Anyone who is in to Atari 2600 knows that ET is verrrrrry far from the worst game available on that system! And it's so sad making it a great game would have take so few tweaks! http://www.neocomputer.org/projects/et/
Basically, just deferenced a pointer to OpenGL memory that I shouldn't have...
There's another neat hack which would cause the machine to run in slow motion. I don't know how it worked; I can't find any references now. Possibly it overloads the system with interrupts. But under its influence, clearing the screen would take several seconds. These two hacks combined beautifully, letting you see all the details of, e.g., Basic's heap management.
It does overload the system with interrupts, by making the (normally 100Hz) timer interrupt that the OS uses occur a lot more frequently.
An initial run of 4 million copies is a lot of pressure on a single developer, the sort that can make you a legend or a catastrophe. I wonder if release management was considered to allow for bug fixes in subsequent production runs or phased production runs with hedged risk.
Probably adding to the pressure is the frustration that immediately following the production run you find a one-liner bug fix but you are 4 million copies too late.
Interestingly, Pac-Man also had millions of unsold cartridges left over. This candid Q&A talks more about the failure of ET, the frustrations and challenges:
http://www.denofgeek.com/games/howard-scott-warshaw/33708/ho...
There was a precursor to the BBC story in Playboy last September: The Guy Who Made the ‘Worst Game Ever’ Has Nothing to Apologize For http://www.playboy.com/articles/the-guy-who-made-the-worst-g...
I was quite young when ET came out. I loved ET, but the game was basically impossible for me to play because I couldn't get out of the pits very well; which was exacerbated by falling into them when I shouldn't have.
In contrast, Combat was easy to figure out and play and I could play it with loved ones.
The Atari 2600 was designed, almost exclusively, to play Combat. It has the ability to animate only 3 sprites: player 1, player 2 and "ball". There are many hacks to get around this, but we're talking about the pre-release period of the Atari Video Computer System, AKA VCS, the Atari 2600.
The only other game in mind for the system was Pong, which actually come out for the system in the form of Video Olympics, and it was created by one of the 2600's TIA chip designers, Joe Decuir. That chip literally synced up the processor with the television's refresh rate, and had each scan line drawn out of processing exactly when the electron beam was moving over the proper position on screen. The 2600 has no frame buffer. Essentially, when it's in the CPU, it's drawn on the screen. The machine only had 1024 bits, not bytes, of RAM.
But that's neither here nor there. For more info on the fascinating hardware that was the Atari 2600, read Racing the Beam by Ian Bogost and Nick Montefort. https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/racing-beam
Video Olympics could be considered to be the 100-in-1 of Pong games, with dozens of variants on the Pong theme. Combat takes the same sort of approach, with lots of game modes, but the actual gameplay was based on another arcade game. Rather than just recreating the arcade game, however, Combat expands on the theme, as Video Olympics did.
Combat is, to my mind, the only game on the 2600 that really holds up to this day. It's still fun, despite it's graphical limitations. For its day, it was the Super Mario Brothers of the Atari: that cart you could always turn to for fun.
It's elegant in its simplicity, extremely deep in its variations on a theme, and even offers a few asymmetrical playing options: one player can be given a different set of planes from the other.
Combat is the Go of computer games. Oh, and all the graphics are drawn in 1's and 0's. Same for the numbers on screen: big binary sprite maps. Here, look! http://benfry.com/distellamap/150dpi/combat-illus-150dpi.png
Thanks for the memory :)
80's kid here. My mom could always kick my butt in a small set of video games. Galaga, Ms. Pacman, Tetris. But she can't beat the first couple levels in Super Mario Brothers to save her lift.
I'm amazed that he shipped anything.
Good read, interesting fixes.
Never beat it. Got extremely annoyed/bored with it after a short time. There were games with much worse graphics and sound that had a much better gameplay overall.
They estimated 10 million consoles were actively being played, so they made 12 million copies. They sold 7 million, and that's before returns. 7 million people who would think twice before buying another Atari game.
Nothing beats game programming in the 80s. IMO, the golden age of programming.
That was he one thing I complained most about with the Atari PacMan. I don't think I ever noticed the flickering ghosts specifically, or even how different the bird layout was vs the arcade version.
But instead of a cherry/orange/pretzel that moved around the screen, the bonus fruit was a dark-brown square inside another slightly-larger light-brown square. It didn't move, it didn't look good, and as a kid I felt like this was the classic example of either the game designers cutting corners or limitations of the system.
I used to joke about this specific example as one of the key reasons to move on to better consoles when they came around.