The Man Who Made 'The Worst Video Game In History'

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After reading this story, I actually feel kinda bad for this guy. How he went from making some of Atari's best selling games to becoming a psychotherapist just makes the story all the more interesting.

"It was the hardest I've ever worked on anything in my life," says Warshaw, who was the game's sole programmer. "I started working at the office but after a while I realised there was a problem; I still have to go home to sleep and eat occasionally. "So we had another development system installed in my house so that I would never be more than two minutes away from working on the code except when I was driving.
 
It's rare that the developers are the ones responsible for a crap game. It's almost always the publishers wanting stupid changes or not giving a realistic timeframe.
 
Thought this was about Daikatana... (or Daicraptana as many of us called it) :p
 
Players complained that the ET character would inexplicably fall into pits and get stuck. As one 10-year-old told The New York Times: "It wasn't fun."
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I remember nagging my mom to buy this game. My 10 year old self didn't know you could return things, but in hindsight, I wish I did. Damn game was like $60 in ~1982 dollars.
 
Good read. I remember as a kid my dad was so upset when all this happened.
 
tetris42 said:
It's rare that the developers are the ones responsible for a crap game. It's almost always the publishers wanting stupid changes or not giving a realistic timeframe.
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It was not a realistic time frame.
 
Saw a movie on Netflix about the programmer and the excavation of the dump site where the E.T. games were dumped. "Atari: Game Over" is the name of the documentary.
 
Meh... I wouldn't call it the worst game in history, maybe one of the worst mass marketed games in history.
 
This is what's kind of sad. Even crap games had some developer who poured their heart and soul into them.
 
As the article mentioned, the demise of the video game industry of the day needed a face and ET became that face. There have many horrible games in both consoles and PC and a few of these have destroyed developers and studios as well. Ultimately, given where the video game industry of the day was they were going to crash anyway. If it hadn't been ET that brought them down, then another title would have done it. Until recent history the video game industry has had these boom and bust cycles and this was just the start of the new bust. Now we are in more of a sustained boom so it is hard to tell if the companies have become better at managing their products or whether the video game industry has now become commoditized so that it isn't subject to these booms and busts anymore.

As to worst titles of all time there are always lots of good candidates (Daikatana, Battlecruiser 3000, Duke Nukem Forever, Custer's Revenge, Outpost, etc). The companies and developers are now a lot better at managing their titles but hubris, poor schedules, and inadequate budgets will always continue to add to the ranks of worst title contenders.
 
I think he was a victim of really shitty circumstances. The first one was his hubris in thinking he could make a playable game in 5 weeks on 8k worth of code. The second was that Atari's decline was already in process and he got sucked into it with this fiasco. The third was that Spielberg expected a pacman clone and he fouled the process completely. The ingredients for this debacle made a recipe for disaster and that shit sandwich that everyone ate was not delicious.
 
One thing is for certain... He still got paid. Also he made other great games so his reputation wasnt too shattered.
 
" I would never be more than two minutes away from working on the code except when I was driving"

If he were in the new generation's time, he would have been texting the code while driving.
 
Unrealistic time frame, bad timing, over confident in manufacturing yield, sub par game.

It wasn't the worst game. I enjoyed it when I was a kid (8-9 years old). It wasn't an excellent game, but it wasn't as cool as the TV show. But - it's very rare that a TV or Movie licensed game is actually any good. This is just one example.

I don't think it was the worst video game in history. It's just gotten that reputation, so it's people's go-to as the worst video game in history. How many people actually played it when it was released? It wasn't that bad. Play it now, and it's bad. A lot of older games, even excellent older games, aren't that great by today's standards.
 
ET as a pacman clone would have been so simple...and think of the additional marketing Reeses Pieces would have gotten.
 
Worst game of all time:

NinjaBreadMan on the Wii. It could have been a decent game, but it is so buggy that you can't even control the character.

For the PC.. also because of a game breaking bug - the Neverending Story. It had a bug where it would not let you progress any further in the game. It was like they just stopped programming it, put a block in the game to make you no be able to go any further and then shipped it out.

At least you can beat E.T.
 
tetris42 said:
It's rare that the developers are the ones responsible for a crap game. It's almost always the publishers wanting stupid changes or not giving a realistic timeframe.
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Very rare indeed, unless we are talking about a particular company....

latest
 
So the BBC just watched the GAME OVER! documentary, and now this assclown gets another 15 minutes.
 
kbrickley said:
As to worst titles of all time there are always lots of good candidates ( Battlecruiser 3000AD)
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I'm glad someone remembers this game.

Probably a good analogy of what this would be like today, is if the maker of Star Citizen just closed shop and never released anything.

In fact, Star Citizen reminds me a lot of BC3000AD in terms of the promises being made.
 
HeadRusch said:
So the BBC just watched the GAME OVER! documentary, and now this assclown gets another 15 minutes.
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I am not sure he is an assclone. He seems like a pretty nice dude. He made some classic Atari games, so he is cool in my book. Though to your point, it does seem odd that the BBC is just now getting around to interviewing this guy when Microsoft already did a better job.
 
E.T. isn't even that much worse than your average Atari 2600 game, by today's standards they're all terrible. Calling it the worst game ever is just silly, most of the people who repeat that line have never played it, or any other Atari 2600 games.
 
Quix said:
E.T. isn't even that much worse than your average Atari 2600 game, by today's standards they're all terrible. Calling it the worst game ever is just silly, most of the people who repeat that line have never played it, or any other Atari 2600 games.
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Agreed, it wasn't bad. It had more content than most games at that point. I beat it several times as a kid. It just is too 'cool' to hate on that game. We could sit and pick apart any classic loved game and none would make it unscathed.
 
Iceberg Mays said:
One thing is for certain... He still got paid. Also he made other great games so his reputation wasnt too shattered.
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He made those games before. After words he never completed another game. He started work on one but left the company before he finished it. He then went through a few changes of careers before his current one as a psychotherapist. That game killed his reputation.

So much so that you still have people calling it the worst game ever made, and most people saying that never played the game. It might have helped push Atari over the edge and put them out of business but they were bound to tip at some point regardless as the industy was in a state of flux.
 
Yeah, if you want the worst games ever produced, this is your collection!



These were sent to game publishers by authors who thought they were worthy of selling :D

The publishers took the worst 5 games and packaged them in a collection titled "Don't buy this."
 
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I would consider the worst game I played to be Bart vs The Space Mutants on NES.

My Friend had ET on ATARI but would never let me play it because it was the worst game he had ever played.

Shack Fu was also pretty terrible on Genesis.
 
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