These days, a good video game can take years to make. “Baldur’s Gate 3,” 2023’s sprawling Game of the Year, took Larian Studios six.
Today’s story, however, is about a disastrous game that one Atari developer tried to crank out in a few weeks.
Atari’s “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” based on the 1981 Indiana Jones flick, was a success, and filmmaker Steven Spielberg was on board for another game about his next hit, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982), per NPR.
Unfortunately, Atari and Spielberg took months to settle rights negotiations, giving game designer Howard Scott Warshaw — who’d helmed “Raiders” — just over five weeks to have it ready for that year’s holiday shopping season.
Warshaw’s plot was simple: help E.T. find pieces of a phone to call his home planet, while collecting Reese’s Pieces, the film’s famous product placement, for energy.
The time crunch meant Atari skipped testing and the rushed game was a confusing mess with no real ending. (You can see the gameplay here.)
Atari paid a reported ~$22m for rights, meaning it had to sell 4m copies to break even. It only sold ~2.6m, of which ~670k were returned.
Atari had already released one flop that year — a poorly reviewed “Pac-Man” for its Atari 2600 console — and in Q2 of 1983, reported a $310m loss. (Its CEO, Ray Kassar, was charged with insider trading that same year and, though cleared, resigned.)
Atari’s woes — alongside oversaturation of the console games market and the rise of personal computers — contributed to a US industry crash in the mid-’80s and opened the door for Japanese brands like Nintendo and Sega. No American company would again release a successful console until Microsoft’s Xbox in 2001.
Rumors circulated that Atari buried its unsold “E.T.” cartridges under cement in a New Mexico landfill.
A 2014 excavation for the documentary Atari: Game Over turned up ~1.3k “E.T.” cartridges — a small portion of the hardware and other games Atari had dumped there.
One cartridge now lives in the Smithsonian Institution, as a testament to Atari’s golden years, its decline, and video game history.