

Similar trick was used a couple of years later in Revs on the BBC Micro: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revs_(video_game)

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

#122

Post by asgfoi »

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.

You seem to be unaware of Ludum dare and similar challenges where (literally) thousands of games are created over the weekend that could easily compete with games made in the 80's.

Skill is still here, it is just muted by the modern media. Back then a any game release was huge news, today such games are made all the time every day and don't even get noticed.

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

#123

Post by boldboy »

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…

Wikipedia says the programmer was offered $200K + a Hawaiian vacation. It doesn't say what he actually negotiated or received.

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

#124

Post by hartpuff »

asgfoi wrote: post #122
hartpuff wrote: post #79

Earlier 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.

You seem to be unaware of Ludum dare and similar challenges where (literally) thousands of games are created over the weekend that could easily compete with games made in the 80's. Skill is still here, it is just muted by the modern media. Back then a any game release was huge news, today such games are made all the time every day and don't even get noticed.

I really don't know why you take what was an entirely positive comment, in praise of programming and programmers in the early 80s, and try to turn it into a negative, pointless, opinion-based pissing contest about which era was 'better'.

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

#125

Post by Nutmog »

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!

In fairness, what else could they have done, given the time constraints? They even hired support staff to make sure he got fed! They surely didn't have source control or other systems to make it safe/easy for multiple programmers to work on it together. I imagine the code is some monolithic thing full of complicated Atari hacks that's best managed by being all together in one person'd mind.

Perhaps they could have made two games in parallel so if one failed, they'd still have a spare.

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

#126

Post by TheAndruu »

This guy's job is what originally attracted me to software engineering... the idea you could be so good and important to a company that they just pay you to pump out something awesome and let you do it. Granted this focuses on a failure, but he had many successes and the failure is Atari's fault for pushing an impossible deadline.

Of course times have changed and this isn't a practical scenario anymore, and likely for good reason. But it still reminds me of how a simple DOS game that a man could do on his own was state of the art. Sure there's the odd app like Flappy Bird that goes viral and garners success, but that's the luck of the lottery, really. It's different from back then.

I miss that simplicity.

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

#127

Post by Nutmog »

hartpuff wrote: post #124
asgfoi wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You seem to be unaware of Ludum dare and similar challenges where (literally) thousands of games are created over the weekend that could easily compete with games made in the 80's. Skill is still here, it is just muted by the modern media. Back then a any game release was huge news, today such games are made all the time every day and don't even get noticed.

I really don't know why you take what was an entirely positive comment, in praise of programming and programmers in the early 80s, and try to turn it into a negative, pointless, opinion-based pissing contest about which era was 'better'.

If the early 80's was good, then something else must be bad. Perhaps you meant it was good compared to what happened before, or compared to what it would have been if people didn't make games. But a reasonable guess is good compared to today, which is an implicitly negative comment about today's programmers. I think the reply was quite reasonable - it doesn't make sense to glorify the past when the present has massively more of what was good about the past.

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

#128

Post by to3m »

david-given wrote: post #104
Chattered wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

The slow motion thing can be found in BEEBUG, Volume 2 No. 6, p31: http://8bs.com/beebugmags.htm

It does overload the system with interrupts, by making the (normally 100Hz) timer interrupt that the OS uses occur a lot more frequently.

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

#129

Post by cornholio »

Nutmog wrote: post #125
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!

In fairness, what else could they have done, given the time constraints? They even hired support staff to make sure he got fed! They surely didn't have source control or other systems to make it safe/easy for multiple programmers to work on it together. I imagine the code is some monolithic thing full of complicated Atari hacks that's best managed by being all together in one person'd mind. Perhaps they could have ma…

Instead of force feeding the genius, how about giving him a competent team of 10 average programmers, and 15 testers / players ? This way, the genius if free to imagine great games, not fiddle with screenbuffer bits and lose all contact with reality.

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

#130

Post by kalleboo »

Nutmog wrote: post #125
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!

In fairness, what else could they have done, given the time constraints? They even hired support staff to make sure he got fed! They surely didn't have source control or other systems to make it safe/easy for multiple programmers to work on it together. I imagine the code is some monolithic thing full of complicated Atari hacks that's best managed by being all together in one person'd mind. Perhaps they could have ma…

I'm genuinely curious about this, since I wasn't around in those days.

For a game being implemented (and probably having design changes on the fly as problems crop up since there was no time for a design phase) in assembly, with instruction- and register-level hacks to save the 128 bytes of memory, with no source control aside from sneaker net, how many developers can reasonably work on it at the same time? 1? 2? I mean at that level don't you need to hold the whole code and memory map in your head? Each change can have huge repercussions.

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