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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'

#181

Post by jeffwass »

kenjackson wrote: post #178
Kapow wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone forgets about Pac-Man, that was another huge contributor to the crash. The 2600 couldn't handle 5 sprites, so they used one sprite for all the ghosts and showed one per frame. The flickering ghosts against the bright blue background was physically painful to watch. They estimated 10 million consoles were actively being played, so they made 12 million copies. They sold 7 million, and that's before returns. 7…

Wasn't it the Atari version of Pac Man with "wafers"? Nothing beats game programming in the 80s. IMO, the golden age of programming.

Are you talking about the bonus 'fruit'?

That was he one thing I complained most about with the Atari PacMan. I don't think I ever noticed the flickering ghosts specifically, or even how different the bird layout was vs the arcade version.

But instead of a cherry/orange/pretzel that moved around the screen, the bonus fruit was a dark-brown square inside another slightly-larger light-brown square. It didn't move, it didn't look good, and as a kid I felt like this was the classic example of either the game designers cutting corners or limitations of the system.

I used to joke about this specific example as one of the key reasons to move on to better consoles when they came around.

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

#182

Post by GFK_of_xmaspast »

makomk wrote: post #119
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.

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 s…

Undertale was essentially solo.

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

#184

Post by kabdib »

abecedarius wrote: post #160
kabdib wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Atari didn't have source control. AFAIK, it just didn't exist. The VAX or DG mini that most people used for cross-development was probably being backed up at least weekly, but if you accidentally wiped out something important, like all of your source code, you were likely hosed. On a project like this, adding people to it will make it later. The 2600 is a different beast from something that you can divide-and-conquer…

I used a VAX in college, and the DEC operating system had built-in support for file versions. E.g., something like: when you write to a file, that creates FILENAME.EXT.5 where before there were FILENAME.EXT.1 through 4. Compared to Unix it was harder to accidentally wipe your data. (It's been so long, and I didn't use it so much, that I won't opine on how much harder. But the Unix Haters Handbook ragged on Unix quite…

File versioning was nice, but it cluttered stuff up. People still lost files. I know that I did. Fortunately, since I was an admin, I had arranged for daily incrementals, and didn't lose anything. :-)

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

#185

Post by jarcane »

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…

E.T. was basically the "straw on the camel's back" moment for consumers. It wasn't just that the game itself was an overhyped blunder, but that by the time it came out, the market was already flooded with truly awful third-party games for the system. Seeing the manufacturer themselves turn out such an underdeveloped hunk of garbage (and E.T. is truly bad, even for a system with such terrible games) basically torpedoed what was left of consumer confidence.

At the same time, home computers were starting to nip at the game consoles' heels. Computers weren't just "toys," you could sell them on their practical applications as well. It was easier for little Timmy to get his parents to buy him a computer "for school" and then sneak games on it anyway, than just plonking down for a piece of hardware that only played inferior crap like E.T.

E.T. was the flashpoint, but the crash of 1984 had a lot of causes.

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

#186

Post by kabdib »

kabdib wrote: post #153
cornholio wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well, adding people to a project that's already impossibly late will make it even later. Atari had plenty of people imagining great games; they didn't ship much content that was compelling, and were generally held in contempt by the "real" game programmers (e.g., the folks in the coin-op division). Also, the 2600 has no screen buffer. It's all real-time raster generation with the CPU in cycle-by-cycle lockstep with t…

One fine day someone in the Home Computer marketing division decided that "Games involving shooting things are bad, we're going to stop making them."

Six months later there were massive purges in marketing.

Not soon enough, IMHO. I might respect a moral position, but mayyyybe you should have a business plan to back up your moral stance (if that plan is "We're going to go out of business because our resolve is strong" then, okay, I'll respect that too -- but say it so we can at least have a discussion about your continued employment). The games that resulted from that decision were horrible and never even paid for their development.

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

#187

Post by GurnB »

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.

Fully agree. I would love to see a modern version (complete with control wheel) in HD with smooth frame rates. Still have found memories of sitting in front of an RCA XL-100 console tv with my eyes burning trying to catch all those bombs. Wish I would have sent in my score back in the day to get the Patch from Activision.

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

#188

Post by CM30 »

JacobAldridge wrote: post #49

To be described as 'the worst' in any genre on an international site does, of course, warrant a degree of scale that separates you from those who are, really, probably no better than you. The worst movie ever made probably doesn't have enough Rotten Tomato or IMDB reviews to be considered. I was once told I had hosted the "worst program on television"[1], but being community tv there were probably 100 people watching…

That's a good point about any list. Best game ever, worst game ever, hardest level/boss/game ever, you name it. The percentage of works or parts of works that ever become popular enough to get noticed is dwarfed by the (couple of hundred) times larger number that simply fall off the radar or never get any attention in the first place.

I mean, what's the hardest game ever made? Probably if you're really picky, some ultra obscure shoot em up or kaizo esque Mario ROM hack. But the average list will only name titles like Battletoads, Dark Souls and I Wanna Be the Guy, because those are the ones many people (including the authors) have actually heard of.

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

#189

Post by Nadya »

CM30 wrote: post #188
JacobAldridge wrote: post #49

To be described as 'the worst' in any genre on an international site does, of course, warrant a degree of scale that separates you from those who are, really, probably no better than you. The worst movie ever made probably doesn't have enough Rotten Tomato or IMDB reviews to be considered. I was once told I had hosted the "worst program on television"[1], but being community tv there were probably 100 people watching…

That's a good point about any list. Best game ever, worst game ever, hardest level/boss/game ever, you name it. The percentage of works or parts of works that ever become popular enough to get noticed is dwarfed by the (couple of hundred) times larger number that simply fall off the radar or never get any attention in the first place. I mean, what's the hardest game ever made? Probably if you're really picky, some ul…

>I mean, what's the hardest game ever made? Probably if you're really picky, some ultra obscure shoot em up or kaizo esque Mario ROM hack.

Probably some bullet hell game which requires pixel perfect movement. Such as: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nscP9QpXoFM

I'm 99% sure near the end there (the last minute or so, last phase of the boss) it is literally unbeatable without buying more lives and if this wasn't an arcade game that allowed purchasing new lives, I don't think it'd be beaten by anything short of a tool-assisted run.

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

#190

Post by CM30 »

Personally, while I'd say ET was a disaster in a lot of ways, I've always thought the talk of being the 'worst game ever' is just ridiculously overblown.

I mean, for the time it was moderately impressive on a technical level, and as dull as it ended up being, it wasn't really all that broken as far as bugs go.

No, if you want something a bit more worthy of the title, try Big Rigs (mentioned below), Action52, Superman 64 or Sonic 2006. Something that is literally broken beyond the point you can easily repair it, and which were a lot less impressive for the time they were released in.

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