The video game of Steven Spielberg's ET is considered to be one of the worst of all time and has even been blamed for triggering the collapse of Atari. Howard Scott Warshaw, the gifted programmer who made it, explains how it was rushed out in a matter of weeks - and how he feels about those events in California now.
Spielberg was unimpressed.
"Couldn't you do something more like Pac-Man?" he asked.
It was July 1982 and Atari, then one of the world's most successful tech companies, had just paid a reported $21m for the video game rights to Spielberg's new blockbuster, ET the Extra-Terrestrial.
Howard Scott Warshaw was the programmer tasked with designing the game.
"I was stunned," says Warshaw. "Here was Steven Spielberg, one of my idols, suggesting that I knock off the game! My impulse was to go, 'Well, gee, Steven, couldn't you make something more like The Day The Earth Stood Still?'"
Warshaw's stock was high at Atari. The 24-year-old had just finished the video game of Spielberg's Raiders of the Lost Ark. Spielberg considered Warshaw a "certifiable genius" and 36 hours earlier Warshaw had been hand-picked for their next collaboration.
"It was a day that will live in infamy in my life forever," says Warshaw. "I was sitting in my office and I get a call from the Atari CEO. He said, 'Howard, we need the ET video game done. Can you do it?'
"And I said, 'Absolutely, yes I can!'"
Games for the Atari 2600 were distributed on cartridges that took weeks to manufacture. If ET was to be in the shops for Christmas, Warshaw had a tight deadline.
"The CEO goes, 'We need it for 1 September.' That left five weeks to do it! Normally it'd be six to eight months to do a game, not five weeks.
"Then he said, 'Design the game and on Thursday morning, be at the airport and there will be a Learjet waiting to take you to see Spielberg.'
"I'm not sure exactly what I was full of but whatever it was, I was overflowing with it."
Dave Staugas
Warshaw drew up his pitch to Spielberg, and travelled from the Atari headquarters in Sunnyvale, California to Los Angeles. His idea was an adventure game in which the player had to help ET phone home by collecting components to make an inter-planetary telephone. The player would have to dodge government agents and scientists in order to complete the mission.
"I got down to Spielberg and I laid out the whole design," he says. "I told him, 'I think it's really important that we do something innovative. ET is a breakthrough movie and I think we need a breakthrough game.'
"I talked him out of the idea of a Pac-Man knock-off. But the key was to design a game that I could deliver in five weeks."
0 Comments
Share and comment. Enjoy!