Techtite's What Went Wrong --- When Entertainment Goes Awry!

In the heyday of first-generation game consoles, nothing could beat Atari. Even when better game systems started to roll out the assembly line, nothing could beat the number of games, and therefore the amount of fun possible of the original (well, not really; but it was to many gamers) game system: the Atari 2600. Yet out of maybe hundreds of games for the system, it would take a mere two games to almost single-handedly ruin Atari, all by themselves.

What Went Right? To look for "What Went Right" in these two

games is to look for the best of spin control. To be blunt --even if this is supposed to be the optimistic part of the article-- E.T. and Pac-Man on the Atari 2600 are often considered the lowest of the low in first-generation video games. True, games have come and gone which weren't terribly successful, though how bad is really, really bad? In a sense, the only good news about these two games is that, when the lowest of lows has been reached, you can go nowhere but up.

Okay, let's try to be optimistic here, and look at the glass as being "not entirely empty" as opposed to "almost dry."

At the very least, these games were the first attempts in licensing big names for home gaming. Nobody until E.T. ever thought of a movie/game tie-in. Similarly, nobody prior to Pac-Man had ever thought of licensing a third-party arcade game and selling it on their own video game consoles. If you're to look at it that way, every major game based on a movie, right down to the award winning Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, owe some amount of thanks to E.T.. Similarly, home versions of everything from Mortal Kombat to Crazy Taxi owe some thanks to Pac-Man on the Atari 2600. How's that for spin control?

However, there's no escaping truth in the matter. These games sucked. Let's just move on to:

What Went Wrong? Let's start with Pac-Man first,

since it's a slam-dunk. Simply put: this Atari 2600 Pac-Man was exactly the sort of Pac-Man that you show to a CEO who never plays games. Look at the picture at left; sure looks like Pac-Man, right? Wrong. It didn't sound like Pac-Man. It didn't play like Pac-Man. All the toe-tapping arcade music was reduced to an almost ear-piercingly BAD "bah-beep, BAH-BEEP!" The fact that the ghosts could defeat you without barely even touching you only made things more annoying. The only things that made this "Pac-Man" worthy of the label were the millions of dollars Atari paid to license the name.

That's the only thing Atari really had; the license...and they horded it like a starving dog protecting an unopened can of meat. While any other company could've made something good out of a Pac-Man license, Atari had the rights, and were ready to sue to keep them...even if someone else could've made something really good with such a license. The smart thing would've been to get someone --anyone-- to make a game for them worthy of the Pac-label. They didn't, and that was a big mistake. What they came up with not only didn't sell; it was a complete waste of the Pac-man license entirely. In the end, only one game in Atari 2600's history would be an even bigger blunder...

E.T.: the Extra-Terrestrial would've seemed like an even simpler slam-dunk, yet once again was not. How easy should this game have been to design...? E.T. gets stranded on Earth, looks for pieces of a device to phone home, then phones home; easy, right? So easy was this game concept, that a younger, pubescent-aged "Techtite" (the webmaster of this site) wrote Spielberg a letter in 1983, suggesting that he help make a game where E.T. would race to collect pieces of his device to "phone home," then race off to his ship's landing point to escape. I remember sending two letters at the same time: one a personal letter telling Spielberg how much I admired him as a director, with the second being a business-letter-style outline for such a game. A secretary returned the initial fan letter, snootily stating that such letters were not the practice of her office to accept nor forward. Yet the letter recommending said game was never mentioned again. Weeks later, a game based on E.T. was announced. What a startling coincidence.

Fortunately, that's all it was: a coincidence. I cannot take the blame for E.T. on the Atari 2600, and I won't. For one thing: Spielberg merely gave the license rights, not the design of the game. No; that would be the job of Atari's game designers, who, it has been said, were given a mere eight weeks for the project. I doubt my suggestions to Spielberg ever reached their desks. Even if they did: eight weeks is way too little time to care what a kid suggested for a game design idea. They more likely simply did what they had to do and went home.

The resulting product was a limited "game," indeed. All E.T. could do was look in giant holes for pieces of his device to phone home. How could E.T. search these holes? Why, he jumped into them with reckless abandon, nearly killing himself each time. Wheee! Then E.T. would use his newly found levitation powers (I kid you not) to float out of each hole, and automatically shut off said powers once he reached the surface...only to often drop right back into the nearby hole again, due to a very annoying game glitch. This is in addition to the holes so close to the side of the screen that merely going from screen to screen often had E.T. fall in a hole anyway. Are we having fun yet?

It gets worse. In addition to the Land of Holes which E.T. must search, there are government and scientific agents trying to catch him. If they did, they stole all the pieces of the "phone home" device and you had to look for them again from scratch. This is in addition to the "health meter" which limited the amount of time you could look for these items at all. Actually, limiting how long you could play this game may seem like a good thing. At the time, it was annoying.

The amount of failure this game had is actually the subject of many urban myths. So many copies of the game were returned, it's been said that Atari sent trucks out to the desert to bury millions of unsold E.T. game cartridges. A more brutal urban legend tells of Atari needing to pour cement into the ditch, to make "sure" they stayed buried. However, if that last legend was true, it would be more of a sign of Atari's greed more than their loathing of the game. Pouring cement onto the cartridges would've kept anyone from digging in the ditch and getting a free game. What a waste of cement! I doubt anyone would have taken it anyway.

So, what have we learned here? One; if you're going to spend millions of dollars on a game license, have a good game idea to begin with. Secondly, games take time. All gamers hate it when Half Life 2 and Doom 3 have bumped release dates but come on; that's to make sure the final product isn't garbage. These games were two big name licenses that could've put Atari back on the map. Instead, they would destroy Atari as anyone remembered it.

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What Went Wrong?

An Analysis Column, by Techtite

Atari 2600's Two Biggest Blunders:

Pac-Man

&

E.T.