The man who made the “worst” video game in history (2019) | Hacker News Reader

The man who made the “worst” video game in history (2019)

thehustle.co

140 pointspaulpauper113 comments

There is a very enjoyable Let's Play, with a few added twists, of Superman 64 here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL6537A2F60C44CF57

The first twist is that because the in-between "fly through the rings" stages are so incredibly repetitive and boring, the player/presenter uses them for what he calls "in-flight movies" that explore other aspects of the game, like its development history. Meanwhile, the boring ring stage continues in a small picture-in-picture cutout.

The second twist is that this Let's Play has gone on for so long, it's become a bit of a running gag. There are years between episodes, but it's still going. The last episode is from last year, over 10 years after the first episode. It's always a highlight to see a new episode pop up in my subscription feed.

And then the game is really pretty bad, but in a way that also makes it pretty entertaining to watch.

Keeping in mind how ridiculously primitive and cumbersome Atari 2600 was to program on, I think it's actually remarkable how functional E.T. is (adding in the time pressure and all).

I never got around to read Racing the Beam [1] but Retro Game Mechanics Explained on YouTube has a good demonstration [2] on how the graphics programming seemed like a nightmare compared to later computers and game consoles. Just positioning things on screen required calculating machine cycles of other preceeding instructions. Refactoring must've been fun.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racing_the_Beam

[2] https://youtu.be/sJFnWZH5FXc

Yes, that video made me... annoyied

It's like the video unit actually made things harder. Even for the technology of the time and what they wanted to do, it could be better.

I have fond memories of many 2600 titles that are contenders for the title of “worst video game”: E.T., Superman, and Pac-Man

Not to get all grumpy old man, but the alternative was pumping quarters into one of two machines at the local ice cream parlor or begging my parents to endure Chuck E. Cheese.

The reality is that these games were entertaining and a reasonable substitute for goods that were economically out of reach.

> I have fond memories of many 2600 titles that are contenders for the title of “worst video game”: E.T., Superman, and Pac-Man

A lot of famous movie themed games sucked back then because of the same reason: game producers wanted to easily cash on fans wanting to purchase anything with that movie title on, and with usually a very short time span at disposal before the craze waned, they put together the smallest crap necessary to allow that title on the box. I soon learned to ignore any game taken from famous movies, except the Indiana Jones themes ones later on the Amiga, but they already had a functioning engine and making a point and click adventure was just a matter of design following some movie parts plots and aesthetics.

I spent many hours in 1982 doing yard work to buy Pac-Man for the 2600, and for me not only was it not a reasonable substitute for the arcade version, it was cromulent enough to disabuse me of the notion of working to buy things for a decade or so. I guess I was a grumpy young kid.

Plus, didn't you have 7-11's where you lived?

ET wasn’t the worst game ever. I think it’s largely an influence issue. People told other people it was terrible, so those people walk into it expecting it to be terrible. The myth persists.

The game has its challenges, but the reputation is enforced by decades of games with better graphics, better hit boxes, and storylines told onscreen instead of in the instruction booklet.

Incidental to this, I remember when I realized that World -1 in Super Mario Bros. wasn’t some trick or secret, but just a pointer bug that was surprisingly playable. Turns out programmers are people too.

I saw “worst” in quotes in the thread title and thought for sure this would be about Daikatana.

Which even then was a fun playable game to anyone that played it. It was just over-hyped was all.

Yeah, this title should really be reserved for games like Superman 64 which are totally incoherent and so buggy that they're unplayable.

I agree.

My understanding is that ET relied too heavily on the instruction manual. Which was made worse by the hard difficulty being the default option, with no obvious onscreen indication that the hard difficulty was selected.

You see this all the time with new games. First impressions and PR are monumentally impactful in the gaming community. The community is also widly inconsistent in its application of criticism. So my advice, if it looks like your kind of game, give it a go anyway.

Agreed. If you stack it against the rest of the 2600 library, it’s fine. It’s a console with a disgusting color palette, very limited sprites, and a controller with one button. ET is at least most ambitious than most games on the platform, even if it’s not that good.

I encountered this recently with The Simpsons.

There's a meme about "zombie Simpsons" and the show being a shell of its former self which gets repeated ad nauseum on the internet.

But when I sat down and watched every Simpsons episode, I discovered that meme to be out of date by 6+ years.

Some of the new Simpsons episodes are surprisingly good and rank among my favorites in the series. Yet even though the show has really returned to form for half a decade now there are still people online commenting about how bad it is relative to some imagined older era of the Simpsons they might not have even watched.

It's a weird groupthink meme that's hard to get past.

First of all, I am not here to tell you what you should or shouldn't like. If the last seasons of the Simpsons are some of your favorites, I am genuinely glad.

Having said that, I don't think your personal outlook matches the opinion of the average Simpsons viewer. I took a quick look at the ratings over the years up to season 31 (which is all that was available in this dataset [1]), and the average IMDB rating for seasons 29 to 31 are 6.61, 6.04 and 6.37. For context, season 15 was the first season to get an average rating under 7 and seasons 2-8 are all above 8.

But more generally, I wouldn't call a "groupthink meme" something that, even with an optimistic point of view, has been true for 17 years and allegedly less true for 6. I would rather call it "a strong prior".

[1] https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/hod101s/simpsons-imdb-rating...

The problem with using priors in aesthetic judgment is that because it's inherently subjective, the prior actually influences your measurement. So it can be self-reinforcing.

yeah but still the simpsons today are something else entirely than the simpsons 20 years ago. It's not that they had 10 bad years and now, suddenly, are good and similar like before. It's simply not true. And it wouldn't even make sense (what would have to happen for that to become true?).

My favourite groupthinks are pineapple on pizza being bad and moist being an ugly word.

The thing about the Simpsons isn't that it's bad as per se but the fact it still going. Who actually gets excited for new Simpsons.

Pineapple pizza gets a bad reputation because it is usually prepared with absolutely no cognition of food flavor interaction. You cannot just put sweet on top of sweet on top of sweet and expect to serve it in a sizing as big as a main course without people complaining about it.

Complains about pineapple pizza are not about taste. It tastes good and fair amount of people is ordering it every day. Every pizza place have it, because it gets ordered often. There are way less popular pizzas people complain about less.

The complains are that the pineapple does not "belong" there.

Yes exactly. It's a lot easier to buy a pineapple pizza than an anchovies pizza for instance. They're both shelf-stable in a can so the expense of a pizza shop having some in stock is fairly negligible, but a pizza shop offering anchovies seems like a 50/50 proposition while just about every pizza shop in America sells pineapple pizzas.

I have come to sometimes like anchovies on pizza (or a salad) but I ordered one for delivery about 10 months ago and the place actually called me up and asked if I was sure. Maybe they get complaints!

This comment makes no sense. Sweet on top of sweet on top of sweet? The fuck are you talking about? Nobody is doing that. The base is savory and only the pineapple on top is sweet. It's also usually paired with ham, another savory item.

Sweet and savory are a pleasant food combination for many (though not all) but I can understand why some don't like pineapple as a topping - it's a really strong flavor and it changes the texture of the pizza.

People who have never had it sometimes complain about the concept. Some of those people simply can't stand sweet+savory foods, my husband is one of them, he hates ALL sweet in savory foods. Since this is a very consistent trait in him, I don't knock him for finding the concept off-putting. Same way I won't try peanut butter+anything else sandwich, because I absolutely can't stand the texture of peanut butter on bread.

I love it though, it's my go-to.

Dough is not savory per se. That why you salt it. That's like super basic stuff.

"Pizza is a savory food" is indeed a super basic fact.

Plus when I'm ordering it I'm guaranteed to get as much as I want

I believe I'm in a greedier boat...my roommate is allergic to pineapple so I order it for the same reason. I don't want to threaten them with chemical burns for eating my pizza but if that's what it takes.

Pineapple pizza is hated but also loved. Some people really hate it, some people really love it. It seems that whenever many pizzas are being ordered for a large group, at least one of them is always a pineapple pizza. Everybody has a chance to try it and fall into one of those two camps.

Personally I think it's a bit odd, but I don't hate it. I don't hate it, but I never order it for myself either. I think pairing the pineapple with ham bridges the savory/sweet gap well enough, but pineapple alone sounds pretty bad.

Moist widely elicits this reaction because by the inviolable rules of English grammar, it can only ever modify two things. Cake, and vaginas.

And towelette. Three things. But no more.

I did as well when I watched every episode earlier this year. I kept on scrutinizing it (and I am normally a hyper-critical TV viewer) but aside from some slight "off-ness" in a few episodes roughly around the time they changed the intro, season after season passed with me still waiting for this decline to occur. Well it never arrived. Did the show change over time? Of course it did I don't know any long-running anything that didn't evolve. I just never noticed it getting less funny, less clever, or less Simpsonesque.

So I brought it up to my brother, who used to watch it with me from its debut until around 2000, and is way more of a Simpsons nut than I am. He explained the decline to me, when it was and what it entailed, from his perspective, which I think more or less vibed with what most fans say. After he explained it, I could kind of sort of see it that way, at least to understand why a person might hold the 'decline opinion'. But I wouldn't have made that judgement on my own.

It still doesn't seem notable enough to me to have turned into "what everyone says". Oh well. More chuckles for me!

You're right about the meme but "Simpsons being bad is just a meme, the last few seasons are actually good" is also a bit of a meme at this point. I don't think there's ever an end to it and I think everything in pop culture gets the same meme treatment.

You can always find people who are for or against something, but past a certain threshhold, shared identities seem to form around these kinds of memes. For example, The Big Lebowski turned hating The Eagles into a meme. Plenty of people didn't like them already, but the movie provided something to rally around.

I can only presume lots of people got burned out on The Simpsons for one reason or another and started amplifying each others' voices online, leading to the meme.

The interesting thing to me is how people with little-to-no firsthand experience on which to base an opinion in the first place then simply adopt these meme opinions and identities.

> For example, The Big Lebowski turned hating The Eagles into a meme.

The Big Lebowski might have been the nucleation site that started the crystallization of that meme, but I think the public was well primed for it. Hotel California was (maybe still is?) getting an absurd amount of radio playtime. They played it so often, I think backlash was bound to happen sooner or later.

I don't dislike the band generally, Journey of the Sorcerer is still one of my favorite songs ever. But I've heard enough Hotel California for three or four lifetimes already.

The game was destined to fail because of all the hype. I remember; I was a tween at the time. The movie was huge; it's all anyone was talking about. And we kept hearing about a pending video game. But when we all got to play the actual game, it was hype meeting reality. And that's why the game was branded such an epic failure.

Was ET the first really pre-hyped video game that you remember?

There is a book by one Stuart Ashen called 'Terrible Old Games You've Probably Never Heard Of' and a quick leaf through that will dethrone ET very quickly.

It was also plagued by some very annoying bugs, which have since been fixed: http://www.neocomputer.org/projects/et/

Eh, I played 2600 ET a good bit as a little kid*. And I knew immediately what game this headline was talking about based mostly on that personal experience.

*Sort of. I would wander back and forth until falling into a hole, try in vain to levitate out of it, and then go play Laser Blast instead. But several times!

Falling in the hole is the only thing I remember about ET. I have no recollection of any other aspect of it.

Superman 64 gave ET a run for it's money

For the love of me I couldn't figure out how to make it past all the entry levels that amounted to "fly through 25 hoops or you die!" and then "fly through 25 more hoops or they die!" all while looking like an alpha game environment still under active development.

Superman 64 is far worse, IMO. It's just plain bad in every way. Unoriginal, badly coded, unfun, looks like butt.

The only good thing about it I can think of is one of the GDQs did a public speedrun of it a few years back that was pretty funny. It was in the "Bad Games Block" of course.

I have a friend who had an N64 and his only game was Superman 64. Like that was nearly the only game he ever played on the system, I think he played GoldenEye years later with some friends. And that was the only system he had until he bought a Wii as an adult. When he told me this I assumed he was joking but he never really used the internet and had no idea how reviled the game was.

He thought the game was OK, and didn't think it was that hard. Somehow still became an avid gamer too.

Why didn't he buy more games???

He had no money, and his mother refused to buy any.

Jesus Christ that poor, poor kid.

Kid locked alone in basement all summer with just an N64 and one cursed game is basically a creepypasta writing prompt come to life ;)

I'm playing SNES / Sega Genesis era Death and Return of the Superman by Sunsoft / Blizzard and it's a wildly amusing punch scroller with heat vision, sonic boom and Man of Tomorrow Cyborg Superman boss!

If you ever watch a play-through it just keeps getting worse. People always talk about the rings but thats barely scratching the surface of the shitty, broken depths.

I remember being hyped about it, having only seen some pre-release screenshots in magazine or something. Luckily, being 14, I couldn’t afford to buy it. I rented it from Blockbuster and felt cheated.

ET being the worst is mostly kind of a meme. It's a bad game, but its badness is far overstated. It's just a bandwagon that people jump on because it's funny or because the narrative is compelling. That it's the game that almost killed an entire industry, or the bit about all of the millions of carts dumped in a landfill (which is really more about bad forecasting by whoever chose how many to make) -- those are narratively satisfying, and it's fun to dunk on bad things, so the story spreads.

I'm pretty confident that there are worse Atari 2600 games, without even spreading the search farther. They just didn't meme as hard.

It's hard to beat "Custers Revenge" for "worst videogame of all time."

You don't think Desert Bus would be worse?

There's no limit to the ways a game can be bad.

Desert bus was designed to be bad though. Which many consider a disqualification from worst game.

Big rigs on the other hand...

That's a strange perspective. If a game was designed to be fun, does that disqualify it from being the best game?

It's a very common perspective for bad game aficionados. Intentionally poor games are parodies and/or jokes.

Anyone can make a bad game. Not many can make a truly excellent one.

So when ranking bad games, intentionally bad ones need something special to elevate them beyond parody status.

Unintentionally bad games are fascinating and often straight up funny. A lot of the fun is discussing all the ways it is bad and how on earth it could possibly have been released.

The same goes for bad film and/or music. You'll find it's the normal perspective.

But everyone has their own rules. You're entitled to your own set of rules.

whenever there's a story like this, "one guy killed an industry", "one guy almost ended the world", "she was patient zero" etc the first thing I ever think is, well what kind of situation are you in where that is even possible to begin with. Clearly a billion things have gone wrong already. Tendency to always find one particular guy to pin it on is not good.

I think the folks on here would get a kick out of a documentary about the games that came out AFTER Atari was sold in 1983.

The Atari 2600 soldiered on until 1985 or 1987, and it was remarkable how good the games were after the industry blew up.

Here's Pac Man on the Atari 2600 from 1982: https://youtu.be/nCPpgt0s70U?t=157

Here's Pac Man Jr on the exact same hardware, from a year later: https://youtu.be/r8-y4o7VX3I?t=71

They managed to figure out scrolling, increased the number of mazes by 400% and reduced the flickering significantly.

It helps when the engineers are given proper resources. I'm guessing there wasn't anyone in Marketing trying to maximize profits at the cost of game quality.

ET with double the ROM and six months of development time would probably have been an awesome game. 2600 Pac-Man (AKA "Flickerman") wouldn't have generated so many returns and would have been fun to play.

I showed up in late October of 1982 and was told that Marketing wanted the cartridge I'd been assigned on the shelves by Christmas. Even this completely green college drop-out knew that was utterly flapping impossible, yet there were people over in the Marketing building who apparently thought it was a reasonable request.

I had a guy from Marketing in my office asking if I could print out every possible 8x8 bitmap for him. He wanted to copyright them so the competition couldn't use them in their games. I pointed out that the bitmaps would have be printed in color as well, then told him the story about what the inventor of the game of Chess asked for when the King wanted to reward him for coming up with the game.

By 1984 (and maybe earlier than that) Atari was losing $2M a day. The new 5200 console was plagued by terrible (yet totally fixable) design decisions. Plans for next-generation (e.g., 68000-based) were being flubbed, but we didn't know that yet. Serial layoffs had everyone pretty demoralized (we usually found out about these from the San Jose Mercury News, often on the mornings of said layoffs).

As a nitpick, it's not quite exactly the same hardware - Jr Pac Man includes more hardware in the cartridge, the extra circuitry needed to support bank-switching to have more than 4k of ROM.

There's also the incredible homebrew version:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dAYuBcuvIww

There are a lot of modern contenders for this title now imo:

1)Fallout 76

2)Big Rigs: Over the road racing (possibly the only game in the history of metacritic to have a single-digit score, with critics actually pleading with people not to buy the game)

3)Metal Gear: Survive (User ranking "Overwhelmingly dislike" in a franchise that is generally beloved). It's particularly funny to read the definitely astroturfed industry reviews saying it's one of the best survival games ever)

> It's particularly funny to read the definitely astroturfed industry reviews

I'm not even much of a gamer, but how is anybody still giving game journalism any credit whatsoever? We all remember the cuphead video, don't we?

The cuphead video?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=848Y1Uu5Htk

Journalists who are not good at playing games are approximately the complete opposite of the real problem with games journalism.

The problem with that video is not that he's bad. The overwhelming majority of people are bad at games, myself included. The problem is that he doesn't understand what's going on.

This is literally like if baseball coverage was done by someone who doesn't know what's a strike.

If you want to understand video games as an artform, then maybe so. Debatable (can they really evaluate the artistic merit of a game if they can't get past the tutorial?) but I think I see what you mean.

But if you're a gamer looking for consumer advice, then game journalists who don't know how to play games are basically worthless. It would be like reading car reviews from somebody who can't drive. They can tell you what they think of the car from an artistic perspective, but they're ill equipped to offer good consumer advice.

I tend to agree with astrange's comment about VentureBeat specifically, but let's be honest here, we're not lacking in internet randos who spend too much time playing videogames, telling you whether you should or not buy a videogame.

It's totally OK that someone is focusing on the industry news and not consumer reviews; and when he gets drafted into playing something (because you don't send your whole damn staff from CA to Köln to ingest what's 99% ignorable media blitz) and he sucks at it it's fine to take some time to point and laugh, but it says absolutely nothing about the greater state of games journalism.

Dean Takahashi isn't really a game journalist, he's just there to give softball interviews to CEOs. Yet the only thing people know about him is he can't play Cuphead and not the actual problem here.

It's a bit unfair to judge an entire industry based on one journalist's experience of one game. Are you saying that "game journalism" (really, "writing about games") is discredited more than writing about film or food or fashion?

> Are you saying that "game journalism" (really, "writing about games") is discredited more than writing about film or food or fashion?

Yes, by a mile. Columns about films, food, fashion (or sports for that matter) in major newspapers are usually curated by people who at least understand the medium that's the object of their critical review.

The video game world is halfway between influencer wannabes and AAA studio shills.

Video game media probably always was corrupt and incestuous in their hype cycle. But at least back in those days people writing were on some level passionate for it.

Now it seems that it is the place where wannabe journalist end up when they can not get work anywhere else. And thus try to insert what they want to signal in their writings. And most of the time not care about medium itself.

There really are a lot of terrible game journalists. The ones who aren't terrible tend to be independents rather than writing for big publications. An amusing and yet thoughtful take on the problem comes from Videogamedunkey https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lG2dXobAXLI and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sBqk7I5-0I0

I'm playing Fallout 76 right now, ha. It was not great at launch to many people, but they significantly improved it since then, which wasn't a possibility in 1983.

Daikatana was pretty famous...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daikatana

Metal Gear: Survive is actually kind of fun. If you ignore the Metal Gear label and the obvious asset reuse from MGS5, it's perfectly enjoyable as its own thing. It has its flaws and it's a bit repetitive, but it's not anything like Big Rigs, which is just janky and unintentionally hilarious.

Fallout 76 and Metal Gear: Survive are only bad because our standards these days are exceptionally high and they did not manage to earn their price. Fallout 76 since came closer. Both are above 70% on Steam.

No, fallout 76 was borderline unplayable for a large amount of the user base and suffered from such a huge amount of game breaking issues it was a total scam to release when it did.

It has since been patched up and is playable, but on release it deserved every bit of criticism it got.

Now the main issue with it is monetisation, which is a divisive topic.

> Metal Gear: Survive

I doubt this game is disliked because it's a terrible game because the game it's built upon has extremely solid gameplay, it's more disliked because of what it represents.

The parent company sabotaging MGS5 development, kicking Hideo Kojima out, then using the assets and engine of the game to rush out some new game that doesn't fit in with the rest of the games without the original creator.

I had this game as a kid, and actually managed to muddle through it, collect all the phone parts, and win the game. I have never heard about anyone else completing it, but it was possible!

My excuse is that I was too young but my older siblings definitely completed it multiple times.

I didn't realize he was also behind Yars’ Revenge, which was actually one of the best Atari 2600 titles. He was given ample time to develop and test it, though.

You know, I didn't hate E.T. It was below average, but the graphics weren't terrible by comparison, and there were many below-average VCS games. For my money it was the hype that doomed the game more than the game did.

As many as half of the games were below average!

I think about this sometimes. Our intuitive definition of the average ${thing} seems to be the average of ${thing}s we've seen before, but we don't ever see the vast majority of ${thing}s. The average, finished, published game is probably well below the average that we've seen.

Producing a game that most people think is average is actually an achievement, because they're comparing you to a list that includes the likes of Skyrim and Assetto Corsa, but probably doesn't include all the variants of Unity Store Asset Simulator. Same for books, music, artwork, sport, and pretty much everything else.

I think sometimes we should thank Steams for opening the flood gates. Now we truly see the whole range of crap to top AAA games.

Just go throw random list of games on discount there and average starts to seem pretty bad actually...

Half the games are below the median.

You could swap E.T. for Cyberpunk 2077 and VCS for PS4 ;)

Was anyone else expecting the interviewee to be John Romero, of Daikatana fame?

Yup, Dikatana is what came to mind when I read the heading!

On a separate note: after seeing the constraints imposed on Warshaw, I have nothing but sympathy for him. Fault of the management, not the programmer.

Fixing E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial for the Atari 2600 (2013) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23199521 - May 2020 (11 comments)

The making of E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, the “worst” video game - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21828725 - Dec 2019 (49 comments)

The man who made 'the worst video game in history' (2016) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19414594 - March 2019 (2 comments)

The World's Worst Video Game? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14456911 - June 2017 (23 comments)

The man who made 'the worst video game in history' - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11148093 - Feb 2016 (209 comments)

Fixing E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial for the Atari 2600 (2013) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9668734 - June 2015 (20 comments)

E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982) Atari 2600 Source Code - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7679503 - May 2014 (2 comments)

Long-Buried E.T. Cartridges Unearthed - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7654240 - April 2014 (1 comment)

E.T. cartridges found in infamous Atari landfill - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7652473 - April 2014 (46 comments)

Fixing E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial for the Atari 2600 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6994180 - Jan 2014 (12 comments)

Hacking E.T. for the Atari 2600 using a hex editor - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5502356 - April 2013 (1 comment)

Hacking E.T. for the Atari 2600 to make it better - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5470446 - March 2013 (1 comment)

What is considered to be the worst video game ever? This one is. - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=528256 - March 2009 (3 comments)

Competition:

Desert Bus: The Worst Video Game - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6023484 - July 2013 (65 comments)

By the way, not a reflection on the man as a coder at all. A lot of software is written - to this day - via bad management and compensated by developer heroics. It usually works.

He was given an impossible task, where no heroics would have ever salvaged this. A few weeks to create a production-ready game for the holiday season. No talk of QA or anything. Just go and do it. A textbook death march. Been there.

ET was actually one of my favorite games on the 2600. I probably played it more than any other.

Sure it had bugs, but once you knew the trick it was quite playable and fun. I think what made people hate it so much was that it was a major departure from the simpler platformers and shooters that were the staple of the 2600 market. Adventure games rarely made any headway in those days on consoles until Coleco.

Same here. I was very surprised to discover that other people consider it horrible. I was happy to get it, loved to play it and the ET face in the opening screen blew me away every time. I also liked the other 2 games made by the author, in particular Raiders of the Lost Ark which was a cool adventure game that I can have fun with even today.

I think it's basically what you wrote - these games weren't the "twitchy fingers" hand-eye-coordination fest of the average Atari title.

It really is worth watching “Atari: Game Over” to get a sense of everything that went down during the early video game console era. I highly recommend it

https://www.amazon.com/Once-Upon-Atari-history-industry/dp/0...

Would also recommend his book that dives deeper into the mess that Atari was under the leadership of Ray Kassar and Warner Bros.

Another man who would claim that title would be Sergey Titov, who produced Big Rigs, received public threats of violence by 1C publisher head on what used to be a russian game developer forum dtf.ru, left for US and then took part in making League of Legends.

Was the first game I ever played on a cousins Atari in 1982, I loved it and Superman, was absolutely fascinated by the game on the TV.

Got an Atari shortly after for Christmas.

The genre of movie based games has now completely turned on it's head, games are now made from movies.

> in April of 2014, a crew excavated the site and uncovered 1.3k games.

So ... 1300.

Insignificant detail - but its great to see "k" becoming as prevalent as "m", even for non-technical English uses. /humor? /sarcasm? /not sure!

Possibly used in a pseudo scientific notation way, to denote the precision.

Maybe it's 1331 games? (1.3 * 1024).

Is that a VT100 terminal in the first photo?

Doesn't look quite like it but similar.

It certainly does look like a DEC product of some kind. The case isn't wide enough on the right and the badge is in the wrong place fora VT100, so I wonder if it was another DEC model, or an unrelated product with some copied styling cues.

It looks like a Televideo terminal, maybe a 925.

The Consumer and Coin-op engineering folks used DEC VAXes for development. (The Home Computer Division used Data General MV/8000 machines, which were actually not that bad. The MV/8000 is the machine described in Tracy Kidder's Soul of a New Machine, by the way).

I don't know this game but the worst video game in history is Life is Feudal if you take into account how much people have played it and how much it sucks.

This guy is actually a genius, delivered a game in no time!

I spent many, many hours of my childhood playing Atari 2600 games. I remember E.T., but the main thing I remember about it is that we rarely played it.

I spent many wonderful hours playing Pitfall and Kaboom

I mainly remember descending into the mouths of many alligators in Pitfall

and loving the rotary controller in Kaboom

(why don't games use rotary controllers anymore?)

ironic how the game paid for itself by reselling old cartridges as collectibles, which would not have been possible if it was a success

I think we had this game when I was a kid, but being 6 years old I couldn’t figure it out. But defender, I loved.

Like if Ted Kaczynski made a video game. Would he make a good game with an anti technology message or a game so bad you never want to play any game again. Curious how he would approach the problem.

Actually are there any video games we know were made by prisoners? Seems like they have time to kill.

I'd rather play ET and Superman 64 than most mobile games.

What do you expect from a $24k-per-year programmer

> What do you expect from a $24k-per-year programmer

$24,000 in 1981 is $78,756 in 2022[1] which compares favourably to some estimates[2] of current average game developer salaries (USA: 'approximately $72,000')

[1] https://www.inflationtool.com/us-dollar/1981-to-present-valu... [2] https://itrate.co/blog/game-developer-salary-growth-in-2021

According to the article $24K-per-year was his starting salary, which is what he would have earned developing his first and most successful game Yar's Revenge. Also according to the article the success of Yar's Revenge made him a company rock star that was earning over a million a year.

So to answer your question we should expect a lot from a $24k programmer and less from a $1M programmer.

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