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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'

#201

Post by Swannie »

baldfat wrote: post #175
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!

Overproduction was insane. I believe that they produced 5 million ET games. They thought it would sell more console units and at a sell rate of ET at 100%.

Watch the documentary. There was a reason for this, and it had to do with the "golden age" of gaming coming to an end...

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

#202

Post by Grishnakh »

CM30 wrote: post #196
Grishnakh wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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), leg…

You've got a point. Maybe the worst-of list should be limited to games that achieved a certain amount of sales, to keep the obscure stuff out. Also, personally I'd be more interested in worst-of lists if they were restricted to certain years, or perhaps even certain platforms. For instance, a worst-of-NES-games list would be much more interesting than a list that comprised all video games ever, since I stopped paying attention to games after the mid-1990s. Or a list of worst-of arcade games from the 80s.

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

#203

Post by a_bonobo »

Sharlin wrote: post #193
softawre wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

I tried running it back then - the textures, the music, the models, all of the content is generated "from scratch", which is why it takes forever to start, it has to create all content first

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

#204

Post by ASalazarMX »

cgriswald wrote: post #31
knieveltech wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. I played the hell out of that game when it came out. I mean, who in their right mind would rank "Skiing" or "Combat" higher that this game?

I would definitely rank Combat higher. I was quite young when ET came out. I loved ET, but the game was basically impossible for me to play because I couldn't get out of the pits very well; which was exacerbated by falling into them when I shouldn't have. In contrast, Combat was easy to figure out and play and I could play it with loved ones.

I'd suppose most kids learned quickly that you could float mid fall and bypass the energy penalty. Even if you fell by accident, it cost practically nothing.

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

#205

Post by CM30 »

consto wrote: post #151
Jtsummers wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What precedent was that?

My best guess is how the NES was marketed, to boys. Here's a link to an Adam ruins everything video about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i08CVkBxvBM Did I guess correctly? Sidenote, somehow googling "youtube video nintendo marketing video game crash analysis boys" had the video I was thinking of at the very top.

I suspect he may have meant the 'requiring all games to be licensed' thing, since a lot of older systems and home computers let pretty much anyone make games if they figured out how to get them working.

Or maybe the centralised content censorship thing. Nintendo waa pretty infamous for that in the olden days, and it may have been the inspiration for sometimes rather insane guidelines for modern day app stores and the likes.

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

#206

Post by vidarh »

SeanDav wrote: post #133
Nutmog wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It does not make any kind of business sense to spend that much money and rely on 1 programmer and such a short project time. What happened if the programmer fell down some stairs or got hit by a bus? Normal project time for a game was 6 to 8 months, they gave this guy 5 weeks and no team. Obviously the programmer should never have agreed to the time frame, but he was 24 and at that age nothing seems impossible. This…

This was clearly a project driven by externals. Christmas is a fixed time, and ET was going to hit the cinemas at a fixed time. If the deal is in place with 5 weeks to go to get things into stores for Christmas, then 5 weeks is what you have.

And adding more than one programmer to a 5 week project for a platform like that would slow things down, not speed it up.

There's lots of things they probably could have done better, such as having testers on standby, but the project timeline and putting one programmer on it doesn't seem like something they realistically could have done differently.

Taking the risks they did on it in terms of volume and marketing costs, is a different matter. The poor planning that led to those timelines, likewise.

> This was not his fault, but shows a shocking lack of planning and communication within Atari at that time.

Here we are in total agreement.

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

#207

Post by tripzilch »

kalleboo wrote: post #130
Nutmog wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 m…

Hm, yes maybe two. This type of project actually sounds like a pretty good fit for pair programming.

The assembly code is too small and tightly knotted to be able to usefully work on different parts simultaneously, but coding as a pair (given that it's an intelligent person you can stand for 5 weeks of intense) seems to me it would have mostly benefits?

Maybe I'm overlooking something obvious, but isn't the main disadvantage of pair-programming that it's not quite as good as two programmers working in parallel (and thus wasteful of workforce)?

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

#208

Post by aswanson »

vidarh wrote: post #206
SeanDav wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It does not make any kind of business sense to spend that much money and rely on 1 programmer and such a short project time. What happened if the programmer fell down some stairs or got hit by a bus? Normal project time for a game was 6 to 8 months, they gave this guy 5 weeks and no team. Obviously the programmer should never have agreed to the time frame, but he was 24 and at that age nothing seems impossible. This…

This was clearly a project driven by externals. Christmas is a fixed time, and ET was going to hit the cinemas at a fixed time. If the deal is in place with 5 weeks to go to get things into stores for Christmas, then 5 weeks is what you have. And adding more than one programmer to a 5 week project for a platform like that would slow things down, not speed it up. There's lots of things they probably could have done be…

They could have had the vision to lock down the rights earlier. Raiders of the Lost Ark was already a hit. It wouldn't take much to conjecture an alien movie by the same director would hit.

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

#209

Post by gravypod »

ganeshkrishnan wrote: post #197
talmand wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Someone could offer me an unpaid summer internship and I'd probably take it.

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

#210

Post by ido »

gravypod wrote: post #209
ganeshkrishnan wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Someone could offer me an unpaid summer internship and I'd probably take it.

I know it's a joke, but don't take unpaid internships - you're devaluing your own (and everyone else's) job.
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