Today we are going to check a video game that had the majority of fault of the crisis of the video game of 1983 and that would be a valuable lesson for the distributors, teaching that a good exemption is not for anything synonymous of a good video game and, especially, synonymous of success and income.
We are located in 1982, when the phenomenon of the movie E.T: The alien is in full boiling and that did not happen unnoticed for the Atari managers. Steve Ross, CEO of Warner Communications (company of which it was subsidaria Atari) those days, got in touch with Universal Pictures and proper Steven Spielberg to be done by the rights on a global scale of the development of the movie in a video game. At the end of July, 1982, Warner was announcing that it had been done by the rights and, although he never went so far as to know in an official way, it is anticipated that the agreement had to be about the sea number for 20 million dollars.
How you will have observed, the history so far only treats about rights and money, being in the long run the principal problem, since it was negotiated on a video game, but nobody was thinking about the video game in himself. In fact, when Ross communicated to Atari the need to develop it, the person in charge of the subsidaria, Ray Kassar, it described the matter as a stupid idea. But (and the payment) was already harmed, by what it was continued by the project.
By request of the proper Spielberg, I satisfy with the adaptation of Raiders of the Lost Ark, the development of E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial would be entrusted to Howard Scott Warshaw. But after the hard negotiations, Warner was not ready to wait very much for the throwing of the title (his intention was to come to the Christmas campaign), setting on September 1, 1982 like deadline of delivery of the product. That was implying that only five weeks were staying to realize an order that, in circustancias normal, had taken a minimum of six months of work. Nevertheless, they had to give a good offer to Warshaw since he accepted the work and one started working.
Warshaw had the original idea of creating a video game that was following somehow the argument of the movie, but considering the closeness of the delivery, little by little it would be rejecting many of his ideas simplifying increasingly the title. The game was delivered in the fixed date and the Atari hurries, it did that there not even realized the acceptance tests between the public, which they usually do to this type of products before to the throwing. In spite of it, Atari had an excessive optimism and he would entrust four million copies. Of these, only they sold to themselves one million and a half, what provoked that, in spite of being the eighth game of major sale of the history of the company, it was accumulating a few losses for 536 million dollars in 1983, what it would derive in the Atari division in 1984. From here on there began one of the urban legends most known about the video games, when one affirms that the remaining cartridges were buried in a dump of New Mexico, close to The Step, and that they would be covered by a concrete layer.
And the game in itself? Since for what it is possible to expect from a game realized in five weeks, a botched job injugable. The original idea of his author, remained limited to the search of three pieces that compose an intergalactic phone. One is provided with a bar of energy that diminishes in the course of time, but that recovers if we eat peanuts. When the level recovers the sufficient thing, E.T. can call Elliot and ask him for a new piece of the phone. When the phone is finished, we will have to go to the "area of call", contact with the ship and to mount us in her. The title turns out to be enough injugable and, why not to say it, miser. The different stages sin of excessively simple, with little variety of colors and unrecognizable designs. And especially, the most important thing, it is tremendously boring, what does that it is usually qualified like one of the worst video games of the history.
In this video you can see how the game is:
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