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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'

#191

Post by DanBC »

CM30 wrote: post #190

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…

Burnout for DS was laughably bad.

Rise of the Robots was extensively hyped, but was a terrible game. (Winnable by mashing A.)

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

#192

Post by pmarreck »

detaro wrote: post #117
pmarreck wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

damn, i should have checked.

Found out there are some other games in that genre, some quite a bit more shocking. :O

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

#193

Post by Sharlin »

softawre wrote: post #159
a_bonobo wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have a look at .kkrieger - a beautiful 3D ego shooter from 2004 in 96 kilobytes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.kkrieger Screenshot: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.kkrieger#/media/File:Kkrieger...

WOW... Uh..is 96k the whole thing? Is this using some framework which provides something else, outside of standard OS stuff?

DirectX, probably, but arguably that counts as "standard OS stuff".

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

#194

Post by Grishnakh »

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…

With this guy clearly being such a talented programmer, it's too bad he hasn't taken up some FOSS game programming as a hobby, just to "scratch the itch". It'd be great to have a really great old-school side-scroller; I wonder what he could come up with using more modern tools if he really wanted to make a new game. And this time, he could take as much time as he needs.

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

#195

Post by Grishnakh »

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 would think that a "worst [item] ever" list would generally be limited in sensible ways, such as with a video game, having the requirement that it actually be commercially sold. Obviously, any amateur could make some crappy little game and give it to his friends and no one would ever know or care about it; when we think of "the worst video game in history", we're going to naturally assume that it's a commercially-sold game. So some Mario ROM hack would not qualify, IMO. Even better would be to limit it to games with some decent amount of distribution.

Same goes for movies: a "worst movies" list would probably be limited to movies that actually made theatrical release, not someone's home movie, or even a straight-to-DVD movie.

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

#196

Post by CM30 »

Grishnakh wrote: post #195
CM30 wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 would think that a "worst [item] ever" list would generally be limited in sensible ways, such as with a video game, having the requirement that it actually be commercially sold. Obviously, any amateur could make some crappy little game and give it to his friends and no one would ever know or care about it; when we think of "the worst video game in history", we're going to naturally assume that it's a commercially-s…

To be fair, that doesn't actually limit the number all that much:

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Horrible/VideoGameGene...

And much of:

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Horrible/VideoGamesOth...

And everything on Hardcore Gaming 101's Weekly Kusoge series here:

http://www.hardcoregaming101.net/kusoge/kusoge.htm

There's also the fact a lot of games are distributed pretty well (and sometimes even sold), legality be damned. Is there any more legitimacy to a bad (and likely illegal) app store game featuring characters from Mario or Pokemon than a game mod or fan game featuring the same thing? People sold Doom Wad collections in boxes in shops at one point, does that count?

Even assuming only legal retail games, there's an awful lot of somewhat obscure shovelware that could fill up an entire (very long) list. Like the tons of PS2 and Wii shovelware (the latter's games were often ported from the former) by companies like Data Design and Phoenix Games.

Like:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UF8QzQp57oI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pk8qbSISQI4

A worst game ever list would be incredibly hard to make to any decent degree, simply because you have so many possible choices to include on it, especially if you go looking outside the most popular titles.

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

#197

Post by ganeshkrishnan »

talmand wrote: post #180
ido wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just for scale: $200k 1982-dollars is $491k in 2016-dollars. So he was probably quite motivated to get it done.

Someone could offer me $200k in today's dollars for a five week project and I would gladly take it.

Someone could offer me a vacation in Hawaii for five week project and I would gladly take it

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

#198

Post by gozur88 »

Hah! The worst? Penn & Teller's Desert Bus is the worst. By design. From the wiki page:

>The bus contains no passengers, there is little scenery aside from an occasional rock or bus stop sign, and there is no traffic. The road between Tucson and Las Vegas is completely straight. The bus veers to the right slightly, and thus requires the player's constant attention. If the bus veers off the road it will stall and be towed back to Tucson, also in real time. If the player makes it to Las Vegas, one point is scored. The player then has the option to make the return trip to Tucson for another point, a decision which must be made in a few seconds or the game ends. Players may continue to make trips and score points as long as their endurance lasts. Although the landscape never changes, an insect splats on the windshield about five hours through the first trip, and on the return trip the light fades, with differences at dusk, and later a pitch black road where the player is guided only with headlights

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

#199

Post by mschaef »

philsnow wrote: post #174
mschaef wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 don't know from first-hand experience, but my impression has always been that the main game loop would be virtually impossible to develop as a team effort. To give a bit of back story for those that are unaware, the 2600 di…

Suddenly "Fantastic Voyage" [0] makes more sense: when I was a kid I thought it would work better as a side-scroller rather than an "up-scroller", because there was wasted space on the sides, and you'd have more time to react / could see farther ahead. It of course never occurred to me that by having so many scan lines being the same, they could save a lot of work. [0] http://atariage.com/forums/uploads/monthly_03_20…

If you want to be amazed, check out Star Castle:

http://starcastle2600.blogspot.com/p/star-castle-2600-story....

This is a recent (2011) Atari game that renders several concentric rotating circles, each with a gap. It's the game that Howard Scott Warshaw (the E.T. guy) decided couldn't be done on the 2600. Knowing what I know about the 2600 graphics subsystem, I can see why he came to that conclusion.

Of course, Warshaw then Star Castle as inspiration for Yar's Revenge. This game was widely considered to be excellent... leading to Warshaw having the credibility to be asked to do E.T.

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

#200

Post by Swannie »

alecsmart1 wrote: post #179

There is a very nice documentary if anyone wants to hear from the actual game developer - http://m.imdb.com/title/tt3715406/ It's on Netflix as well.

I enjoyed this a lot. Especially the bits from the developer! And the comments about how technically unique the game was at the time.
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