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

bbc.com

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

#91

Post by aleem »

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 pressure is the frustration that immediately following the production run you find a one-liner bug fix but you are 4 million copies too late.

Interestingly, Pac-Man also had millions of unsold cartridges left over. This candid Q&A talks more about the failure of ET, the frustrations and challenges:

http://www.denofgeek.com/games/howard-scott-warshaw/33708/ho...

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

#93

Post by ENTP »

moonshinefe wrote: post #81
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.

That sounds pretty interesting. Do you know if anyone has written on that history yet? It sounds like it'd make a great article in one of the tech magazines.

If you're interested in that era, I recommend watching "From Bedrooms To Billions" http://www.frombedroomstobillions.com/

I grew up in this era, first programming on an Aquarius. It was quite the hobby in the UK.

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

#95

Post by maaku »

krapp wrote: post #39
pmiller2 wrote: post #30

Let's not forget, the same person also created the best-selling original title for the Atari 2600: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yars'_Revenge

...or that his biggest failure still sold over a million copies.

We can all aspire to fail that badly!

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

#97

Post by Chattered »

Moru wrote: post #83
bottled_poe wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I accidentally produced a similar effect while working on my voxel game engine: https://twitter.com/jmhobrien/status/624133887036424193 Basically, just deferenced a pointer to OpenGL memory that I shouldn't have...

I think all lower-level programmers have done similar mistakes at one time or other. I managed to do it several times while learning assembler on the Atari ST/STE/Falcon :-)

Most BBC Micro games loaded like this: game data would spill into memory mapped video and then dealt with after.

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

#99

Post by moonshinefe »

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!

Hahaha, yeah, when you put it that way, it's pretty ridiculous.
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