美国国家公共电台 NPR Total Failure: The World's Worst Video Game

ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:

Today we meet Howard Scott Warshaw, the man behind one of the early failures of the computer era.

HOWARD SCOTT WARSHAW: I did the "E.T." video game, the game that is widely held to be the worst video game of all time.

SIEGEL: The Atari Corporation made millions of copies of his game, and it flopped 2. Some have claimed it was so bad it caused a collapse 3 of the video game industry in 1983. NPR's Geoff Brumfiel has the story.

GEOFF BRUMFIEL, BYLINE 4: From the very beginning of life, Howard Scott Warshaw was in a hurry.

(SOUNDBITE OF VIDEO GAME MUSIC)

WARSHAW: When I was a kid, I wanted to be older. When I was older, I wanted to be an adult. I wanted to get out, and I wanted to engage life 'cause that's - that's what I always pictured as the first time I'll be free.

BRUMFIEL: Free of what?

WARSHAW: Whatever.

BRUMFIEL: He wanted to get through school fast, make a quite tidy fortune in business and retire by 30. Now, the other thing to know about young Howard is that he was smart - really smart. He got his degree in computer engineering, headed to Silicon 5 Valley and eventually got hired at a new company called Atari.

Atari was basically an early Silicon Valley startup. It had this gadget 6, the Atari 2600, which was the first really popular video game console. Howard's job was to design games. While others were programming black and white stick figures and balls...

WARSHAW: I tried to make every single thing on the screen move and pulse with color and sound.

(SOUNDBITE OF VIDEO GAME MUSIC)

BRUMFIEL: His games were hits, and then Atari got a big contract. They would make the game for Steven Spielberg's first Indiana Jones movie, "Raiders Of The Lost Ark." They put Howard on the job. Now, to put this in perspective, no one had ever done a video game based on a movie. And at 23, Howard was going to be the first programmer to ever attempt it.

It took him 10 months to design the "Raiders" game, write the code, get feedback, re-program it and put it all through quality control. When that was finished, he shows Steven Spielberg the final product.

WARSHAW: He looks up at me, and he says, it's just like a movie because I feel like I just watched a movie. I thought, oh, my God, you know, Steven Spielberg thinks that the game, the adventure game that I produced feels like a movie. To me, that was the ultimate compliment I could possibly receive on this work.

BRUMFIEL: And here's where the trouble begins. The next movie Steven Spielberg makes is "E.T." Spielberg wants an "E.T." video game, and he wants Howard to program it.

WARSHAW: Spielberg had requested that I do "E.T." OK, so fine. I'm not going to argue. But what had happened was the negotiations 7 for getting the rights for "E.T." had run very long.

BRUMFIEL: Atari and Spielberg haggled 8 over rights and money until the end of July, 1982. And to get the game out in time for Christmas, Howard would have to have it built from scratch in five weeks. The CEO of Atari called him directly.

WARSHAW: He goes, we need an "E.T." game, and we need it for September 1. Can you do it? And I said, you bet I can. I absolutely can. I don't know what I was full of at that time exactly, but whatever it was, I was overflowing 9 with it. And I believed I could pull it off. I mean, the hubris 10 of it.

(SOUNDBITE OF VIDEO GAME MUSIC)

BRUMFIEL: Howard wasn't the only one full of hubris. During this period, Atari was one of the fastest growing companies in America. Its profits were soaring, and bonus checks were rolling in. Inside the headquarters were drugs and sex and booze.

WARSHAW: It was a ridiculous excessive sort of, you know, fall of Rome kind of environment.

BRUMFIEL: And everyone believed that nothing could stop them.

WARSHAW: We can do no wrong.

BRUMFIEL: So Howard has just 36 hours to come up with the concept for the game. In the movie, E.T. puts together a communicator he uses to phone home, so Howard makes that the basic plot of the game too. The player will be E.T. and go around gathering 11 parts for the phone.

WARSHAW: Another issue with me is like it's not enough that I'm just going to do a game in five weeks, I wanted to do something that was a step up, not just an add-on.

BRUMFIEL: Howard creates this elaborate world for the Atari E.T. to explore. In this world, he puts lots of pits in the ground where he hides parts of the phone. We'll get back to those pits later. Anyway, Howard flies down to LA to show Spielberg the concept.

WARSHAW: And I lay the whole thing out, and here it is. And Spielberg looks at me, and he goes, couldn't you just do something like "Pac-Man"? And I thought, oh, my God.

And I had an impulse - just to give you an idea of how full of myself I was at that point. I'm sitting there with Steven Spielberg, and what I wanted to say was, well, gee 12, Steven, couldn't you do something like "The Day The Earth Stood Still"?

BRUMFIEL: In the end, Spielberg signed off on Howard's concept. Howard goes back to Silicon Valley. He has a game development system moved into his home so he can work on "E.T." day and night.

WARSHAW: That was the hardest five weeks of my life. It was the hardest five weeks I ever spent doing pretty much anything.

(SOUNDBITE OF JOHN WILLIAMS' "FLYING")

BRUMFIEL: And at the end of those magical weeks, he took the blockbuster film "E.T." and turned it into a horrible, horrible video game.

(SOUNDBITE OF VIDEO GAME MUSIC)

BRUMFIEL: OK. So E.T. has landed, and he's in some sort of weird 13 forest thing. He does look like E.T., I'll give you that.

WARSHAW: He's in the forest. Yeah. Now he's got to run around to the areas with the pits and try and find some phone pieces.

BRUMFIEL: Oh. So he just fell into something.

WARSHAW: That's a pit.

BRUMFIEL: OK. He comes out. Oh. He's back in. And now another guy in a tan jacket's after - oh.

WARSHAW: That's the FBI agent. He steals whatever you're carrying 'cause they want to know what you've got.

BRUMFIEL: So now I'm back to square - well, I don't even know what square I'm on really.

WARSHAW: You're back to naked and lonely in a cruel world. It's a tough place to be.

BRUMFIEL: Here comes the FBI agent again. What's he want? Oh, no. I'm in a pit.

WARSHAW: (Laughter).

BRUMFIEL: Oh, man. This is terrible.

WARSHAW: (Laughter).

BRUMFIEL: Now, here's the fundamental problem with "E.T." It violates one of the basic rules of video game design.

WARSHAW: There's a difference between frustration 14 and disorientation. OK. Video games are all about frustration. It's OK to frustrate 15 a user. In fact, it's important to frustrate a user, but you don't ever want to disorient a user.

(SOUNDBITE OF VIDEO GAME MUSIC)

BRUMFIEL: At first, Howard didn't know he'd made a dud. Sales around the holidays were strong. "E.T." was at the top of the charts. But then in the halls of Atari, people started coming up to him and saying things.

WARSHAW: You know, Howard, nobody blames you.

BRUMFIEL: Things that made it clear "E.T." had flopped.

WARSHAW: You know, Howard, we really don't think it's your fault. We think you really came through for us. You did what you could, and we really appreciate that. It's all good.

BRUMFIEL: Millions of copies went unsold.

WARSHAW: It hurt. I mean, it hurt to hear that people aren't liking 16 my game.

BRUMFIEL: And meanwhile, Atari was running into some real trouble. The company's owners were making bad business deals. Programmers like Howard were making bad games.

WARSHAW: Now, we have an expression in video games that greed kills. The time you die in a video game is usually when you're trying to get too many extra points.

(SOUNDBITE OF VIDEO GAME MUSIC)

BRUMFIEL: And just as quickly as it had risen, Atari was falling.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

UNIDENTIFIED JOURNALIST: The Atari Corporation has announced the layoff 17 of 1,700 employees at its Sunnyvale plant in the Silicon Valley.

BRUMFIEL: Now, some game aficionados 18 have blamed "E.T." for the death of Atari. Howard says that's not really true. "E.T." was more of a symptom, the same ambition, arrogance 19 and hype that made the game a flop 1 ultimately doomed 20 Atari to collapse.

WARSHAW: Atari was the world to me. It was the world that worked and made everything I dreamed about being a reality. You want to talk about a failure? The failure of "E.T." was really nothing at that time in my life compared to the loss of Atari as a workplace.

BRUMFIEL: But when it came to failure, Howard was just getting started. Atari made him a millionaire, but he squandered 21 it on bad investments. And then the IRS came after him for back taxes. Howard hit bottom.

WARSHAW: Until one day, I really had to sit down with myself. You know, we have a lot of meetings. And so at one of the summits, I decided 22, you know, the IRS can only take my money. That's really all they can do. If I give them my happiness, that's on me.

BRUMFIEL: And he began a long, slow journey towards finding that happiness again. He went from job to job - computers, videography.

WARSHAW: Had a real estate broker's license 23 for a while.

BRUMFIEL: Some gigs were better than others but none compared to his time at Atari. The months stretched into years, eventually, more than a decade. And then one day, he was talking to his girlfriend at the time, and she asked, what do you really want to do?

WARSHAW: I said, well, I'd be a therapist. I mean, I didn't even think for a second. I knew exactly what I wanted to do.

BRUMFIEL: Therapy. It made perfect sense. Silicon Valley was booming, except instead of videogames it was smartphones and apps. Startups were failing. People's careers were crashing and burning. And after everything he'd been through, Howard knew he was the guy who could help.

WARSHAW: I have been there. I do know what it's like. I have succeeded, and I have failed. And I have lost it, and I've had it, and I've lost it. And I've seen all this go. And I can help people really understand and relate and find a way around and through it.

BRUMFIEL: Howard got his license. And today, he calls himself the Silicon Valley Therapist. His clients are a lot like he was back in the day - young, ambitious, rushing ahead. Business is good. Geoff Brumfiel, NPR News.