High Hopes
- It’s the Atari era. For now. 1981 trade ad with Centipede, Tempest and Space Duel, 1981
- Ad for TV show Discover: The World of Science. Paid by Atari, features a computer segment, imagine that! 1982
Pac-Mess
JUMP: History of the arcade version of Pac-Man
It is painfully apparent that the game is a rush job, pushed out in order to quickly recoup the money paid by Atari to Namco for the Pac-Man license. Programmer Frye is ensconced in a room by himself to code for the four-month deadline, and upon release the game is a big hit, eventually hitting nine million cartridges sold. With a 10 cent royalty on every copy sold, his sales-based bonus results in a paycheque approaching a million dollars, which he cockily staples to his office door. Better versions are eventually released for other platforms like Atari’s own 400/800 computers and the 5200 Supersystem, as well as other manufacturers’ game platforms like the Commodore 64. Atari is eventually redeemed with the vastly improved Ms. Pac-Man on 2600, appropriately released on Valentine’s Day of 1983.
Kassar’s Revenge
Of course, not every game released by the company of this era is a turkey, as shown by the marvelous Yars’ Revenge, released in May of 1982. The game is originally conceived as a port of Cinematronics’ hit vector arcade game Star Castle until the licensing deal falls through. The designer of Atari’s version is Howard Scott Warshaw, creator of some of the more complicated 2600 games, including Raiders of the Lost Ark as well as The A-Team, a game which itself had started out being called called Saboteur until the graphics are altered and the name of the hit early 80’s Mr. T vehicle is slapped on the cartridge. Warshaw juggles the play mechanics of the now-license-less Star Castle port around a bit, and Yars’ Revenge becomes one of the most original and involving games in the 2600 library. The title character’s name is taken from Atari president Ray Kassar, to show his triumph over the failed license deal.
- A closeup of the artwork from the 2600 Yar’s Revenge box, 1982
- Animatic for “The Fly”, a 1982 Atari theatrical ad made by Robert Abel and Associates
- Abel film creator Clark Anderson stands next to fellow filmmaker John Hughes, of Abel.
- Actor Rod Davidson acts in the 1982 Atari ad for Yar’s Revenge
To herald the release of Yar, as well as promote 2600 games Asteroids and Star Raiders, Atari commissions an impressive two-minute commercial, titled The Fly, featuring state-of-the-art CGI by Robert Abel and Associates, who also do CGI work on the groundbreaking Disney film Tron, released the same year as the commercial. Made to run in theatres over the summer of 1982, the ad features actor Rod Davidson sitting in an office chair with his back to the audience, posing as an Atari game designer brainstorming ideas, which manifest themselves as computerized images zooming and swirling around him. Designer-director Clark Anderson and co-director and technical expert John Hughes of Abel first design the commercial as an animatic on an Evans and Sutherland Picture System II computer graphics terminal, the animatic being a B&W wireframe version that is the equivalent of the pencil test in traditional animation. The wireframe design is then filled in with tightly-packed smaller lines, and filters are used between the output video screen and the 35mm camera recording it on film to add colour fill to the images. Actor Davidson is filmed in front of a blue screen, acting against the animatic hidden on a video screen in front of him. Computerized lighting cues expose the actor to the various lighting effects synced to the colourful video game elements; there are 80 different lighting events over the two-minute commercial. Live action, CGI and other VFX elements are then matted together, to make an ad that startles moviegoers in 1982.
- Warner chairman Steve Ross, 1982
- There’s no healing this one, E.T.
- Box art for the dreaded Atari E.T. game
- E.T. on the cover of Videogaming Illustrated, Dec 1982
- Atari digging its own grave in E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial
- Newspaper article on the E.T. cartridge dump
Extra-Terrible
Atari’s next big fumble is 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 publically 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.
The resulting product nets Warshaw a $200,000 payment, but it is torture for gamers to play, featuring frustrating control over the lost alien, along with endlessly confusing gameplay. Expecting a windfall of sales, Atari manufactures around five million 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. Even though wary retailers have scaled back their orders on the game, 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. 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 ad dig E.T. the video game out of its hole. Bob Abbate, president of the Sounds Alive chain of music stores of Connecticut, would put the industry’s attitude about the game’s release most succinctly: “E.T. is a bomb”.

A procession of dump trucks, ready to lay part of video game history to rest in Alamogordo, NM, 1983
The Big Dump
With unsold inventory piling up, under cover of night sometime in late 1983 a convoy of 14 dump trucks lines up at Atari’s El Paso, TX. manufacturing plant, previously rendered defunct with its operations off-loaded to factories in Puerto Rico, as well as Taiwan and other points in the Far East. There the trucks are loaded with millions of unsold Pac-Man, E.T., and other surplus cartridges such as fellow movie adaptation flop Raiders of the Lost Ark, 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 unwanted games are various hardware prototypes and limited production runs littering what now serves mostly as an inventory storehouse. The filled trucks are driven north to the Alamogordo municipal landfill in New Mexico, home of another big bomb; nearby was the site of the 1945 Trinity test, the first explosion of a nuclear device. The contents of the trucks are dumped and covered with a layer of concrete, in order to deter looters. Atari later insists the sudden burial was done to dispose of “defective” inventory. If only they could bury 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.
- Atari’s ‘E.T.’ game celebrated on the cover of Atari Age, holiday season 1982
- Another bomb they dropped near Alamagordo
- Artwork from 2600 Raiders, another game they tried to bury, 1982
- E.T. fared a bit better with E.T. Phone Home!, for Atari 8-bit computers, 1983
Enjoying reading your video game history. What is the “one special exception” mentioned in the shutdown of Atari game development?
It was the Atari Jaguar 64-bit console.
Could I get the information I need to cite this article?
Sure, I’ll shoot you a note to get the details.
Hey, didn’t get a note from you yet. Can you send it to my email?
I’ve sent you a couple of emails from the bill@thedoteaters account. You might have to check your spam filter.
Hello, I’m currently writing a paper on the topic of the Atari video game crash. I was wondering if you wouldn’t mind emailing me some of your sources/information regarding this topic? I definitely enjoy researching this idea, but there does not seem to be enough information online for me to write an effective paper.
Thank you.
You can find all the sources at the bottom of the final page of the article, by clicking the Sources tab. Glad you find the site useful, and I wouldn’t mind reading your paper when it’s finished.
Hi! Could i also get the information to cite this article (author & date)?
Thank you
The author is William Hunter, published 2013/03/17.
1983 was a great year. I was only 12 and discovered jerking off. So I would play Atari 2600 all day and jerk off all night
Sounds like you had your priorities straight.
Console sales numbers are not quite right. If it’s total sales through mid 1982, 12M Atari and 1.5M coleco vision might be okay but Intellivisions should be about 2.5 million.
There’s no evidence that any Atari 7800 were sold in 1984.
Grabbing a handful of loose cartridge out of a 55 gallon drum and paying $10, thinking there might be one good game in the bunch. Never actually trying all of them, and missing the fact that two of them were really good games.
Tale as old as time.