Dude's a legend! He did exceptionally great for the short amount of time they gave him, and he was only 1 person! If Atari didn't make such a freakishly high amount of cartridges, this would have never become the infamous story it is today.
@StormsparkPegasus
Жыл бұрын
They produced twice as many cartridges as there had been 2600's sold at that point, naively thinking that 1 game would double their install base overnight. That was not a smart business decision. Also, by 2600 standards it was a pretty good game, and sold pretty well. Just not enough to keep Atari from having to dump a ton of cartridges in a landfill. I tell anyone who says ET was a bad game, to make something better on that hardware. They won't be able to.
@UltimatePerfection
Жыл бұрын
@@StormsparkPegasus Supposedly drugs, especially psychodelics were really common to use at Atari, so that may account for some of the boneheaded decisions they've made. Also hindsight is 20/20, and this was one of the very first consoles with interchangeable cartridges, so there were not much precedent in regards to system sellers and such.
@jarvindriftwood
Жыл бұрын
The license fee they paid really raised the bar they had to clear too. The ridiculous amount of cartridges sounded like they gambled with a bad hand by going all in.
@MSAPtube
3 ай бұрын
@@UltimatePerfection it was typical "80s guy" shit if you ever saw that character on Futurama. Marketing and management ruining everything with impractical deadlines and then falling off a cliff. It was worse in America, but Japanese companies frequently misjudged the public as well.
@jimmyclaw9974
Жыл бұрын
Graphically, Saboteur has to be one of the best looking 2600 games I’ve ever seen. Weird that the boss is a flying phallus though.
@pojr
Жыл бұрын
Yeah I missed an opportunity for a good joke there.
@patsk8872
Жыл бұрын
E.T. is actually an incredible game for the ridiculous time constraints and how ambitious it was, especially for that antiquated system with only 128 bytes of RAM. How anyone could even code anything involved on that is unreal and I used to code on the Atari 8-bit computer. E.T.'s main problem was falling back into the pits especially when you exited on the top. If he had just managed to fix that I'd say the reception would have been a lot better.
@pinebarrenpatriot8289
Жыл бұрын
"Many consider E.T. the worst game ever". Not really. That myth was invented by some Millenial during the early days of youtube.
@WalkerRileyMC
Жыл бұрын
He was given a ridiculous timeline for E.T. Not his fault at all. Here's a bit of Warshaw's genius: He didn't have enough room to program in graphics for the neutral zone in Yar's Revenge...so what he did was he ran the actual game code through the graphics processor. You're seeing the actual game code visualized.
@FeralInferno
Жыл бұрын
Saboteur would've been a cool game had it been released. Cool that the Atari Age community finished it up and released it.
@pojr
Жыл бұрын
Yup. It was released on some of the Atari Flashback consoles too. Too bad it wasn't released during the 2600's original run, might have been a best seller.
@tobypupzz7112
Жыл бұрын
I love the Atari 2600 videos as the console was my introduction to video games 👍
@FeralInferno
Жыл бұрын
@@tobypupzz7112 a great era for the birth of console games! What was your go-to 2600 game?
@tobypupzz7112
Жыл бұрын
We had a big 2600 collection as the games were so cheap in the late 80's, I loved kangaroo, berserk, joust, venture and freeway 🕹 ms. Pacman was also great
@FeralInferno
Жыл бұрын
@@tobypupzz7112 Ms. Pac-Man & Joust were awesome ports of their arcade counterparts.
@jasonross6727
Жыл бұрын
Atari really shot Warshaw in the foot by limiting the development time for E.T. to 5 weeks, when normal development time for a game was anywhere from 5 to 8 months. Plus, he was working on the project alone, when most games were developed by a small team. If Atari hadn't insisted on a Christmas release and went for a summer one, they could have had a much better game. I wonder if anyone has contacted Warshaw to see if he'd be interested in finishing the development of E.T. the way he'd originally planned? There would be licensing issues for a release, but it would be interesting to see how the properly developed game might have turned out.
@revjim123
Жыл бұрын
Dude did an impossible job given his constraints
@jeremygregorio7472
Жыл бұрын
Bad video games didn't cause the crash. There was a massive recession. Retailers thought video games where a fas so when the recession hit they threw everything on discount and stopped ordering new games. The public still wanted games so they started buying directly from Atari. Eventually Nintendo came along
@TheTurnipKing
Жыл бұрын
The thing is the "crash" didn't really hit the home computer industry. Retailers don't throw things on clearance unless they're not selling. There was definately a business failing here. Atari manufacturered more Pac Man carts than there were 2600s to play it on!
@jeremygregorio7472
Жыл бұрын
@@TheTurnipKing so when the recession hit pretty much everything stopped selling. The difference was when the recession let-up retailers didn't go back to selling video games because they thought the fad over. As for computers William shatner said it best, why buy a video game? Retailers thought that wouldn't spend money on video games because the computer was only about a hundred or two hundred dollars more. Now for anyone who has half a brain they quickly realize that that's a lot of money but if you own a large retail chain it's not. It's like that joke, it's one banana how much could it cost $10? Basically it was out of touch retailer executives that caused the video game crash. The final thing that proves this is the Atari 2600 jr. It's a consult it exists because consumers kept calling Atari directly to purchase Atari 2600 game consoles and when they ran out of stock they had to make more to keep selling them.
@TokyoXtreme
Жыл бұрын
As a Commodore 64 owner, I don’t even remember the crash. It just seemed like I always had games to play regardless.
@jasonross6727
Жыл бұрын
There actually WAS a computer industry crash in Europe and the U.K. about a year later, though.
@litjellyfish
Жыл бұрын
I never got this really In EU about the crash. Basically around the supposed time of the crash almost all I knew have switched to home computers to play games on so of course we did not buy any more console stuff. Then it was when NES / master system arrived some of us or younger bought console again. For me any my friends it was only with SNES megadrive and then later PS1 we got a console again as the Amiga was better then a NES in general. And some did not even get a console but switched to PC when Doom arrived
@ramgladore
Жыл бұрын
I heard they produced more carts of ET than the total number of Atari systems that could play it
@Nomenloony
Жыл бұрын
No, he was just given unreasonable tasks to achieve in ridiculously short time scales. When he really set his mind to a project he delivered amazing results.
@FigbyTheWolf
Жыл бұрын
I love when he just smiles politely at the camera, it makes me feel happy xD
@Babai24
Жыл бұрын
Yeah, but at the same time it's creepy and a bit cringey 😅 but still, love it!
@amitzdullnicker2k
Жыл бұрын
You both are totally right! 🙂
@Dorelaxen
Жыл бұрын
I don't think he was. I mean, E.T. isn't a great game by any means (I personally loathe it, though it's not the worst of all time), but given the time constraints, it's a miracle the thing even worked at all. Yar's Revenge on the other hand, is quite possibly the single best game on the 2600, and that's high praise. Raiders of the Lost Ark isn't a bad game, but it's just way, WAY too complicated for it's own good. I'd say HWS was constrained by the technology of his time. Had he been making games 10 years later during the NES days, he'd have cranked out some amazing stuff for sure.
@marafolse8347
Жыл бұрын
Yeah, I think HSW was just trying his absolute damnedest to make the kinds of multi stage action-adventures that would become popular on the later consoles. The spirit of ET and Raiders is more present in the design of movie tie-in games for the 32 bit consoles actually, they almost feel like modern demakes. Yars Revenge is definitely the best game for the console, though Kaboom might beat it out as my favorite.
@jasonross6727
Жыл бұрын
@@marafolse8347 He was ahead of his time in so many ways.
@kurtmager1626
Жыл бұрын
One of (IMO) coolest bit of Warshaw lore is what the Neutral Zone, and screen-filling explosion are in Yar's Revenge. It's the source code of the game itself being displayed, in both instances.
@litjellyfish
Жыл бұрын
Yah It’s pretty common usage for many early games. I mean intellivison even use code as part of their permanent graphic tile set in the console itself :)
@robertmoss556
Жыл бұрын
I think most of the stuff said about ET is bullshit. You can dislike it as a game but it's technically excellent. There is no way HSW's other games took months and this took weeks. I like all of HSW's games, they are all good.
@litjellyfish
Жыл бұрын
Could be that this took a lot less as he had already a core code setup to reuse
@AgentM79
Жыл бұрын
Mr. Warshaw is a LEGEND. Yar’s Revenge was, and remains, an essential Atari 2600 title. HSW accepted the challenge of (essentially) bringing Star Castle to the 2600. Yar’s Revenge was the result. Sure, AtariAge brought us the phenomenal “Star Castle Arcade” homebrew a few years back, but this cartridge had a serious horsepower upgrade and years of well-spent development time. HSW did it “Live” back in the day, with deadlines. Atari grossly-overpaid for the ET license, and gave HSW an impossible holiday deadline to meet. He succeeded. The failure clearly belongs to Atari’s incomprehensible (in retrospect) business decisions. For the record, I skipped the ET game because it didn’t interest me. There were plenty of great 2600 games back in the 80’s. But those who wanted more had other options such as Intellivision, the Atari 8-bit, and Colecovision.
@originalfred66
Жыл бұрын
I thought E.T. was a decent adventure style game if you took the time to figure it out. Yes, the falling into the pits mechanic was annoying. Other adventure style games such as Adventure, Superman, Haunted House, and Raiders of the Lost Ark were definitely better. However, E.T. was much better than those horrible Swordquest games.
@brianwolters7560
Жыл бұрын
I love E.T. and loved finding all of the Easter Eggs too...
@thedinobros1218
4 ай бұрын
Answer: no, yar’s revenge, raiders of the lost ark, and E.T. were great.
@pojr
4 ай бұрын
Yeah I like them too. ET is underrated.
@desiv1170
Жыл бұрын
OK, I know the answer is "No, he was a great game designer" so it will be interesting to watch your vid. ;-)
@whiskyguzzler982
Жыл бұрын
If you drop $20M to get the rights, you shouldn’t rush the developer.
@SNARC15
Жыл бұрын
A little side note about Saboteur. For a short time, Atari planned on rebranding the game to have an A-Team theme. They replaced Hotot (the player) with a disembodied Mr. T head and instead of saving the "Gorfons" (the yellow birdlike aliens in the first stage) you were to "Save Hannibal." Also the last boss was replaced by Colonel Decker.
@JustWasted3HoursHere
Жыл бұрын
E.T. is not the worst game ever made, by a long shot. It's not even the worst game ever made for the 2600. Heck, it's not even the worst game that came out that year for the 2600!* The main issue with E.T. is the controls, which any programmer will tell you takes a while to get just right. Continually falling into holes (until you learn the trick) is very frustrating and that's why so many people hated the game. The big difference between Howard's E.T. and Todd's Pac-Man is that Todd had, by his own reckoning,^ about 6 months to program it, whereas Howard only had 5 weeks. I'd say Howard deserves some credit for creating any game at all in that time frame! * For example, "Sneak 'n Peek" by Vidtec ^ Here's a much younger Todd Frye talking about why he made the choices he made with Pac-Man: kzitem.info/news/bejne/top6u3aVgJuFfnY BONUS: Here's an older and wiser Todd Frye admiring a homebrew version of Pac-man: kzitem.info/news/bejne/s6eb4HqVhahhaI4
@SNARC15
Жыл бұрын
Those who claimed that it's the "worst game ever made" obviously never played any of the Mythicon 2600 games.
@JustWasted3HoursHere
Жыл бұрын
@@SNARC15 Mythicon? Never heard of them, but there were SO many fly-by-night game companies turning out any kind of crap they could throw together to cash in on the Atari craze. That was a contributing factor to the whole video game crash: A huge number of sub-par (even for the 2600) games flooding the market (though a few gems here and there too). I'm going to check out Mythicon and see how bad it is... Okay, I'm back. Man, you're not kidding. They all suck, especially the "music" and sound effects. And graphics. And gameplay. And overall look. And...
@TheTurnipKing
Жыл бұрын
I dont think the 2600 had any bad programmers, really.
@litjellyfish
Жыл бұрын
How so?
@GustavoValdiviesso
Жыл бұрын
I don't want to be "that guy", but here's a criticism you didn't ask: When editing your videos, you must cut in late and cut ou early. Don't overstay on screen while fading in or out. That is seeing as bad editing. Also, if your gonna smile, go for it! Don't say your text with a straight face and smile just afterwards, like you're doing. Say it with a big smile from the top. That will give you a better camera presence. Other than that, you have a good voice, good reading cadence and your texts are well written and informative. It's all a win for me. That's exactly why the things I mentioned before are so distracting. Keep up the good work 😎
@pojr
Жыл бұрын
I appreciate the feedback, and gonna implement some of this in my next videos.
@GustavoValdiviesso
Жыл бұрын
@@pojr And I appreciate how you responded politely 😇 wish you the best. By the way, the "coming right at you with" bit at the beginning is gold!
@pop5_
3 ай бұрын
Hey Pojr! Congratulations for the 20k subs! This year I believe you'll double it!😊
@akxmedia0
Жыл бұрын
5:10 Now I'm envisioning a ET Pac-man clone where Elliott is laying down Reeses Pieces while avoiding the agents in a Pac-man-esque maze. Maybe sort of like Lock N Chase....but ET themed.
@edrosa3485
9 ай бұрын
Would have been cool to see what Warshaw could have done with more time. Yar's Revenge is one of my favorite 2600 games. I still get a massive kick out of playing it, appreciate that in the revamped version for the Atari 50th they just mostly updated the graphics only. Sad that he left the industry.
@themidcentrist
Жыл бұрын
HSW in my opinion is a brilliant man who as a programmer wanted to make games that were innovative and challenging. The problem with ET and Raiders of the Lost Ark was that a game that challenged HSW intellectually would be nigh unto impossible for the rest of us mere mortals. Seriously, the guy has two master's degrees and is a psychotherapist. ET isn't a horrible game, but it was a horrible game for a child who was used to Atari games being simple pick up and play affairs. A kid isn't going to read the directions to their new game before playing it on Christmas morning assuming they are old enough to read the directions at all. Atari should have given HSW a general direction to go in - a game that would be simple and kid / family friendly. Playtesting by representatives of the target audience would have been great, but of course there was too much crunch for that to happen.
@pojr
Жыл бұрын
Yeah you're 100% correct. Warshaw was a skilled programmer, but was dealt with bad cards.
@tomsuzyinfluencerinfj2712
Жыл бұрын
Yar's Revenge is awesome
@Kennephone
Жыл бұрын
You wouldn't think that it took 6 months to make games that are only 8K. I'm sure a lot of it was brainstorming and bug fixing, also Atari programmers were famous for working sometimes 40 hours straight with no sleep, with a little help from cocaine, speed, and gallons of coffee of course, which makes it even more surprising.
@cosmefulanito5933
Жыл бұрын
I am of the opinion that if the creator of the initial product (the movie in this case) doesn't like the game, the game is inherently bad. Something similar happened with "The Shining" by Stephen King. He didn't like the movie either. And I endorse King. The movie is bad. The other game he do was terrible too. A nice game is Frostbite for example. Atari was also partly to blame. It was almost impossible to make a good game on such a limited and bad console. Paying millions to have the right didn't make sense. That console was useful only for very simple games and nothing else.
@KeithPhillips
Жыл бұрын
I've seen people dirty-up old E.T. cartridges and put them in a sandwich bag with even more dirt and try to sell them at video game conventions 🤣
@GhrexSD
10 ай бұрын
Man was just rushed. For games to be great, development should take time.
@chaosordeal294
Жыл бұрын
I don't think I could make a game as bad as E.T. in just five weeks.
@Bigbacon
Жыл бұрын
E.T. really isn't even that bad of a game.
@Bigbacon
Жыл бұрын
you use some of the weirdest filler video ever. it doesn't even fit anything.
@matthewrease2376
Жыл бұрын
E.T. might be my favorite Atari game I own tbh.
@DougGlendower
Жыл бұрын
The worst game ever is the 2600 version of Donkey Kong, which was deliberately made bad by Coleco to pump up the ColecoVision. ET is better than Raiders, which is a piece of garbage.
@litjellyfish
Жыл бұрын
I don’t think it’s so bad. So I am not sure if that is a myth. It uses the 2600 technically quite good and plays not bad. What is really so bad about the 2600 donkey Kong version if you compare it to other arcade conversations at that time? Also remember that Gary Kitchen IS a VERY good coder so of course he would do a decent job
@ZX81v2
Жыл бұрын
One thing about E.T. you missed was that the game had a BUG which made it IMPOSSIBLE to complete. This was fixed a couple of year ago by a rom hacker
@robertmoss556
Жыл бұрын
This isn't true, I completed it many times.
@michaelmorris4515
Жыл бұрын
ET is a game that requires you to RTFM released in an era where no one RTFM. It's nowhere near as bad as people make it out to be if you can be bothered to RTFM.
@jasonross6727
Жыл бұрын
And now, no one seeme to know what a manual is anymore. Coming from someone in Tech Support, you wouldn't believe how many issues are caused by people not reading or following instructions!
@joefell5311
Жыл бұрын
That one boss was looking a bit phallic.
@michaelturner2806
Жыл бұрын
This popped up in my recommendations and I'd been avoiding it because I don't like negging on people who are just trying to do their jobs. Glad it was straightened out in the first twenty seconds and I could actually enjoy the video. I'd always heard ET wasn't that terrible of a game considering the few resources able to be devoted to it, and it was the hype and overproduction of anything that led to its part in the collapse.
@Eric-lr5ur
Жыл бұрын
Excelent video.
@johnchase7667
Жыл бұрын
ET at the time was a good game. We had it and played it a lot. People that are negative about ET and even Pacman are not seeing them as we did when they were released. Pacman looks like crap now but when it came out it was amazing, we had Pacman on our TV and played the heck out of it as kids. It was so much fun to play and everyone enjoyed it back then.
@patsk8872
Жыл бұрын
Pac Man similarly had a very short time constraint, from tone-deaf executives at Atari that didn't know how badly they were wrecking their own company. Dude needed more time. There's a crazy good Pac-Man for the 2600 now made by a fan. And yeah at the time 2600 Pac Man was still "fun" if you have no expectations. But anyone hoping for anything like the arcade would have been fuming.
@pb7379-j2k
Жыл бұрын
I’m sorry but you are dead wrong. I was there and pac-man was a huge steaming disappointment. It was total ass no matter what year
@johnchase7667
Жыл бұрын
@@pb7379-j2k My friends and I loved it, had all kinds of fun playing it. At the time of release is was very enjoyable and comparable to most 2600 games at the time. The only real issue with the game was the flickering ghosts, but we seemed to ignore that back then. We never expected arcade quality ports of games back then. We knew the 2600 had serious limitations and it didn't matter.
@pb7379-j2k
Жыл бұрын
@@johnchase7667 everything you say is true for space invaders, asteroids or missile command-all 2600 ports that had obvious differences with the arcade versions but were still fun. If you loved pac-man, great, but it was objectively trash
@RealDorti
Жыл бұрын
to bad that HSW never developed Games again
@pojr
Жыл бұрын
Yeah it surprised me that he only made 4 games lol. Thought for sure it would be more.
@RealDorti
Жыл бұрын
@@pojr there is a movie about the excavation of the mexico landfill where his story is also mentioned
@cootmaster
Жыл бұрын
WORST was Firefly and sorcerer they look unfinished
@dava00007
Жыл бұрын
You guys use the most random stock footage ever in any video in the history of mankind.
@edwin3928ohd
Жыл бұрын
Quite the opposite, the stock footage seems to align exactly with what hes talking about when its on, and its not excessive. Which parts are you talking about?
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