"E.T. was the death of Atari." If you believe the urban legend, then that game, based on Steven Spielberg's blockbuster movie, is the sole reason Atari flopped in the 1980s. As the myth went, the company, allegedly so ashamed of the game, decided to bury millions of unsold cartridges in the New Mexico desert and cover them with a slab of concrete; a curious tale we now know to be true. Like the oral histories passed down from one generation to the next, though, certain details of the story behind E.T.'s genesis and Atari's demise have been lost along the way, and mild inaccuracies have become fact. To find out what really happened more than 30 years ago, we went straight to the man who made the game: former Atari developer Howard Scott Warshaw. This is his story.
THE BURLINGTON FACTOR
By the time he'd been approached to take on the E.T. project in the summer of 1982, Warshaw had been with Atari for some 17 months. During which time, he'd already developed and shipped two games, Yars' Revenge and Raiders of the Lost Ark, almost singlehandedly. The E.T. team consisted of only three people: a graphics designer, a composer for the game's opening song and Warshaw himself. "I did everything else in the game: all the design, all the programming, all the sweating. That was all me," he said laughing.
Three decades ago, that was common. Today? Even among the nimble indie scene, that's mostly an exception. As Warshaw explained, under the leadership of CEO Ray Kassar, Atari underwent a transformation from being a technically innovative company to one focused on licensed games. "Once you had that property tie-in, that's all there was to a game," he said. "All you needed was something to stick in a box and sell. Development got shorted."
Smart Voip: James Potter
