99% Invisible - 387- The Worst Video Game Ever

Episode Date: January 29, 2020

Deep within the National Museum of American History’s vaults is a battered Atari case containing what’s known as “the worst video game of all time.” The game is E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, and it was so bad that not even the might of Steven Spielberg could save it. It was so loathsome that all remaining copies were buried deep in the desert. And it was so horrible that it’s blamed for the collapse of the American home video game industry in the early 1980s. Subscribe to Sidedoor on Apple Podcasts or RadioPublic The Worst Video Game Ever

This is 99% infecible. I'm Roman Mars. There are a few rules everyone should abide by to have a good life. Always carry a book to read. Never get involved in a land war in Asia. And always, always make friends with people who work in museums. Because there's the museum that everyone else gets to see. The exhibits, the diaramas. I love them all, don't get me wrong. But behind the scenes, there's a whole cabinet of wonder that only a few people get to see. And if you play your cards right, you can get an invitation to the real deal, the museum's

museum, full of archives, and things neatly lined up in drawers with handwritten tags. A behind the scenes tour of a museum is the greatest way to spend an afternoon. Bar none. This is why I really enjoyed the podcast, Side Door, produced by the Smithsonian Institute in DC and hosted by Lizzy Peabody. They feature stories from the more than 154 million treasures

in the Smithsonian archives about art, science, and history. This is my favorite episode of theirs. It's a story of a video game. People call it the worst video game of all time. Based off one of the most popular movies of all time, you're going to love it. I'll let Lizzie Peabody and Sidedoor take it from here. I'm part of a crowd of some four or five hundred people waiting to get into a dump. This is Howard Scott-Warsha.

And on April 26, 2014, he was part of an unusual scene, something like a wildly out-of-place tailgate party. People lined up with folding chairs, sun hats, beverages, in the middle of the New Mexico desert. It was a hot day. I mean, it was hot, but there was no dessert. It was just desert. Oh, yeah. How it has a real thing for puns? And the open up, and here we go, and we're all rushing into the dump and there's a lot of excitement, you know, we're on a mission to uncover the truth or not of a very popular urban myth.

The legend goes like this. Once upon a time, in a land called Silicon Valley, an American tech company invented video games that enchanted children and brought billions of dollars flowing through its doors. The company was called Atari. Atari made many good games. Until one day, in 1982, it made a bad one. Oh, really bad one.

A game so bad, it has been called the worst video game of all time. The video game was ET, the extra terrestrial. According to the myth, it was so bad it put Atari out of business. And to hide its shame, Atari buried the unsolved game cartridges in the middle of the desert, where they would never never ever be found. Did you believe that the myth was true? Did you believe that there were games buried in the desert? I never believed it. Why would a company that strapped financially and is really failing and having a lot of trouble staying afloat? Why would they spend extra money to go into the desert and

bury something that supposedly is so worthless, they want to throw it away. That doesn't make any sense at all, right? I mean, that's just nonsense. So Howard was a skeptic, but others in the crowd. I think they believed it, and they were there because they wanted to see it. They wanted to see it come up out of the ground. So there was a ground swell of excitement, you might say.

So Howard and the rest of the expectant crowd gather around the dump, which is now a dig site. Hundreds of video gamers are there, wearing all their favorite ET gear, their reporters, and even a documentary film crew. The dig begins. There's these huge machines that are super loud. And, they have these giant claws and all these, you know, the X-Govina equipment and super

drills and just this giant stuff and there's loud machinery, there's all these piles of dirt that have been brought up, of garbage in them and detritus, because it was a dump that has, you know, decades of dump. After six hours of digging, through three decades worth of trash. Outcomes an ET cartridge, a kind of crushed, very damaged ET cartridge. In the end, the excavation team unearthed a total of 1,178 Atari game cartridges.

Enough to confirm that Atari had actually buried its games in a giant desert pit. So, this time on SideDora, we explore just how those games wound up in the desert. And why popular history blames a tiny pixelated alien for bringing down one of the most influential video game companies of all time. Long ago, before there was PlayStation or Xbox or even Nintendo, there was Atari. It is undoubtedly part of kind of American cultural landscape. If you grew up in the 1980s, you would recognize that symbol immediately. I'm of that generation myself.

This is Arthur Demrich. He's the director of the Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation in the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History. He explained that long ago, there was really only one kind of video game, Arcade Games. To play them, you had to put on pants, leave your house, and go to a shopping mall, bowling alley, or bar. And in the late 1970s, Atari was the first company to create a smash hit arcade game called Pong. They realized pretty quickly that they were on to something. There's amazing stories in the early days of the restaurant and bar owners calling them up and

saying the machine's broken and they go in and it's not broken at all. It's just completely jammed up with quarters. And they suddenly realized, oh my God. They were so popular. Yes. So many people were going out to bars just to play these games. Atari wondered, what if they made a game that people played at home? At this time, most people didn't have personal computers.

Television was king. And Atari saw an opportunity. So in 1977, attention shoppers, the new Atari cartridge came in. The Atari appears with a game set that any kid can use and it really transforms the home playing video game market. So what did you need to have at home in order to play an Atari game? A television. That's it. That's right. All of a sudden TV, which had always been passive entertainment, became interactive. That's pretty cool. Yeah, it's very cool. And no one had seen it before. The first sort of demos of video games to play at home, people were utterly confused by

what it was. Well, adults may have been confused, but kids got it immediately. Because for such cutting-edge technology, Atari was easy to use. There was a simple console that plugged into your TV, and it was controlled by a joystick with a single red button. On this foundation, Atari built entire digital worlds on screen. And for $199 plus $20 per game cartridge, you could have those worlds in your own home.

The new video computer system by Atari. More games, more fun. Atari took off. They brought the excitement of the arcade into the suburban living room. And to do it, they hired the world's best programmers. These guys were geniuses at figuring out how to make interesting games and make them fun.

Many of these genius programmers were young men right out of college, and one of them was Howard Scott Worshaw, our friend from the desert. And he was pretty good at his job. I was pretty good at my job. My first game that I did for Atari was Yars Revenge. That was the first game I think that ever actually had a pause mode. Whoa.

It was the first full screen explosion. It was a more elaborate use of sound than people had seen before. There was an incredible amount of color. I wanted a frenetic action game that demanded attention and that would grab someone right by their cognitive elements and not release them. That's what I was trying to do with Yars Revenge. Wow. Yars Revenge transformed Howard into what fans called a Game God. Even though Atari didn't credit its programmers publicly, fans would sluth out the minds behind

their favorite games. The growing community of American gamers was that passionate. It was the golden age of Atari. By 1980, Atari was the fastest growing company in the history of the United States, commanding 75% of the home video game market and bringing in more than $2 billion a year. They produced their own games, but they also licensed their name to outside game developers, slapping the Atari label on all kinds of third-party games. No other company could keep up. In 1981, Atari conquered Hollywood. Hollywood. Howard spent eight months working on Raiders of the Lost Ark, the video game, strutting

around Atari HQ with a Fedora and a Whip, the Daniel Day Lewis of Game Goddry. The game sold well, so when Steven Spielberg made another blockbuster, ET, the extra terrestrial, in the summer of 1982, it was a no-brainer. Of course, Atari would make ET the video game. Here's how Howard remembers it. We're hanging out in my office, and then a call came in. And it was the CEO of Atari, who actually never calls me. He's basically my boss's boss, bosses, bosses, boss. The CEO of Atari calls 25-year-old Howard and says,

we want you to make ET the video game, and we need it done by September 1st. Now, this is July 27th, so at least five weeks and a half day to do the game. five weeks and a half day to do the game. Five weeks and a half day. To give you a sense of how insane this is, video games at the time took six to eight months to create. And this guy is saying,

Howard, we need you to create a game for the highest-grossing blockbuster film of the year in just 20% of the time it usually takes. You can do that, right? And I said to him, absolutely I can. Did it ever occur to you that it might not be possible? Was there a part of you that acknowledged that this might be impossible?

To be perfectly honest, I don't think it ever occurred to me that it couldn't be done. So how would it go to work? And he worked. And he worked. I was brutal. I was grueling. Like how the development system moved into my home.

So that no matter where I was, I was no more than two minutes away at any point in time from actually sitting down and doing something on the game. And even when he wasn't sitting down, eating, driving, showering, he was working in his head. And when he was asleep, still working. I thought, you know what I need to do is turn sleep into an asset. I would work until I ran into a problem.

And then I would go to sleep. And I would think, okay, maybe if I can just sleep and come up with something, if I can literally dream up a solution, I thought that would be kind of cool. And there were some times where that happened. So Howard, all of this sounds crazy. Why did they even ask you to do this?

It's a really good question, right? Why would you put someone through something like this? Right. And well, if you were to ask the executives, they would say, huh? So they didn't even know what they were asking of you. No, they had no concept. The management of Atari was completely disconnected

from production. According to management, ET the video game needed to be in stores by Christmas, or they'd lose millions of dollars in potential holiday revenue. But Atari and Spielberg had taken so long nailing down a licensing agreement that by the time they finally did get pen to paper, there was almost no time left to make the game. That never occurred to anyone. This was a case of people believing they could do nothing wrong and myself included.

Everybody at Atari thought, you know, we're on top, no one can touch us, we can do anything. And honestly, it seemed like they could. Against all odds, Howard delivered E.T. the video game in just five weeks. I was a hero. There was a huge company meeting at which, you know, they called me up on stage. He said, hey, how it came through. Oh, yeah. Steven Spielberg himself called Howard a quote, certifiable genius. And by Christmas time, five million cartridges of the much anticipated ET the video game stocked the shelves of stores nationwide.

So mission accomplished, right? Well, not exactly. You're listening to Side Door, on 99% of visible, produced by the Smithsonian Institute with PRX, more after this. From Side Door, here again, is Lizzy Peabody. Here's where we are. It's December 1982. Steven Spielberg's soon-to-be classic movie, ET, The Extra Terrestrial, is out in theaters.

In Atari, the American video game Titan just released the thing every kid was waiting for. ET, the video game. The video game that lets you help ET get home. Just in time for Christmas. Howard Scott Worshaw, Atari's star programmer, created the game in only five weeks. Spielberg is happy. Atari leadership is happy. Howard is happy.

Guess who is not happy? Eight-year-old Jason, Christmas morning, thoroughly disappointed. This is a man that Sidor does not like to disappoint. My name is Jason Arfano, I'm the executive producer of Scydor, aka your boss. Thanks for the reminder. Justin, can I please have like a latte or something? Perhaps more Roman therapy? We brought Jason into the studio because he has some personal history with ET.

When ET, the movie came out, I was 8 and ET was everything. I mean, there were stuffed animals for ET. I had a ton of them. You know, I learned how to draw ET. That was a big deal. So ET was a huge part of the summer of 1982. Jason was also into Atari. He played every day after school and when he started seeing ads for ET the video game, he had really high hopes. Oh my God, I can play the movie. I was gonna ride my bike in the game

and maybe fly through the air. You know, maybe I can- On Christmas morning, there it was under the tree. ET the video game. Right up to my room, opened up the box, pulled the game out, stuck it into the Atari, turned it on. There's ET on that first screen. It's super exciting.

It plays a little song that's you know, the song that's kind of like the ET song but not quite and started playing the game. And that's when I realized that something was wrong. The game was nothing like the movie. The objective of the game is for ET to collect pieces of a phone so that he can, of course, phone home. ET, phone home.

ET, phone home. I never finished the game. It was so incredibly hard and confusing. It doesn't sound that hard. And Jason is older and wiser now, so we decided to play it. Okay, let's do it. Oh no. I'm nervous, I'm super nervous.

Okay, are you ready? All right, there you go. All right, ET is landing in his tiny little spaceship and now he's in this this what looks like a forest. It didn't go so well. Oh my god. Alright, there is a government man coming after me and he's like, what is he doing? He's just sort of bumping into me.

Nothing happens. In the game, it's hard to figure out where you're supposed to be going. And as you try to navigate the game world, you keep falling into these pits that are everywhere. Alright, I'm in a pit. This is the worst part of the game. And there are random characters trying to get you. And now who's that guy? And you might be thinking, hey, what would Howard say about you talking smack about his game? But he agrees.

ET commits the ultimate video game sin to disorient the user. And you have to understand the difference between frustration and disorientation, right? Frustration in a video game is essential, right? A video game must frustrate a user, but you should never disorient them. Howard says that frustration ultimately creates satisfaction. It's a huge motivator in a good game, to get better, faster, stronger. Disorientation on the other hand is just... I'm in a pit.

I fell in another pit. Terrible. But back in the winter of 1982, Howard thought everything was peachy, because ET, the extra terrible game, was selling pretty well. But as soon as the young Jason or Fanon's of the world started playing it, word got out, and sales virtually stopped, leaving unsolved ET games clogging the shelves of stores. And by early 1983, Howard started to hear rumblings. People from other parts of the company, you know, suits as we would come walking by and engineering

some time, and people would look at me and they'd go, you know Howard, you really came through for us. We don't blame you. And I'm thinking, that's nice. You know what are you talking about? I didn't know what was happening out there. What was happening out there? Millions of unsold games coming back to Atari. Games they'd banked on selling. Atari sold them to a distributor who placed them in stores but the distributor had the full right of return. Oh so they could return their stock to Atari. Right so all the ones that they didn't sell the stores gave back to the distributor and the distributor then returns to Atari as unsold product. Okay. And so they went belly up. Wow.

E.T. was a big liability, but its very creation spoke to an even bigger problem for Atari. The company had made a habit of prioritizing money over quality. Remember how in an attempt to get more games on the market, Atari let outside companies make them? Well a lot of those third party games were bad too. And so Atari's name gets associated with some really bad games that nobody really likes and that aren't selling well. What's more, by 1983 programmers had reached the Atari console's limits for memory and graphics. All the games kind of started to look the same.

And gamers got bored. People stopped buying consoles. Atari was in big trouble. So when Atari went down 1983 into 1984, the entire video game industry tanks in the United States. But it basically wiped out sales of home game sets. The history books call it the video game crash of 1983. American video game sales dropped by over 90%

from 1982 to 1986. No new game systems were introduced and hardly any new games were created at all until the late 80s. That's when Japanese companies Nintendo and Sega brought their consoles and their famous characters to the United States. But it would be nearly two decades before another American-made console would return to the market in any significant way, with Microsoft's Xbox in 2001.

So there's no question that when you have an economic downturn, you have a catastrophe, a natural disaster, there's an effort to put a face on it, an individual story on it. You have to have a face, right? ET became the face of the fall of the video game industry because it was very identifiable. And I became the butt behind that face. On September 26, 1983, much like the character in the game, ET fell into its own pit in Alamagordo, New Mexico. Not for any symbolic reason, but because dumping laws

relaxed there, and Atari needed a cheap way to dispose of its 14 truckloads of unsolved game cartridges. ET the video game was steamrolled, covered in cement, and largely forgotten. Until 2014, when those cartridges were exhumed, and one of them found a home here in Washington DC at the National Museum of American History. So it's kind of crunched, it looks cracked. Like if you tried to play this, it probably wouldn't go well. We have not tried it, obviously for the reason. Right. Smithsonian Museum Specialist Drew Abarge took ET out of the collections to show it to me.

But it still has dust on it, it still has like sort of like white crusty. Yeah. Like is that a rock or what is it, is that just gunk? I think it's just gunk, you know, this was in with tons of other stuff, you know, plastic parts, you know, paper, instruction manual boxes, all this kind of stuff. Drew's role doesn't usually involve collecting objects, but he's a gamer himself. I jumped that I was born with a controller in my hand. But he's a gamer himself. When he heard that a film crew applied for a permit to dig up the fabled Atari Gravesite,

he wanted to make sure the museum secured a cartridge. Because E.T. the video game tells the story of something bigger than its own dirt-crusted case. It's about the rise and fall of the company that pioneered video gaming in America. And although it's not very old, it hints at the digital revolution that followed. It's a piece of American history. I was just afraid that if I didn't act now, like, probably nobody else would had realized the synonyms of it, so I felt it was like the first time I felt like I had to do

something if not it, the opportunity might have been lost. Howard Scott Worshaw left Atari in 1984 and eventually became a therapist. But he recognizes his role in Atari's story. And on that day in the desert, when ET was pulled from the ground. I looked around and I thought, this is awesome. This is so awesome. Because something that I did, you know,

a few thousand lines of code that I had written over 30 years ago is still generating all this excitement in that moment. I felt a tremendous sense of satisfaction in that I had really created something that meant something to a lot of people. And that meant something to me. While Atari never regained video game supremacy, the culture it created endures in the fans who bow down before their game gods, and stand for hours in the desert to see an old piece of plastic dredged from a dump.

A game cartridge now preserved in the Smithsonian's collections. Once worthless, now priceless. The Side Door is hosted by Lizzie Peabody. It's produced by Justin O'Neill, Jason Orphanon, Ellen Rolfes, Caitlin Schaefer, Jess Sadeck, Lara Koch, Ann Kenan, and Sharon Bryant, music by Break Master Syllinder, with support from John Barth, Jason Saldana, and Genevieve Sponsler at PRX, mixing by direct fooda.

This show is produced by the Smithsonian with support from PRX, the public radio exchange. You can find the show at s-i.edu slash side door. This episode of 99% of visible was pulled together by Chris Perubey and me Roman Mars. We are a project of 91.7 K-A-L-W in San Francisco and produced on Radio Row in beautiful downtown Oakland, California.

99% of visible is a member of Radio Topia from PRX, a fiercely independent collective of the most innovative shows and all of podcasting. Find them all at radiotopia.fm and you can find us at 99pi.org.