Many gamers hold their Xbox, PlayStation and Nintendo titles to the same exacting standards that they would a movie or a novel. Therefore, much like films and books, there are video game classics remembered not for their greatness but the lack thereof. So, meet Howard Scott Warshaw, the man behind the worst video game of all time.
Warshaw created the 1982 video game E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, the Atari 2600 tie-in for the Steven Spielberg-helmed blockbuster of the same name. The movie “E.T.” grossed $792.9 million at the box office, surpassed “Star Wars” to become the highest-grossing film at the time and is a critical part of every ’80s kid’s nostalgic memory bank. The game? Well, it started all right.
After Warshaw helmed 2 million-plus selling Atari titles in Yars Revenge and the game Raiders of the Lost Ark, the CEO of Atari approached Warshaw about taking on the E.T. project. It should have been a match made in heaven: one of the platform’s most successful designers with a surefire major motion picture tie-in. E.T. was Atari’s highest profile title yet. The problem? Atari gave Warshaw only five weeks to turn around the game.
Needless to say, that’s not a lot of time, but Warshaw did his darndest. He settled on building a puzzle-style platformer with randomized placement of items, so each play-through would have a unique feel. E.T. was initially a success: It was Warshaw’s third platinum Atari hit, selling over a million copies. But then, people started noticing some strange …
As a result of that tight production schedule, Warshaw failed to notice a glitch in the game. It would transport the player to random parts of the game’s map as they collected the items they needed to progress. The glitch made it kind of impossible to, you know, do things. If he had had more time, Warshaw would have probably found the mistake in playtesting, but the rest is history. After a month or so, sales fell off as word-of-mouth spread that the game was nearly unplayable.
The resultant sales and bad leadership from Atari led to E.T. being responsible for the crash of the video game industry in the early ’80s. Atari went from 10,000 employees to 2,000, and Warshaw left the entire discipline behind, trying not to think much of the game’s tanking for the next 10 years.
However, the ’90s were a weird time, and whether it was the realization of a collective bad-game-hangover or the cultural mileau’s appreciation of irony, E.T. entered the conversation again. Cartridges began popping up on eBay for hundreds of dollars as collectors’ items, and the game took on a new life as a bona fide so-bad-it’s-hilarious cultural artifact. This surprised no one more than Warshaw, and yet, he’s proud. In his mind, the fact that the game lives on and still generates excitement and enthusiasm—even if that excitement is for its terribleness—means there’s reason to be proud.