The Extra-Terrible Atari E.T. Video Game

If you’re a masochist, you can click the button to play the godawful Atari E.T. game

Atari’s next big fumble is the 2600 adaptation of the hit film E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial. Warner chairman Steve Ross negotiates a 23 million dollar deal with his friend Steven Spielberg, MCA, Inc. and Amblin Entertainment for the exclusive worldwide coin-op and home game rights to the film, the sum to be paid three years after E.T.-based games are shipped to stores, with a release date pegged at November of 1982. With the E.T. movie by Spielberg at the time the highest-grossing ever made, it demonstrates a special kind of chutzpah when giving a preview of the game’s development to Spielberg and a cadre of movie execs at the 2600 game development lab at Atari, designer Howard Scott Warshaw starts off with this bold prediction: “This is the game that will make the movie famous!” The company announces publicly that Spielberg is directly involved in the game’s development, with Atari Consumer Division vice-president of marketing Ron Stringari stating that the movie director meets with the game’s designer about its development on a weekly basis.  Spielberg himself tells the press that he’s helping to make E.T. “the first emotionally oriented video game ever produced.” It’s hard to figure out just when Warshaw would be able to find the time to consult with Spielberg, as the game designer has accepted a breakneck six-week deadline to have the 2600 E.T. game out for the holiday season of 1982.

With all Spielberg’s talk of “emotional” video games, when Warshaw presents his basic design to the director, Spielberg suggests he make the adaptation a Pac-Man-type maze game, lumping it together with a myriad of such clones clogging the shelves of retailers. However, Warshaw’s ace in the hole for completing the harrowing deadline on time is a game prototype already in existence at Atari: he jury-rigs it with E.T. related graphics, utilizing a treasure hunt motif: guide the little long-necked alien around the woods and fields of Elliott’s suburban digs, across screens laid out in a grid pattern, looking for the scattered pieces of a homemade radio E.T. can use to “phone home” and get off this rock. Said pieces found at the bottom of holes. Lots of holes. My God, it’s full of holes!

Warshaw’s efforts eventually net him a $200,000 payment, but it is torture for gamers to play, featuring frustrating control over the lost alien, an action-adventure strewn across multiple screens dubiously linked together along with endlessly confusing gameplay and maddening collision detection (with THE HOLES!). Ostensibly placed to help gamers are invisible hotzones on the various screens, which when entered by E.T. will cause an icon to appear at the top, its power activated with a press of the joystick fire button: warp to the next screen, force the chasing FBI spook or evil scientist back to their bases, reveal a piece of the radio in a hole, if any (…. radio pieces, that is. There are ALWAYS holes), call Elliott to swap Reeses Pieces to boost E.T.’s health bar, etc. Oh yeah, that reminds me…. all this while keeping an eye on the alien’s life bar, which depletes as he runs around, levitates out of holes (THE HOLES!), struggles when he’s captured by the chasing G-Men, et al.

Expecting a windfall of sales, Atari manufactures around five million E.T. cartridges, but only one million are eventually purchased. In dollar figures, $98 million in cartridges are shipped by Atari right before Thanksgiving…a week and half later they ship none. Wary retailers have scaled back their orders on the game, and many are still left with unsold product as they struggle to move E.T. off the shelves after this initial Thanksgiving rush of retail orders, even as Atari heavily flogs the game with a $5 million ad campaign, through November and December. This includes a 10-city promotional tour. To try and help move the product, a lavish TV commercial for the video game is produced by Spielberg, who also handpicks its director. Even utilizing the cinematographer and camera operator from the film doesn’t help the 30-second and 60-second versions of the ad dig E.T. the video game out of its hole. Even Michael Moone, president of Atari’s consumer division, would admit, rather understatedly, “The cartridge did not live up to our expectations.” Bob Abbate, president of the Sounds Alive chain of music stores of Connecticut, would put the industry’s attitude about the game’s release more succinctly: “E.T. is a bomb”.

These marquee game releases expose another problem aspect of the video game industry that has surfaced: it has become overly hit-driven. The vast majority of sales for games, sometimes up to 80%, come from current hits that are heavily promoted with expensive ad campaigns, while the growing back catalog languishes. Having been complacent in the boom years when nearly every new video game quickly sold out, when the surmised “hits” stumble upon release, grumblings from distributors and retailers now begin about formal return policies for surplus product from video game companies, a process known in the industry as “stock balancing”. Most of these buy-back agreements equate to “buy two games, return one”. Now facing blowback from distributors and retailers angry after years of, at best, indifference and at worst, abuse from Atari, the company is left with a large inventory of unsold or returned cartridges as E.T. becomes one of the greatest video game flops in history, creating a noticeable drag on company sales figures. An E.T. coin-op game, as well as a computer version, are slated for release, although only the computer product makes it to stores: A similar yet different version of the console game, E.T. Phone Home! is released in early 1983 by Atari for its 8-bit computer systems. Along with improved graphics comes a role reversal, with Elliott on the run looking for the scattered phone parts across four screens, while E.T. hides at home offering telepathic clues to their locations. The game also benefits from a group approach to its development, with game designers, graphic artists, sound engineers and programmers teaming up to produce it. Although E.T. never flies over into the arcade video game space, he does have a deleterious effect over there too: the unprecedented success the movie enjoys in theatres over 1982 (and beyond) draws kids out of the arcades and slows coin-drop into arcade games even more. 

The Big Dump of Atari E.T. Video Games

With unsold inventory piling up, under cover of night on September 22, 1983, transport trucks line up at Atari’s El Paso, TX. facility, now a “remanufacturing” plant used as a repair facility, as well as a warehouse repository for broken or unsellable game cartridges and systems. Its former manufacturing operations have been off-loaded to factories in Puerto Rico, as well as Taiwan and other points in the Far East. There the trucks are loaded with thousands and thousands of unsold Pac-Man, E.T., and other surplus video game cartridges such as fellow movie adaptation flop Raiders of the Lost Ark, originally a product titled Foxbat until the project is re-tooled for use under licence of Spielberg’s smash-hit movie. Atari’s version is released in November of 1982. Also designed by Warshaw, the obtuse gameplay of Raiders makes the game mechanics of E.T. seem clear and concise.  Joining these “hits” are back-catalog games that have been languishing, along with  various hardware prototypes and limited production runs littering the El Paso Atari inventory storehouse. The filled trucks are driven about 90 miles north to the Alamogordo municipal landfill in New Mexico, home of another big bomb; nearby is the site of the 1945 Trinity test, the first explosion of a nuclear device.

The contents of the trailers are then loaded onto dump trucks and emptied into the Alamogordo City Dump, run over with a bulldozer and covered with a layer of 50 cubic yards of concrete, in order to deter looters… although adventurous kids plunder the site after the activity and find playable cartridges. Somewhere between 14 – 20 of these loads make the trek from El Paso to Alamogordo over the following week, each truck hauling around 100 cubic yards of discards from Atari. The game company insists to the curious press that the burial was done to dispose of “defective” inventory. Considered a kind of urban myth by some over the years, including E.T. designer Howard Scott Warshaw himself, the Atari landfill burial is confirmed by a crew filming the documentary Atari: Game Over in 2014. They uncover tens of thousands of cartridges of E.T., Raiders, and others at the site, along with other flotsam and jetsam that Atari wanted to disappear. If only the company could have buried the lack of confidence the missed sales figures of games like E.T. fosters in shareholders, retailers and consumers alike as easily. They’re not the only culprit, however, as both Mattel and Coleco overproduce cartridges in a market becoming less and less able to support them.

Shovelling Dirt Into the Grave of Video Games

Even though successful third-party game makers Activision and Imagic produce some of the better games for the 2600 in its later years, when these game-making upstarts first appeared on the scene Atari saw their grip sliding on the control of the software library for their system, and they start legal tussles with the two companies. Atari eventually loses its case in court, opening the floodgates for third-party manufacturers of games for their systems. Soon everybody and their dog has a game out, and while this does expand the machine’s library of cartridges, little concern is given to their quality. The vast majority of them are simplistic knock-offs of arcade game concepts: maze games in the Pac-Man vein, or platform games a la Donkey Kong. There are 50 companies publishing games for the 2600 in 1983, outfits such as 20th Century Fox, Avalon Hill, CommaVid, MCA, Froggo, ZiMAG, VentureVision, Milton Bradley, Telesys, Sega, Spectravision and Tigervision. To put some of these accomplices to the murder of the early 80’s video game industry up into a lineup for closer identification:

• If you are an aficionado of B-grade schlock movies, you might recognize the name Charles Band. By 1983 he has an impressive resume built up as a film producer and director, including such classic fare as Laserblast, Tourist Trap and Parasite. It is with this pedigree that Band wades into the unsuspecting video game industry in 1983, founding Wizard Games. Game production is contracted out to a development studio started by former programmers at Games by Apollo, which had declared Chapter XI bankruptcy on Nov. 12, 1982. Wizard licenses two notorious horror movies for their first video game products for the 2600: Halloween and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. It’s true that the violence contained within the resultant games is blockily abstract, but blocky abstract violence is all the public has at the time in video games, so after whole weeks of development time the games are released and the obligatory controversy generated. With most stores unwilling to stock the games, and those that do keeping them behind the counter on a request-only basis, sales figures are understandably low. Unfortunately, Wizard’s plans for a game based on softcore porn movie Flesh Gordon never hardens up.

• Game maker Xonox is a division of K-tel, infamous TV sellers of “50 Original Hits” music compilations. Their idea of innovation in the video game space is to sell Double Ender cartridges for the 2600. With a suggested price to retailers of around $42, Double Enders have two separate 8K games accessible via edge connectors on each end. Early entries for these dual games include Spike’s Peak/Ghost Manor and Chuck Norris Superkicks/Artillery Duel. The most clever bit of this whole exercise? The palindrome company name, readable any way their cartridges are inserted. Any way you look at it, K-tel is eventually turned upside down by its heels and shaken for loose change by creditors, when it posts a fiscal year loss of $33.8 million and files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in late-1984.

• CBS, distributors of the ColecoVision outside of North America, enters the videogame publishing biz via a four-year partnership deal with Bally Mfg. Corp, creating CBS Video Games. This gives CBS rights to available Bally/Midway arcade games for adaptation to home consoles and computers. The cartridges are produced and marketed by Gabriel Industries, the toy arm of CBS, headed by Benjamin Ordover. CBS Video Games vice-president Robert L. Hunter, a 29-year-old MIT graduate, is at the helm of the new venture.  Adaptations of Gorf and Wizard of Wor are two of the bigger hits from the partnership between CBS and Bally/Midway, both games developed by Dave Nutting Associates, makers of the classic one-on-one shooting game Gun Fight for Bally/Midway. With a name change from CBS Video Games to CBS Electronics, the company develops 2600 cartridges with the RAM Plus Power Chip installed inside, adding 16K of memory. This allows games with advanced 3D graphics for the system like Tunnel Runner, as well as the first-person combat flight simulator Wings, a game within weeks of being released when CBS suddenly pulls the plug on their video game division in late 1983. CBS Software is also formed, releasing games primarily for the Atari 8-bit computers, via a licensing agreement with K-Byte Software.

• Another media conglomerate, 20th Century Fox, throws their hat into the crowded ring with their video game arm, Fox Video Games. The initial plan for this venture is that Atari programmers Tod Frye and Howard Scott Warshaw, creators of some of the company’s best-selling games, would leave Atari and form this division for Fox. This, before Frye threatens Atari management with the prospect and the company nearly instantaneously starts handing out large cheques and installing a more generous bonus system, satisfying its biggest game development performers. Headed by former Mattel Electronics Sales and Marketing Senior VP Frank O’Connell, Fox Video Games cranks out 20-some carts into the market. Tagged as Games of the Century, a few are licensed from computer software game company Sirius Software, and Fox also reaches into their own film library for titles like Fantastic Voyage,  the Barry Bostwick SF extravaganza Mega Force, and teen sex-romp Porky’s. It is the latter game, based on the hit screwball teen-sex comedy film, that O’Connell publicly predicts will become “the most successful video and personal computer game in 1983.” While planned for a plethora of video game systems and home computers, Porky’s only ambles onto the 2600 and Atari’s 800 computer. Predictably, Fox also cranks out a game based on the 1979 smash hit SF-horror movie Alien. This tie-in is facilitated by Fox brass taking what amounts to merely a programming experiment to see if a Pac-Man clone can be created on the 2600 without all the flicker of Atari’s lamented version, and then insisting that the little figure running around this maze be shown holding a rectangle that could, with a healthy spray of imagination, be considered a flamethrower. Voila! An Alien game is born from its slimy egg-sack! Fox’s biggest stretch might be a game based on the film M*A*S*H, where chief surgeon Hawkeye Pierce actually flies helicopters around rescuing injured soldiers and skydiving medics. At least he does get a bit of surgery in between flights, Ferret Face!. Sirius had actually first been contracted to do the M*A*S*H game for Fox, but for whatever reason the company decides to eschew the Sirus submission and go with their own version. With M*A*S*H star Alan Alda already pitching for Atari computers, Jamie Farr, Cpl. Max Klinger himself, does KP duty selling this one. Mega Force, M*A*S*H and Alien are all programmed under contract to Fox by Doug Neubauer, who probably had more fame as the creator of the excellent Star Raiders for the Atari 400/800 computers.  Frank O’Connell regals members of the press at the 1983 Summer CES with sales numbers of M*A*S*H game cartridges of over 500,000 units, with a possibility of them hitting a million. However, the initial price of the M*A*S*H cartridge for the 2600 eventually goes under the knife in 1983, from $29.99 down to $14.95. Announcing the price slashing, O’Connell paints it as a good thing for the industry, proclaiming that moves like this will clear out surplus inventory to make room for new games that gamemakers would somehow be able to charge higher prices for. He also expects the enormous software glut to be cleared out within two months. This is a highly optimistic forecast, especially considering the gold-rushing Fox itself is perpetrating on the video game market via their seemingly reckless diving into their media property pool:  video game adaptations of Fox works as far flung as the Kenny Rogers vehicle (literally) Six Pack, SF classic The Day the Earth Stood Still, female empowerment tale 9 to 5 and the Lee Majors-starring TV show The Fall Guy are some floated by the company. Even a game based on the Robert Redford/Paul Newman classic western Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid is threatened by Fox, but mercifully never emerges out into the light of day. Fox does wins the award for best video game title ever: The Earth Dies Screaming. Another thing that dies screaming is the partnership of Fox and Sirius: the latter files a 20 million dollar lawsuit against Fox in the later part of 1983, containing forty counts of breach-of-contract, fraud and lack of good faith charges. On November 8th, Fox Video Games announces that it is shutting down, effective immediately.

JUMP: A closer look at the M*A*S*H video game, during TDE’s Oscar Week

• Board game giant Parker Brothers had rolled the dice on electronic games in the late 70’s with items like their first boardgame/electronics hybrid Code Name: Sector, along with light-pattern handheld Merlin. Under the leadership of VP of consumer electronics Richard Stearns, the company makes their move into the video game market via a series of lucrative licenses. While these initial releases are made for the Atari 2600, Parker Brothers had originally approached Mattel in 1981, offering to make games for the Intellivision if the company would forward technical specs for the machine to speed game design. Mattel passes on the proposal, so Parker Brothers jumps into the rapidly crowding Atari pool. Their strategy for an early boost in the market is aggressive licensing, including a valuable deal with Lucasfilm to make console games based on the Star Wars franchise. Their first game, released in June of 1982 and based on the second Star Wars film, is titled Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back. For their second game, Parker Bros. produces an adaptation of the hit arcade game Frogger. Together, both of these initial 2600 games sell over three million cartridges, helping the company pull in $115 million in sales for 1982. Empire alone accounts for over thirty millions dollars of that figure. Parker Brothers would later release Star Wars: Jedi Arena, and titles such as Star Wars: Return of the Jedi: Death Star Battle. The mouthful-of-a-title Star Wars: Return of the Jedi: Ewok Adventure is put in the development pipeline, completed, but never released as the marketing department of Parker Brothers determined the controls too complicated. In 1983 the company is responsible for the highly promoted and anticipated Spider-Man, featuring Marvel’s iconic web-slinging superhero, for the Atari 2600. Parker Brothers also makes the largest bid yet for an arcade game license, paying Nintendo $2 million for the rights to the hit Popeye, plus a promise of $4 in royalties for every cartridge they sell of their console translations. They also put out product based on Strawberry Shortcake, G.I. Joe and James Bond.  Backed by a $30 million ad campaign, Parker Brothers has a slate of 16 new video games, for various platforms, scheduled for release through 1983. One is another big licence for the company, Lord of the Rings, which is near completion for the 2600 and set for release in 1983, with a planned version for the Intellivision as well. Given a subtitle of Journey to Rivendell, the project is then unceremoniously cancelled late in 1983.

• Quaker Oats, known more for breakfast cereals than high-technology, enters the market via its acquisition of game maker U.S. Games, Inc., later changing its name to Vidtec. The company quickly builds a library of titles by contracting out to game development company James Wickstead Design Associates, of which Garry Kitchen is an employee. There he makes the shooter Space Jockey, probably U.S. Games’ most popular title out of a bunch of other fairly forgettable games. One U.S. Games release, put out in February of 1983, is initially titled Treasures of the Deep while under development at Wickstead, and then renamed Guardians of Treasure by U.S. Games. It is subsequently saddled with the mouthful of a title Name This Game and Win $10,000. It is designed by Ron Dubren and tied to a contest asking people to submit their own title for the game. U.S. Games goes out of business before the contest’s April 30th, 1983 deadline. Garry Kitchen eventually leaves U.S. Game’s  JWDA developer partner to join his brother Dan at the greener climes of Activision. Apropos, a popular game from U.S. Games is Eggomania, the action of which closely emulates Activision’s hit game Kaboom!

• Taking a run at matching the crassness of Fox’s pillaging of their TV and film properties. Sega’s sister company Paramount Pictures (both reside under the wide umbrella of Gulf + Western) announce a desire to leverage their video game relations in promoting their media library. While games based on the Nick Nolte/Eddie Murphy cop comedy 48 hrs., hilarious parody film Airplane! or SF classic War of the Worlds might seem a bit suspect, Sega really rattles teeth threatening to make a video game based on the Dustin Hoffman/Laurence Olivier thriller Marathon Man. One could only imagine the company making a running sports game and slapping the movie title upon it. And of course, you know…. there’s always Star Trek. Qapla’!

 

Rock ‘n Roll Video Games: Don’t Stop Believing

Food products such as Purina dog food, Coca-Cola and Kool-Aid are all also being hawked by shoddy video game tie-ins. In a combination of two time-honoured teen-age time-wasters, rock & roll and video games, America’s #1 rock band at the time, Journey, struts onto the video game stage with  Journey Escape in 1982. It is an attempt to boost the aforementioned synergy between music stores and video games. Journey Escape is designed by J. Ray Dettling, also the creator of Frankenstein’s Monster and Bermuda Triangle for Data Age. About the toughest part of the job for Dettling with the Journey game is squeezing in all of the rock band’s iconography into a 2600 cart, especially after spending a lot of the cartridge’s 4K memory opening the game with the spectacle of the group’s famous scarab Escape vehicle breaking through the cosmic egg a la the famous cover image for their multi-platinum rock album Escape. Snippets of two Journey hits Don’t Stop Believing and, naturally, Escape, also have to have space found for them within the tight confines of the cartridge. Versions for the Intellivision and ColecoVision are also promised to soon take the stage, along with promises of future games possibly starring The Rolling Stones, Styx and Fleetwood Mac. But with Journey Escape the first actual game based on a Rock ‘n Roll band, it also is the first home game that reverses the common adaptation trend and moves from the original VCS cartridge by Data Age into a coin-op version by Bally/Midway the next year. A collection of five game stages, the arcade version of Journey Escape does contain at least one saving grace: digitized images of each band member’s head on the characters, facilitated by a process created by Ralph Baer, creator of the first home video game system, the Magnavox Odyssey. The company ships 400,000 copies of the rock ‘n roll video game to retailers accompanied by a $4.5 million ad campaign of promotions and advertising paid for by Data Age. Unfortunately for the games company, only 25,000 of the cartridges actually sell. Due to a stock balancing policy Data Age has agreed to that every unsold copy of the game can be returned, the rest get sent back and, on the hook to buy back the unsold games as well as facing high licensing fees from the Journey people, Data Age files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on April 6, 1983.