When you mention “ET Alien”, you may think of the classic sci-fi movie of the same name you watched when you were a kid. The “ET” with big head, big eyes and long and thin limbs in the film is still in the minds of many people. Recognize the image of the “alien” creature.

However, in the field of video games, “ET Alien” carries a rather unpleasant history-after all, the 1983 “Atari crash” was caused by it.

▲ Picture from: The Hustle

This incident not only destroyed Atari, the gaming giant in the 1970s and 1980s, but also caused the entire North American game market to experience a three-year contraction period, accompanied by the bankruptcy of a large number of game developers, and the The end of second-generation video game consoles.

Many historical articles also believe that if it was not because ET Alien was too crude at the time, and then broke consumer enthusiasm and confidence for games, the entire market and the Atari company behind it would not And the crash.

Few people know that the Atari engineer who developed this game, Howard Scott Warshaw personally, had to take responsibility for the failure of ET Alien, Carrying unimaginable pressure.

Maybe things are more complicated than we think.

Recently, Warsaw himself accepted The HustLe “interview , sharing his own story with the public.

1.

Around the 1970s, Warsaw graduated from Tulane University in the United States and joined HP as a systems engineer.

The video game industry is just getting started. Atari released the first home game console Magnavox Odyssey in 1972, and also released the table tennis game “Pong” on the arcade platform in November of the same year, which officially opened the era of commercialization of video games.

Following the success of “Pong”, famous arcade titles such as “Space Invaders”, “Pac-Man” and “Blasting Comet” have also appeared one after another. A “golden age” that belongs to video games has arrived, which has also attracted Warsaw Attention.

For Warsaw, although HP’s work in the past few years has been stable, he is also tired of this life of nine to five. On the recommendation of a friend, Warsaw decided to submit a resume to Atari.

In 1981, 24-year-old Warsaw chose to leave HP to become a game developer with a salary of $ 24,000 a year, which is 20% lower than his salary at HP.

“I wanted to make the largest piece of work ever.” Warsaw recalled in an interview that he wanted to do something truly valuable at Atari, although he personally hadn’t before Any experience developing games.

Warsaw soon tasted the sweetness from game development. The first game from him was called Yars ’Revenge, a horizontal shooter. It took him 7 months, and after about 5 months of testing, he went on sale in May 1982, and the sales soon exceeded 1 million copies.

At the same time, this is also the largest work on the Atari 2600 game console at that time, which is a notable commercial success.

Since then, Atari has discovered Warsaw’s potential in game development, and then put him in charge of another important task-the popular movie “Indiana Jones and the Raiders” that teamed Lucas and Spielberg. Adapted for the game.

Facts also prove that Atari did not read the wrong person. After 10 months, Warsaw has once again built a million-level game. The two successes not only made Warsaw one of the most well-known developers in the game industry at the time, but also further deepened Atari’s recognition of his game development capabilities.

At this time, Atari also began to adjust its business strategy for fine business. The most obvious point is to significantly shorten the time for game development in order to bring the work to the market faster.

“The success of Indiana Jones has made Atari feel an illusion. As long as you can get a super hot IP and paste it on a game box, you will definitely make a lot of money. Money. “

At that time, various Hollywood blockbusters also began to rise, and these film and television IPs have become the target of adaptation by major game companies. They even think that the developer who made the game is not important to a game, because as long as it is named by an IP, the sales are guaranteed.

However, when Atari realized that he was on a devious road, it was too late.

2.

In June 1982, Spielberg’s “ET Alien” was released on theaters in North America. With its unique narrative perspective, the film not only changed people’s image recognition of aliens, but also broke a number of box office records and became the best-selling movie at that time.

Atari is obviously such a good work that it will not miss the opportunity to adapt it into a game. At the time, Atari’s parent company Warner also paid US $ 20-25 million in royalties in order to obtain game production rights from Universal Film, the publisher of the film.

In July, Warsaw received a call from Atari CEO Ray Kassar and was asked to produce a game of the same name as “ET Alien” as soon as possible.

“I remember very well when Casal called me on Tuesday afternoon and he asked me to fly to Burbank on Thursday morning to show Spielberg the prototype of the game . “

Warsaw said that he had less than 36 hours to think about a plan before telling Spielberg what to do with the game.

Worse is still to come. Atari also hoped to use the popularity of the movie to bring the game to the market before Christmas. If the preparation time related to the market release is subtracted, it means that Warsaw needs to give the finished game on September 1 of the same year.

Before that, most of the games that Warsaw participated in took at least 6 months of development time. During this time, a lot of details were adjusted and tested. The game will not be available until the game becomes satisfactory, so the development time Basically cannot be fixed.
▲ Picture from: Vox

If not in 2014, several bulldozers entered the landfill in Alamogordo, New Mexico, USA, and dug out a batch of “ET Alien” physical game boards that have been buried for more than 30 years. Atari’s “buried cassette” was once considered a rumor because there was no evidence.

3.

In 1983, Warsaw left Atari. After the entire market has lost confidence in video games, many game developers like him can only choose to devote themselves to other industries, but this means that they will lose the annual number. One hundred thousand dollars in income.

The Los Angeles Times reported this in 1986 A sight. In order to prevent developers from changing jobs to other companies, Atari used to offer very attractive compensation to its employees in its heyday-not only the basic salary, but also the royalties and additional bonuses for the sales of physical games.

A developer who worked for AtariThe author Dennis Koble said that most games with sales of hundreds of thousands of copies will allow developers to earn 200,000 to 300,000 US dollars, even if they are not good, earning 5-10 a year. Ten thousand dollars is still fine.

“Every three months, I submit a game and they will write me a check for $ 40,000. Who wouldn’t like this job?”

Limited by early development technology limitations, game development was not very complicated at that time. It only required a few lines of code to write out the entire game content, and then stuffed it into a cassette with a silicon chip and printed it The box is ready for sale.

It was reported that the cost of a single physical game cartridge at that time was only $ 2.50, and most companies sold it to consumers for $ 30.

This extremely low-cost but lucrative way of making money has also attracted a large number of second- and third-rate companies to participate. They pay more attention to the quantity and speed of producing games than game quality, because even if they do poorly, they think that consumers will still pay.

And relying on millions of sales, star developers like Warsaw will naturally have higher income.

But after all, he didn’t play games anymore. After Atari was split and sold, Warsaw chose to enter the real estate industry. Later, he recalled that he did not like this business, but just wanted to spend some time recovering from the previous Atari collapse.

After that, Warsaw wrote two books, shot a documentary related to Atari, and even trained as a psychotherapist.

“Maybe I want to repair the trauma caused by the failure of the year. After all, I made the game. But” ET Alien “is really as bad as everyone said? Maybe not. People just want to find a representative from a failure story, and that representative is my ET. “

The fact accepted by more people in the industry is that there were already many hidden dangers in the North American game industry at that time. The platform adopted a “laissez-faire” strategy for game works, which caused a lot of junk content to flood the market. “Alien” only accelerated the bursting of this bubble.

Mike Mika, founder of the independent game studio Other Ocean, accepts Polygon I thought during the interview that most people have not experienced the Atari 2600 era, so they will only stare at this game;

“At the time, there were many worse games than ET Aliens. You do n’t know what it means to play these games, but no one knows why they are on the store shelves.

In 2014, Atari’s co-founder Nolan Bushnell posted on