Speaker 1: Everyone. It's Joshua. For this week's select, I've chosen our
Speaker 1: twenty eighteen episode on ET the video game. It's one
Speaker 1: of those topics that you thought you knew about, but
Speaker 1: after you hear this episode, you'll realize that you've been
Speaker 1: grossly misinformed by the Internet. Who knew that could happen?
Speaker 1: Enjoy this trip down nostalgia lane.
Speaker 2: Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of Iheartradioy.
Speaker 1: And welcome to the podcast. I'm josh and there's Chuck
Speaker 1: and there's Jerry, and it's like the holiday season. I
Speaker 1: feel great.
Speaker 3: It is Holidays with a Z, and we're gonna do
Speaker 3: what we almost did for a short stuff.
Speaker 1: Oh yes, Chuck, you're commended for that call.
Speaker 3: Well, I was just like I kind of wanted to
Speaker 3: do this one. Always is a long stuff. We don't
Speaker 3: have a show called mediums stuff yet.
Speaker 1: No, we have a so so stuffed called Stuff you
Speaker 1: Should Know.
Speaker 3: Yeah, but yeah, I saw that documentary Atari game over
Speaker 3: a few years ago.
Speaker 1: It's a good one.
Speaker 3: And I also guested on tech Stuff and did a
Speaker 3: two part episode on the history of Atari.
Speaker 4: It's a good one with Strickland.
Speaker 3: He's great too, and we could probably do Atari on
Speaker 3: its own at some point too.
Speaker 1: I agree, I think we definitely should.
Speaker 3: But this is I mean, I was about to say
Speaker 3: if Strickland and I could get two episodes out of it,
Speaker 3: but you know how that guy goes on.
Speaker 1: Oh my god, he's the hardest working man in podcast business.
Speaker 1: I'll tell you that.
Speaker 4: Just ask.
Speaker 1: So we're talking today about what is widely believed to
Speaker 1: be the worst video game of all time, except that
Speaker 1: it's not. Except that it's not. Yes, it's true. I
Speaker 1: love stories like this where it's like everything you thought
Speaker 1: you knew was wrong, and really stop and ask yourself,
Speaker 1: how did you even know that this truth that you
Speaker 1: knew before. I love that man.
Speaker 3: Yeah, E t the Atari video game a lot of people.
Speaker 4: It's that whole.
Speaker 3: Internet bandwagon thing. I think, Yes, worst game of all time.
Speaker 3: They tried to bury it in the desert. It was
Speaker 3: so bad.
Speaker 4: Killed Atari, killed the whole stinking industry.
Speaker 1: Right, But it was just that bad of a game.
Speaker 1: But you've played it.
Speaker 4: No, Yeah, I will say this, it may be one
Speaker 4: of the one of the most disappointing games of all time.
Speaker 4: It could be, Yes, because if you were a kid
Speaker 4: back then like me, and you and you played Atari
Speaker 4: like I did. It was it was a disappointment.
Speaker 1: It was greatly anticipated. I'm sure a lot.
Speaker 3: Of anticipation that was part, you know, that was that
Speaker 3: was probably the biggest reason why it gets all the
Speaker 3: attention because it was e t It wasn't what said,
Speaker 3: dumb game sorcerer, yeah, or fast food. There were so
Speaker 3: many bad video games for Atari.
Speaker 1: Yeah, there were a lot.
Speaker 4: It was awful.
Speaker 1: So will this come out and say, no, ET is
Speaker 1: not the worst video game of all time. There were
Speaker 1: a lot of worst, far far worst video games. Yes
Speaker 1: than ET, But like you were saying, as far as
Speaker 1: the anticipation went, as far as the letdown went, as
Speaker 1: far as the loss of money went, you can understand
Speaker 1: how people would say this is the worst of all time.
Speaker 1: But also the timing of its failure was so utterly,
Speaker 1: amazingly perfect that it just took it from worst video
Speaker 1: game of all time to worst video game of all time.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's like here Atari in video home console game industry,
Speaker 3: you're not doing well, and I notice you're sinking. Let
Speaker 3: me tie this anvil around your ankle that's shaped like ET.
Speaker 1: Yep, that's right.
Speaker 4: It's just really bad timing.
Speaker 1: So let's get into the story because it's one of
Speaker 1: the more interesting ones, and it features a great guy
Speaker 1: named Howard Scott wore Shaw, who if you've seen the
Speaker 1: movie Game Over, you have probably come to really like
Speaker 1: and admire good dude.
Speaker 4: Good dude, brilliant designer.
Speaker 1: Huh and like a just a genuinely great guy. He
Speaker 1: The story begins back in nineteen eighty two, I believe, Yeah,
Speaker 1: it was nineteen eighty two. He was a designer at Atari.
Speaker 1: He'd apparently started out writing Coda Hewlett Packard and was
Speaker 1: very unhappy, so he made the move over to Atari,
Speaker 1: even though he had zero experience with game design, but
Speaker 1: he was really an exciting game designer because he came
Speaker 1: up with some really innovative ideas.
Speaker 3: Yes, he Yars Revenge is one of the best Atari
Speaker 3: twenty six hundred games of all time.
Speaker 1: Did you have that one?
Speaker 4: Oh?
Speaker 1: Yeah, I never played it.
Speaker 4: It's great. It's great.
Speaker 1: It's kind of space invaderies or something. It's like a
Speaker 1: shooter thing, kind of yeah, single screen shooter.
Speaker 4: Well, you're a I guess you were a Yar, and
Speaker 4: you're this sort of bug like Reacher and instead of
Speaker 4: shooting at something to chip away at it. You do
Speaker 4: it so with your body, so you just fly into this.
Speaker 1: Oh I think I had that went You.
Speaker 4: Would fly into this. I mean, of course all this
Speaker 4: stuff was supposed to represent like a spaceship or a planet,
Speaker 4: but it was made up of you know, blocks and cubes,
Speaker 4: so I don't even know what it was. But your
Speaker 4: whole point was to make it.
Speaker 1: Smaller, gotcha, and you would fly into I know.
Speaker 4: You instead of yeah, shooting, you would fly into it.
Speaker 1: For my money, that kind of game the best of
Speaker 1: all time with Centipede.
Speaker 4: Cinipede is great.
Speaker 1: It was great.
Speaker 3: I mean a lot of those games I played today
Speaker 3: when I happened upon an arcade, Galagha and Frogger and
Speaker 3: Centipede and Defender, like those are still really good challenging
Speaker 3: jus sure, miss fun games, yeah, miss bac man, they
Speaker 3: just stand up still. It's not like you go to
Speaker 3: Galagha or Jousts now and you're like, this is easy.
Speaker 1: What was I thinking? I was such a kid.
Speaker 4: There are still hard challenging games, and I think that's
Speaker 4: sort of they to a good video game is it's
Speaker 4: got to be winnable, but it's got to be hard
Speaker 4: because a kid didn't want to you know, a pushover, right,
Speaker 4: but a kid also wants to win.
Speaker 1: So Howard Scott Warshaw knew this like he was a
Speaker 1: game designer. He wasn't like a code monkey or anything
Speaker 1: like that. He was a game designer, an artist. I'm
Speaker 1: sure he considered himself, especially at the time, and he
Speaker 1: should have. One of the other things he was known
Speaker 1: for was he was the guy who realized that you
Speaker 1: could make a game way more enjoyable if you created
Speaker 1: a backstory for it. So rather than like, drive this
Speaker 1: car there, you're actually running away from this gang of
Speaker 1: you know, international mafia guys who are trying to kidnap
Speaker 1: your girlfriend or whatever. Yeah, you make up a backstory
Speaker 1: for it. The player reads this backstory and then plays,
Speaker 1: they care that much more about the person because their
Speaker 1: imagination is now kicked in. They're not just doing a
Speaker 1: mindless task. They're imagining what's going on in computer world.
Speaker 1: And he did that for games, and he was one
Speaker 1: of the first, if not the first designer to create
Speaker 1: backstories and biographies for his characters and games.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and you know what just now is sort of
Speaker 3: hitting me that part of the appeal was the imagination
Speaker 3: of the kid. So like when you got the game
Speaker 3: Adventure or Asteroids and Asteroids, you were a pencil drawn
Speaker 3: triangle shooting at pencil drawn shapes.
Speaker 1: Shooting pencils at pencil drawn shapes.
Speaker 3: Shooting dots at pencil drawn shapes. An Adventure, you are
Speaker 3: a cube that flew around with an arrow attached to
Speaker 3: you that was supposed to be your sword. But when
Speaker 3: you look at the actual cartridge or the box that
Speaker 3: it came in, they had this great artwork of this
Speaker 3: night on a horse with his sword drawn in asteroids,
Speaker 3: this han solo like pilot like cruising through a you know,
Speaker 3: an asteroid field, and that would kickstarts. That starts the
Speaker 3: imagination of a ten year old, right, and then they
Speaker 3: forget they're a cube, right or an arrow?
Speaker 1: Yeah, it makes it that much more real.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it was really really cool.
Speaker 1: Because the imagination can do some pretty amazing stuff with
Speaker 1: eight bytes of graphic.
Speaker 4: Yeah, you know for sure.
Speaker 1: So Warshaw figured.
Speaker 4: This out, Yeah, designing worlds.
Speaker 1: He would design easter eggs into his games too. Yeah
Speaker 1: he wasn't the first, but yes, no, but he was
Speaker 1: an early person to do that.
Speaker 4: Yeah, Adventure was the first, I think.
Speaker 1: And in addition to Yours Revenge, he also already had
Speaker 1: a hit in the Raiders of the Lost Art game.
Speaker 1: He had designed that and it's still laid so much.
Speaker 1: I read you did. Oh yeah, so from what I
Speaker 1: never played that one. From what I understand you, it
Speaker 1: was extremely difficult. You it required both joy sticks. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there was. I think I read somewhere that there were
Speaker 1: thirty three screens, which is unheard of.
Speaker 4: I could buy that.
Speaker 1: And that like people still have trouble beating it today.
Speaker 3: Well, it's it was really hard. I remember very specifically.
Speaker 3: There was one part where you were to parachute parachute
Speaker 3: from one screen and it would all of a sudden,
Speaker 3: you went to the bottom and it would pop up
Speaker 3: and you're on the next screen going down and there's
Speaker 3: a tree on the left, and you had to start
Speaker 3: that jump early, going hard left and hook onto that
Speaker 3: tree with your parachute. If you hit at the wrong angle,
Speaker 3: it burst your parachute and you would die, and if
Speaker 3: you didn't, you would hook onto it and slide perfectly.
Speaker 3: And it was probably one of the hardest things I've
Speaker 3: ever had to do in a video game.
Speaker 1: I know, you get to this day life.
Speaker 4: No, as far as video gameplay though.
Speaker 3: Really it was very, very challenging, but it was possible.
Speaker 3: So when you tried it twenty seven times and you
Speaker 3: nail it on that twenty eight, like you would run
Speaker 3: around the neighborhood telling all your friends that you nailed
Speaker 3: the parachute jump really really hard.
Speaker 1: But it was so hard that it was like you
Speaker 1: would get frustrated or it kept you sucking.
Speaker 4: No, no, no, no, You're like, I know I can get it.
Speaker 1: There's the key and that's.
Speaker 4: Where ET messed up. But we'll get to that, okay.
Speaker 1: So on June, it's funny, he remembers us the date
Speaker 1: on June twenty seventh, nineteen eighty two, Howard s Gott
Speaker 1: Warshaw's hanging around Atari and he gets a phone call.
Speaker 1: He gets a phone call from the CEO, Ray Casar himself.
Speaker 1: That was a big deal back then. Oh sure, and
Speaker 1: Ray Casar says, hey, kid, we know you, we love you.
Speaker 1: We've got something going on with Steven Spielberg. He remembers
Speaker 1: that you made the Raiders of the Lost Art game
Speaker 1: for him. He thinks, you're a certifiable genius, but we
Speaker 1: have a special assignment for you. We want you to
Speaker 1: make the et video game. Can you do it? Wait,
Speaker 1: don't answer yet. Can you do it in five weeks?
Speaker 1: Then he went sure, yeah, he said yeah, which I
Speaker 1: mean even today, you're like five weeks. That doesn't sounding
Speaker 1: very long. That was less than a tenth of the
Speaker 1: time that it would normally take.
Speaker 3: And he had the little secret is that he had
Speaker 3: already called some other people in the company and said,
Speaker 3: the CEO has this, like is this even possible? Or
Speaker 3: am I just crazy for asking this guy to do
Speaker 3: this in five weeks because it takes five or six months.
Speaker 3: And they all said, no, it's not possible. And he said, well,
Speaker 3: I'm going to ask him.
Speaker 1: Anyway, right, And Howard Scott Warshaw didn't realize that they'd
Speaker 1: already told him like, no, this can't be done when
Speaker 1: he said yes, but he was locked in the punch
Speaker 1: and he was twenty four years old and sure, full
Speaker 1: of full of exuberants and hubris and all sorts of stuff,
Speaker 1: and said I can do this. So he did. And
Speaker 1: the reason we should say, the reason why this this
Speaker 1: schedule was so short and usually took five to six
Speaker 1: months for a game to be developed, and he had
Speaker 1: five weeks to do it, and The reason why is
Speaker 1: because the haggling the deal to get the rights for
Speaker 1: the et game for Atari to purchase them, which they
Speaker 1: bought for twenty one million dollars, took way longer than expected,
Speaker 1: and they really wanted this game out for in time
Speaker 1: for Christmas.
Speaker 4: That was the whole deal.
Speaker 1: So because of the because the deal had worked all
Speaker 1: the way up into the summer and Christmas was on
Speaker 1: the other edge, they needed also several weeks to manufacture
Speaker 1: the actual cartridges and get them into stores. Yeah, if
Speaker 1: you lay it all this timeline out, they left five
Speaker 1: weeks to develop a game from scratch. So they they
Speaker 1: knew just the guy to do it, and it was
Speaker 1: Howard's got Warshaw and Howard said I'll give it a shot.
Speaker 1: I'm going to do it.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: And I should point out that when you say five
Speaker 3: or six months is the usual time, five or six
Speaker 3: months was fast.
Speaker 4: The usual time was more than that.
Speaker 1: Well, you also probably had a team working on it.
Speaker 4: Like five or six months was the Rush version?
Speaker 1: Right?
Speaker 4: Anyway? Yeah, I mean I think I think.
Speaker 1: That the pretty delightful prog Rock version.
Speaker 4: Did that have a they should add their own video game.
Speaker 1: I'm surprised they didn't. They were like, right there, they
Speaker 1: did in that wheelhouse.
Speaker 4: We would like the twenty one to twelve game or something.
Speaker 1: We would know. Yeah, there's no way we wouldn't know
Speaker 1: about the Rush twenty one to twelve Atari game.
Speaker 3: So Warshaw gets to meet with Steven Spielberg in la
Speaker 3: and was not given direction or a brief. He meets
Speaker 3: with Spielberg says, here's what I proposed, this adventure game
Speaker 3: that follows a plot of the film somewhat where the
Speaker 3: kid is et playing the game. You are et, right,
Speaker 3: and you got to go around and collect all these
Speaker 3: pieces to build a phone so you can phone home,
Speaker 3: and the government's after you and these bad doctors are
Speaker 3: after you. It's just like your movie, right, And Spielberg
Speaker 3: was like, well, can't you just have him like running
Speaker 3: around eating Reese's pieces like pac Man?
Speaker 4: Yeah, and he went, oh.
Speaker 1: There's this great there's this great quote where he's like, here,
Speaker 1: here's one of my idols, Steven Spielberg asking me to
Speaker 1: knock off pac Man for the ET game. And I thought, well, gee, Stephen,
Speaker 1: couldn't you make something more like The Day of the earthstud?
Speaker 4: Yeah?
Speaker 1: Burn right, burn? So he apparently had to do a
Speaker 1: little fancy footwork to talk Spielberg into going with his
Speaker 1: vision rather than a pac Man knockoff of ET, which
Speaker 1: who knows, may have sold a lot better, but it
Speaker 1: was he got him to agree to his vision for
Speaker 1: this game. He said, no, this is a groundbreaking movie.
Speaker 1: We need to make a groundbreaking game. And so Spielberg
Speaker 1: agreed to it, and Warshaw started to get to work.
Speaker 1: So we should probably take a break before Scott, Howard
Speaker 1: Scott really jumps in it, all right, Chuck. So it's
Speaker 1: basically the beginning of July nineteen eighty two, and Howard
Speaker 1: Scott Warshaw is the sole programmer for an ET video game.
Speaker 1: Atari's biggest bet. That they spent twenty one million dollars
Speaker 1: on the rights too, that they're going to spend an
Speaker 1: additional five million dollars on the advertising budget, for the
Speaker 1: most anyone's ever spent on a video game up to
Speaker 1: that point. He's the only programmer who's going to make
Speaker 1: this game, and he has five weeks to do it,
Speaker 1: which from what I understand, no one had ever done before.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and this was Atari was a giant at the time.
Speaker 3: If video If the video game industry was beginning to slip.
Speaker 3: It wasn't like the public didn't really realize that yet.
Speaker 3: The industry may have, but Atari held about eighty percent
Speaker 3: of the market. They were at about two billion in
Speaker 3: annual sales and about three quarters of billion in profit,
Speaker 3: which is just unheard of.
Speaker 1: About two billion in profit in today's money.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so a ton of money. But they saw the
Speaker 4: writing on the wall.
Speaker 3: They knew that the personal computer like the Common or
Speaker 3: sixty four that could play games but also do a
Speaker 3: lot more, was a real genuine threat to the home console.
Speaker 1: So I read a contemporary article in the New York
Speaker 1: Times from nineteen eighty three talking about this, and Atari
Speaker 1: said they did not see the writing on the wall.
Speaker 4: Well, one of.
Speaker 1: Them said, the first six months of nineteen eighty three
Speaker 1: was one way. The second six months it was like
Speaker 1: we were in a totally different business.
Speaker 3: Yeah, but if you read interviews with him now, I
Speaker 3: think that might have.
Speaker 1: Been, Oh, the guy covering is well, yeah.
Speaker 3: I don't think you want to go out in the
Speaker 3: press in the moment and say, hey, everyone, we're super
Speaker 3: scared investors.
Speaker 1: Don't freak out, don't panic, You're right, Chuck. I feel
Speaker 1: a little foolish.
Speaker 3: So they what they did was they set Warshaw up
Speaker 3: with everything he would have at work. They set him
Speaker 3: up at home. So the only time he could not
Speaker 3: be working on this game was his very short drive
Speaker 3: over to the office. And he worked on it almost
Speaker 3: NonStop for five weeks.
Speaker 1: He had a manager that was assigned to him to
Speaker 1: make sure that he ate. That was I'm sure not
Speaker 1: the manager's only duty, but it was. One of the
Speaker 1: manager's new jobs was to make sure that Warshaw ate
Speaker 1: every day.
Speaker 4: How about a waffle?
Speaker 1: Sure, whatever, Stop bothering me.
Speaker 4: ET's in the pit again.
Speaker 1: So for five weeks he worked almost like you said,
Speaker 1: twenty four hours a day. He said, it's the hardest
Speaker 1: he's ever worked in his entire life.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 1: And when five weeks came and went, he handed off
Speaker 1: his He handed off the game. He finished it. He
Speaker 1: completed it in time. And it wasn't done in his opinion,
Speaker 1: or it would turn out in anybody's opinion, but it
Speaker 1: was done. It was a complete game that he had
Speaker 1: finished in five weeks, the et video game. And it
Speaker 1: wasn't just something like a pac Man knockoff. He'd given
Speaker 1: real thought to it and created a world that was
Speaker 1: much different from a lot of the other games at
Speaker 1: the time. At the time, it was a world like
Speaker 1: it was a cube shape told with six screens, and
Speaker 1: so if you walk to the left, you knew you
Speaker 1: were going to end up on this other screen. If
Speaker 1: you walked up, you wouldn't end up on the other screen.
Speaker 1: It was a world that you were navigating, rather than
Speaker 1: say like Yars Revenge, which is just one screen and
Speaker 1: everything's happening on the one screen and it may imply
Speaker 1: motion or something like this. With the Et game, you
Speaker 1: were moving from one area of this world to the next. Yeah,
Speaker 1: which is it was new. It wasn't new, but it was.
Speaker 1: It wasn't. It wasn't standard to have six screens, especially
Speaker 1: if you have five weeks to do it. Give a
Speaker 1: guy a break.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, No, I'm not saying it should. What I'm
Speaker 4: saying is that.
Speaker 3: It wasn't like some big revolutionary thing like the Raiders
Speaker 3: game was pre this and it had thirty something screened. Okay,
Speaker 3: all right, fine, and adventure like kids were used to
Speaker 3: this by this point. Okay, So it wasn't like, oh
Speaker 3: wait till they get a load of six screens, like
Speaker 3: leaving the screen.
Speaker 1: I see, but I think Howard Scott Warshaw should have
Speaker 1: gone to everybody's house and been like, here's your copy
Speaker 1: of et game as well. You know I made this
Speaker 1: in five weeks.
Speaker 3: Well he designed Easter eggs in there too, and I
Speaker 3: kind of wondered, like, how much time did he spend
Speaker 3: doing that with his own initials and like the little
Speaker 3: Yards Revenge Flower.
Speaker 1: I hadn't really thought about that.
Speaker 3: I don't know, so he says time was of the essence,
Speaker 3: though I just maybe put that last on the list.
Speaker 1: He says today that had he had one more week
Speaker 1: to just troubleshoot, he could have worked out all the kinks.
Speaker 4: He could have worked out the kinks and one more
Speaker 4: Easter egg.
Speaker 1: But he handed it out. He handed it off to Atari,
Speaker 1: and Atari said genius. They gave it to Steven Spielberg
Speaker 1: to play. Spielberg apparently liked it. And in the game
Speaker 1: it wasn't it wasn't just some dumb clunky game. It
Speaker 1: was a mediocre game, but it was a game, and
Speaker 1: it was done, and it was out the door, and
Speaker 1: they got it out in time for Christmas. The cartridges shipped.
Speaker 1: If you go back onto YouTube and search ET game
Speaker 1: ad or commercial of some extraordinarily nostalgic ads of ET
Speaker 1: dressed to Santa Claus playing his own video game of
Speaker 1: a kid like receiving the ET video game from ET
Speaker 1: out in the shed. Amazing stuff. So not only is
Speaker 1: it like Christmas time feeling, but like Christmas time nineteen
Speaker 1: eighty two.
Speaker 4: Feeling Christmas plus ET who over the top.
Speaker 1: It's nice. It's just like the the taste of ice
Speaker 1: sugar cookies swells from the inside of your mouth. You
Speaker 1: almost gag on it. It's so overpowering.
Speaker 3: So they produce, well, we don't know for sure how many,
Speaker 3: maybe as many as twelve million copies of this, at
Speaker 3: least four million.
Speaker 1: That's part of the urban legend.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, I don't think there's an exact exact number,
Speaker 3: but millions of copies of these were produced. Twenty one
Speaker 3: million dollars invested in the licensing, plus five five million
Speaker 3: dollars in advertising and marketing, not just I mean, who
Speaker 3: knows what they paid Warshaw or for the actual production.
Speaker 3: I mean, I doubt if it was millions of dollars.
Speaker 1: But he was probably salaried.
Speaker 4: They sunk a.
Speaker 3: Whole lot of money into this thing and sold. Okay,
Speaker 3: at first they sold about a half a million copies.
Speaker 3: And then and I remember, oh you do oh yeah,
Speaker 3: oh nice. Word got around And this was obviously long
Speaker 3: before the internet, uh huh, like you could still sell
Speaker 3: some stuff back then, before everyone realized it stunk. But
Speaker 3: and that's what was going on. But literally, kid to
Speaker 3: kid to kid in cul de sacs and classrooms got
Speaker 3: the word that the ET game stunk and it killed it.
Speaker 4: It did it is little kids killed it.
Speaker 1: They sold like a half a million copies right out
Speaker 1: of the gate, almost and then it peaked right there
Speaker 1: very quickly, right around the Christmas season, right yeah, I.
Speaker 4: Mean, just think about that. Though. It was children led
Speaker 4: to the demise.
Speaker 3: It's not like kids read an article in the newspaper,
Speaker 3: even a review on the ET game.
Speaker 4: It was kids going, man, that game stinks. Yeah what
Speaker 4: you bought that? Oh, don't buy it. It stinks.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's terrible.
Speaker 4: And that happened like a game of telephone all around
Speaker 4: the country.
Speaker 1: That's really cool.
Speaker 4: Simultaneously, kids get things done, they do, man.
Speaker 1: So, like you said, it happened pretty fast. They peaked
Speaker 1: at a half a million copies, and over time it
Speaker 1: managed to sell another million on top of that, So
Speaker 1: a million and a half copies success. I think it's
Speaker 1: like actually inn Atari's top ten of best sellers. But
Speaker 1: the problem is, if this story is a story of
Speaker 1: everything or anything, it's not the story of a over
Speaker 1: over confident game designer making a terrible game. It's a
Speaker 1: very confident game designer making a middling game. If it's
Speaker 1: a story of anything, it is of executives being drunk
Speaker 1: with confidence in Hubris. Yes that no matter what they
Speaker 1: put out, if it's tied to a hot property of
Speaker 1: like a movie or something, it's gonna sell. Doesn't matter
Speaker 1: what the game is, it's gonna sell. Problem one. Problem
Speaker 1: two was they forecasted based on that Hubris too. So
Speaker 1: not only did they say it's gonna sell no matter
Speaker 1: what we put out, it's gonna sell bigger than anything
Speaker 1: we've ever put out before, and they ordered four million cartridges.
Speaker 1: Well again, it sold a million and a half and
Speaker 1: two and a half million cartridges were sitting in warehouses.
Speaker 1: Not to mention ones that we're starting to be taken back,
Speaker 1: because not only did did kids go I don't want
Speaker 1: this game, I want to take it back, and took
Speaker 1: it to the stores. The stores started taking their games
Speaker 1: back to Atari. So Atari's like, wait, wait a minute, everybody,
Speaker 1: this is et the game. What are you doing? Put
Speaker 1: this in your twenty six hundred and shut up and
Speaker 1: people then listen.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And you can hardly blame the executives. I mean
Speaker 3: they were like, Warshaw plus Spielberg is going to be
Speaker 3: another hit because we had it in Raiders, so sort
Speaker 3: of get it. But it was it was just it
Speaker 3: was that timeline, right, like that was that was the
Speaker 3: big problem. It was all the timeline. He could have
Speaker 3: created a game as good as Raiders.
Speaker 1: Right, Yeah, given five six months, I'm sure. Yeah, even
Speaker 1: given two months, he probably probably could have made an
Speaker 1: even better game. But it was It was kind of
Speaker 1: a boring game. It wasn't that fun. There's a very
Speaker 1: famous quote from a New York Times article in nineteen
Speaker 1: eighty two where a little ten year old said, it
Speaker 1: wasn't that fun.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that was kind of it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's all you need to say.
Speaker 3: And it wasn't. And not only was it not fun,
Speaker 3: but and I don't know, I guess you could call
Speaker 3: it a bug.
Speaker 1: It was a bug.
Speaker 3: It seems more like bad design than just a mistake.
Speaker 3: But what would happen as Et would fall into these
Speaker 3: pits and then he could levitate back out. But depending
Speaker 3: on which way you were or even how you were
Speaker 3: holding the joystick, the slightest little move would cause Et
Speaker 3: to fall back into that pit.
Speaker 1: No matter what direction you went. Sometimes.
Speaker 3: Yeah, but it wasn't like all the time it was.
Speaker 3: It happened enough though to where as a kid, Remember
Speaker 3: you asked me earlier if it was frustrating trying to
Speaker 3: parachute as Indy. Yeah, it was not, because you knew
Speaker 3: you could do it. This was frustrating. Kids got frustrated
Speaker 3: because Et was falling in the pit and he would
Speaker 3: get out and he would fall in the pit.
Speaker 4: And then you do that enough times and.
Speaker 3: You're like, I'm going to play Yards Revenge or any
Speaker 3: of my other games.
Speaker 1: Do you have fast food?
Speaker 3: And kids put it down? Yeah, you know they put down. Well,
Speaker 3: they didn't put down the joystick and go outside and play.
Speaker 3: That would be like the movie ending.
Speaker 4: They just popped it out and put in the game
Speaker 4: that they liked exactly.
Speaker 1: So this was a big deal for Atari because it
Speaker 1: came at the worst possible time. And speaking of the
Speaker 1: worst possible time, let's take a break and do an
Speaker 1: ad breaking. We'll come right back, all right, Chuck. So,
Speaker 1: like I was saying, this came at a really terrible
Speaker 1: time for Atari. You kind of talked about how the
Speaker 1: personal computer industry was starting to eat into their profits
Speaker 1: big time and they really needed this ET bet to
Speaker 1: pay off. And not only did it not pay off,
Speaker 1: they lost tens of millions of dollars on this. It
Speaker 1: was a huge catastrophic bet for Atari. And the numbers
Speaker 1: are just stunning. In like you said, in nineteen eighty two,
Speaker 1: Atari's profits were two billion dollars.
Speaker 4: Well in today's money.
Speaker 1: No, that was yeah, the profits, I'm sorry, in today's money. Yeah,
Speaker 1: their gross was two billion. Yeah. In the second quarter
Speaker 1: of nineteen eighty three, they posted a loss of three
Speaker 1: hundred and ten million dollars five hundred and thirty six
Speaker 1: million dollar loss for the whole year. By nineteen eighty four,
Speaker 1: the company had been sold. So it went from two
Speaker 1: billion dollars in profits to a loss of five hundred
Speaker 1: and thirty six million dollars over the course of a year.
Speaker 4: Yes, and it was not because of ET.
Speaker 1: But this is the thing, Okay, So it gets even
Speaker 1: worse hold on, We're not there yet. I'm getting excited.
Speaker 1: The whole video game industry actually went down. Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: So there's something called the North American video Game Crash
Speaker 1: of nineteen eighty three, where not only did the did
Speaker 1: Atari go under, basically the industry did so the whole.
Speaker 1: The whole industry in nineteen eighty three had a three
Speaker 1: point two billion dollars in sales. By nineteen eighty five,
Speaker 1: two years later, they had one hundred million dollars in sales.
Speaker 1: It was a crash, like that is a catastrophic crash.
Speaker 1: And like you're saying, no, it wasn't because of ET,
Speaker 1: but imagine this. Think about this. All of that has
Speaker 1: been laid ever since then at the feet of ET
Speaker 1: the video game and Howard Scott Warshaw. People look at
Speaker 1: him and say, you ruined the video game industry single handedly.
Speaker 1: That's how he's thought of.
Speaker 4: I think that was the case.
Speaker 1: Up until like twenty fourteen or fifteen, right.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean I think people in the know knew
Speaker 3: that that was not the case, but.
Speaker 1: The popular pop culture opinion of him.
Speaker 4: Yeah maybe.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 4: But let's say ET was a big hit. It would
Speaker 4: not have saved Atari.
Speaker 1: No, it might have like staved the bleeding a little bit.
Speaker 1: Maybe it would have been a drop in the bucket basically.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, I certainly feel bad for Warshaw, but
Speaker 3: he's a good inning, so stick around for that.
Speaker 1: Don't go anywhere.
Speaker 3: After ET, he took some time off. He said that
Speaker 3: he just needed to sort of recover. I believe was
Speaker 3: the words he used. He went into real estate and
Speaker 3: did not enjoy that at all, and eventually he became
Speaker 3: a psychotherapist and that's what he does today. He's labeled
Speaker 3: the Silicon Valley psychotherapist and sort of specializes in talking.
Speaker 3: He jokes that he's fluent in English and NERD, so
Speaker 3: I think kind of specializes in talking to Silicon Valley types.
Speaker 4: About their work problems. Certainly a man.
Speaker 3: That can identify Yeah, yeah, I bet he's a great psychotherapist.
Speaker 1: It seems like he definitely would be.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so he.
Speaker 1: Definitely made peace with the whole thing. And I think
Speaker 1: he very frequently jokes. I've seen it in more than
Speaker 1: one article that he says he kind of enjoys it
Speaker 1: when people say that ET's the worst video game of
Speaker 1: all time, because people also say that Yours Revenge is
Speaker 1: one of the best video games of all time. So
Speaker 1: he has the greatest range of any video designer ever.
Speaker 1: So he definitely has like a I think it took
Speaker 1: him a little while, that's the impression, I have to
Speaker 1: make peace with it. But he made peace with it.
Speaker 1: And I think one of the reasons he was able
Speaker 1: to make peace with it, and I'm just armchair psychologizing here,
Speaker 1: but he came to realize, yeah, I've used it before
Speaker 1: and you said the exact same thing. I think too. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he realized that it wasn't the worst video game of
Speaker 1: all time, and that a lot of the people who
Speaker 1: were saying it was the worst video game of all
Speaker 1: time didn't know what they were talking about, which has
Speaker 1: to be super liberating. Sure, and the whole world's like
Speaker 1: you ruined everything. And then you realize, like they don't
Speaker 1: even know what they're saying, you can just kind of
Speaker 1: lay roll off your back a little more easily.
Speaker 3: So the cherry on top of this story, we mentioned
Speaker 3: this documentary Atari game Over. It is about the legend
Speaker 3: of the story of the et game, which continued after
Speaker 3: its demise, with this urban legend that Atari was so
Speaker 3: distraught and embarrassed by this game that they had all
Speaker 3: the remaining boxes shipped out and buried in the desert
Speaker 3: under cement. Initially, You're like, that doesn't make any sense.
Speaker 3: Why would Atari spend all this money to do this
Speaker 3: when they could just burn them, sell them in the
Speaker 3: dollar bin, do anything other than this weird plan to
Speaker 3: bury them out in the desert of New Mexico.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And a lot of people took it when it
Speaker 1: was kind of an initial rumor that like, Atari was
Speaker 1: trying to bury their shame. That's all right, It just
Speaker 1: went that much further to point out how bad the
Speaker 1: video game was. Atari was trying to bury it and
Speaker 1: forget about it.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 3: So in twenty eleven, there was a party where there
Speaker 3: was an Atari former Atari person there and a guy
Speaker 3: named Mike Burns was talking to him and said something about, yeah,
Speaker 3: the urban legend that you guys did this, and apparently
Speaker 3: the answer was just sheepish enough to where he was like,
Speaker 3: wait a minute, is that true?
Speaker 4: Right? So did he did he fund this documentary? Is
Speaker 4: that how that worked?
Speaker 1: I think he's a guy who makes things happen, he
Speaker 1: brings people together. Okay, I think yes, he definitely puts
Speaker 1: some of his own money into it. But I think
Speaker 1: he also got others to put money into it as well.
Speaker 3: Okay, I didn't know if he was involved in the
Speaker 3: dock itself. Yes, yes he was, or just financing the
Speaker 3: dig both. But Zach Penn made this documentary. Zack Penn,
Speaker 3: a great, great writer, ironically wrote the movie Ready Player
Speaker 3: one which talks about adventure and Easter eggs and all
Speaker 3: that fun stuff. So he's written a bunch of movies,
Speaker 3: a bunch of the Marvel movies and stuff, and it was.
Speaker 4: Clearly a labor of love.
Speaker 3: This this documentary, if you've seen it, you know Zach
Speaker 3: Penn is like super excited about all this stuff.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: So the old Alamagordo landfill in New Mexico has three
Speaker 3: it's three hundred acres and then one hundred cells, which
Speaker 3: are these it says holes, but they're just these big square,
Speaker 3: deep pits where you you know, if you listen to
Speaker 3: Our Landfills episode, then you know what goes on there.
Speaker 4: They just dump stuff in there and cover it up.
Speaker 3: And the legend was that the ET is in one
Speaker 3: of these cells, and these days they chart it and
Speaker 3: it's mapped out, so they know what's where generally sure,
Speaker 3: and if a cop comes and says, hey, there's some
Speaker 3: evidence from four years ago. They could say, oh, well
Speaker 3: that's going to be in this cell because it was
Speaker 3: from this area of town where it was picked up
Speaker 3: and we buried it here. Back then, they didn't have
Speaker 3: anything like that.
Speaker 1: No, it was like they just dug a hole, put
Speaker 1: garbage in it, covered it up, and went home. According
Speaker 1: to a guy named joe Leewandowski, and Mike Burns lucked
Speaker 1: out that a guy named joe Leewandowski worked at the
Speaker 1: Alamagordo City Waste department because he is basically the institutional
Speaker 1: memory of Alamagordo's waist, and he worked at the dump
Speaker 1: for so long that he had a pretty good chance
Speaker 1: of remembering where the stuff was put. But he was
Speaker 1: kind of like, no, we didn't document it. I have
Speaker 1: no idea, leave me alone. And apparently Mike Burns is
Speaker 1: not the type to just be like, oh, okay, thanks,
Speaker 1: didn't mean to bother you. He'll keep pestering you until
Speaker 1: you do what he wants from what I understand, and
Speaker 1: so he finally got joe Leewandowski on board, and in
Speaker 1: just an astounding turn of good luck, joe Leewandowski's wife
Speaker 1: had made a scrap book of Joe's time working for
Speaker 1: Alamagordo's waste department that included pictures of the dump from
Speaker 1: around this time. So they were able to narrow down
Speaker 1: these hundred cells over three hundred acres to two to
Speaker 1: just two, which narrowed the search enough that they could
Speaker 1: actually start taking samples to try.
Speaker 4: To fgd that. That was a very big breakthrough.
Speaker 3: And if you watch this documentary when when they're taking
Speaker 3: these samples and they come across like newspaper clippings from
Speaker 3: that year and that month where these cartridges were supposedly buried,
Speaker 3: it's really exciting.
Speaker 1: It is.
Speaker 3: I gotta admit, it's like, oh my gosh, it's like
Speaker 3: finding buried treasure. So they narrowed it down. All of
Speaker 3: these people showed up, fans the what's his name, Ernest Klein,
Speaker 3: who wrote the book Ready Player one, he showed up
Speaker 3: in his Back to the Future DeLorean, and.
Speaker 4: It was a very big deal.
Speaker 3: They Howard Warshaw came in and he was there and
Speaker 3: people were just like embracing this guy instead of like
Speaker 3: it's not like he showed up and people are.
Speaker 4: Like, there he is, get him.
Speaker 3: He's like this beloved cherished, dude, And I get the
Speaker 3: sense that this was a very big deal for his closure,
Speaker 3: which is interesting because burying something is usually the closure.
Speaker 3: In this case, digging it up was the closure.
Speaker 1: Yeah, good point.
Speaker 3: And they did find uh thirteen hundred game cartridges. Yeah,
Speaker 3: which it makes you wonder like how this how they
Speaker 3: got there, how the rumor got started to begin with?
Speaker 4: Well, then the fact that there is some truth to it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, they feel like it definitely confirms that urban legend,
Speaker 1: like Atari definitely did cover up. They did dump these
Speaker 1: these cartridges, but it wasn't just et cartridges, and it
Speaker 1: wasn't like the millions that they supposedly dumped, but they
Speaker 1: probably buried some elsewhere in either California or Texas or both.
Speaker 1: But it confirmed that, yes, this actually did happen. The
Speaker 1: urban legend was real, and at the very least, it
Speaker 1: gave Howard Scott Warshaw that closure year he got to see,
Speaker 1: you know, thirty something years on, people were still vibing
Speaker 1: out on his creation, although in ways he could not
Speaker 1: have possibly predicted when he was spending that five weeks
Speaker 1: programming this game.
Speaker 4: Yeah, he said, he was full of gratitude.
Speaker 1: That's really cool.
Speaker 4: That's a very cool way to go through life.
Speaker 1: My friends. Oh man, you know, if you can remember
Speaker 1: to have gratitude, it truly does make you happy. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's insane. It's just remembering to be grateful is the trick.
Speaker 3: So they ended up a lot of these went on
Speaker 3: eBay auctioned off. I think they sold about one hundred
Speaker 3: thousand dollars worth of these things that went to the
Speaker 3: city of Alamagordo. Of course they owned them. It's not
Speaker 3: like they just gave them out to everyone that.
Speaker 1: Was there as a party gift.
Speaker 4: They should have. Sure, they should have given everyone one copy.
Speaker 1: I think some of the like Mike Burns and some
Speaker 1: of his crew got some, and Almagordo kept some. But
Speaker 1: I think the ones that were auctioned were auctioned by
Speaker 1: Alamgordo to go to a fund of museum.
Speaker 4: I would love a copy assigned cartridge for moreshaw.
Speaker 1: I mean, the most I think one went for was
Speaker 1: fifteen hundred bucks, So.
Speaker 4: We don't want it that bad.
Speaker 1: But no that I'm saying like that's the most. That's
Speaker 1: the highest any of them went for. So you could
Speaker 1: probably give them for a couple hundred bucks if you tried.
Speaker 4: I wonder if he listens to the show.
Speaker 1: I hope so you never know. I hope so. I
Speaker 1: hope we cleared it up for you. Warshaw, your legend, sir, Yes,
Speaker 1: hets off to you.
Speaker 3: Send me a signed cartridge, Josh needs one.
Speaker 1: Thank you, buddy. You got anything else?
Speaker 3: No, it did. ET was not the worst game there were.
Speaker 3: There were games that were so bad that you don't
Speaker 3: they were just in the dustbin of history.
Speaker 4: They were so bad.
Speaker 1: Yeah, like Sorcer, like you said, Manjo's apparently pretty bad.
Speaker 3: Yeah, they were terrible, like all these not knockoff companies.
Speaker 3: But you know, ari Atari opened it up to where
Speaker 3: anyone could could design a game that fit their console.
Speaker 1: And some people say that that was one of the
Speaker 1: reasons why Atari lost market shares, because there's so much
Speaker 1: crudd on the shelves, right, people were tired of buying
Speaker 1: Creddy games for twenty five bucks. Yeah, and that they
Speaker 1: just oversaturated the market themselves. But they oversaturated with terrible
Speaker 1: stuff oversatched well at any rate, that's ET the game
Speaker 1: not the worst video game of all time, but a
Speaker 1: heck of a story. I'll tell you what good one
Speaker 1: and gave you a little bit of nostalgia this holiday season. Yeah, great,
Speaker 1: feel that warm tingling. It's either a bladder infection or
Speaker 1: a nostalgia. Let's see. Since I said bladder infection, everybody,
Speaker 1: it's time for listener man, this.
Speaker 4: Is about bird poop.
Speaker 3: Hey, guys, listen to the Olive Oil podcast and loved
Speaker 3: it very much. Living in Italy, they use it every day.
Speaker 3: That's my wonderful complexion and youthful looks. I want to
Speaker 3: tell you about a problem though, that we have it
Speaker 3: in Rome every year and directly caused by olives. Every winter,
Speaker 3: the city center is home to millions of migrating starlings
Speaker 3: who spend their days out in the local countryside, eating
Speaker 3: olives and having a great time. In the evening, they
Speaker 3: come back to our warmer city center and sleep in
Speaker 3: the city center trees for the night. Great news for
Speaker 3: bird watchers, but bad news if you'd like to avoid
Speaker 3: being pooed on. The city gets covered in the stuff.
Speaker 3: And he sent me a video and of these cars
Speaker 3: parked on the street and it's literally looks like it
Speaker 3: was painted with bird poop growth, completely solid every square inch.
Speaker 1: That's gotta be bad for the paint.
Speaker 3: And yes, it's really bad, he said, What has this
Speaker 3: got to do with olive oil? While the olive stones
Speaker 3: may not come out of the starling bird's bottoms, but
Speaker 3: the olive oil infused greasy pooh does, and it makes
Speaker 3: driving along the roads almost impossible.
Speaker 4: I've fallen off my scooter.
Speaker 3: Twice in the past few years, Oh my god, because
Speaker 3: of this, So I guess it's it's slippery oily poop.
Speaker 1: Oh my god.
Speaker 4: And that is from James in Rome.
Speaker 1: Well thanks James. That email's kind of petered out at
Speaker 1: the end there. Yeah, I was expecting a big finish,
Speaker 1: just oily poop. All right. Well, thanks regardless, and stay
Speaker 1: stay safe on your scooter.
Speaker 4: There, James, he said, people use umbrellas.
Speaker 1: And hats off to you living in Rome. Have you
Speaker 1: been around?
Speaker 4: Sure?
Speaker 1: When I went, I was like I could live here.
Speaker 1: Pretty great, I told Jumie.
Speaker 3: She's like, maybe it's lovely city. It really is old
Speaker 3: world charm cats. What's what else?
Speaker 4: Wine food, beautiful people.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and I've never seen men and women at every
Speaker 3: turn that looked like runway models.
Speaker 4: Sure, and they were just regular newspaper boys.
Speaker 1: Well, the fact that they do like a little twirl
Speaker 1: every once in a while as they were walking. Really
Speaker 1: kind of sold it.
Speaker 4: To Yeah and go Chell, Chell Bell Chow Bed.
Speaker 1: Wow, Let's turned out weird. If you want to get
Speaker 1: in touch with us, you can go on to stuff
Speaker 1: youshould Know dot com and hit us up through our
Speaker 1: social links, or you can just send us a good
Speaker 1: old fashioned email to stuff podcast HowStuffWorks dot com.
Speaker 2: Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
Speaker 2: more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
Speaker 2: or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.