Found: E.T's unmarked grave. · 1:51pm Apr 28th, 2014
750,000 cartridges. Zero play value.
I'm guessing the Angry Video Game Nerd may make a pilgrimage to the site, and what he might do there cannot safely be put in an open-access blog post.
If you need a quick education:
Da Tropes. (Eight digits for the game rights. Eight.)
The Crash Of '83.
For the record: I have played this thing. An old 2600 (is there another kind?) and a freshly-dusted cartridge were presented to me at a Top This Torture party. I then proceeded to fall into holes. A lot. Repeat until you get to test just how indestructible those old cartridges are, which is 'not very'. The 2600 itself rebounds off walls very nicely, and the shape creates some remarkable dents.
Why bring this up on FIMFic? Well...
1. A number of us are gamers to varying degrees: PC, console, even tabletop. If you look at the historical record, the videogame industry wasn't taken out by the crash which this cartridge was an integral part of -- but it came close. We gather not to celebrate it, but to stand over the grave and say 'It could have been so much worse.'
2. I have the MLP game app on my Kindle.
There are a few game elements I would like to place in that landfill.
3. Again, looking at said historical record: is anyone here of the generation which can remember what it was like to pay $40 for a game and get the whole thing? The stone-drip financial model of apps can run into triple digits before you're fully aware of it... and beyond.
Confess. Some of you paid to unlock the Princesses.
What everyone forgets about the E.T. game was that, even if a lot of them ended up in a landfill, it also sold over a million units, it actually was a huge financial success and one of the best selling games ever at that time, they just made too many of them, they reached the market saturation point but kept pumping them out.
Yeah, I used to have it back in the 80's. To be fair though, we got it from a flea market around '85 so we only paid like a dollar for it. I don't think I ever figured out how to get out of the holes but i do remember my little brother found it scary as hell. He would go into the whole cover face with hands and hide whenever he stretched his neck and floated around so of course, as the eldest son, i enjoyed the hell out of that game just to torture my siblings.
I'm reminded of that one episode of AVGN when the Nerd reviews his own games. In the end, when he tries to come up with ways to destroy the game, the best he can come up is deleting it from his computer.
If Activision or Ubisoft ended up creating as big a flop as ET, how exactly would they try to bury that, especially how every nowadays has to be digital?
2056174
Given how Activision often seems to feel about those who purchase their product, I'm guessing they'd try to bury every last person who'd actually brought the thing.
2056168
As I understand it, the problem is that the 'over a million units' is 'out of four million produced': still a losing proposition. My guess is they thought people might buy the console just to have access to the game.
A dollar? Overpaid.
...I confess, I play the MLP Gameloft game. Except I don't think "play" is the right word, since there is very little in it that can be called "gameplay" in any meaningful sense of the word. More like, I look at the MLP Gameloft game, several times a day, on my ipod.
It's a small thing, but it makes me smile.
*Goes off to look at the game a bit. Comes back.*
And yes, I did spend some money on it. A few times.
I have every pony now except Trenderhoof. My desire for 100% completion struggles against, well, Trenderhoof. When I do get him, he will join the ranks of Canterlot's massive unemployed population: the city only has shops to employ about two thirds of the ponies who live there. The thought of him begging in the streets for scraps of pizza crust has some appeal.
I love the quote from the game's writer:
It's like a Christopher Guest movie come to life.
The article is misleading: The guy wasn't the game /designer/. That title didn't exist in 1982. He was the game's MAKER. I believe he did the whole thing. Game development in those days meant ONE GUY, who did the design, the art, the coding, and often even the music. In 6 weeks. He wasn't the idiot; the idiots were the suits who gave him only 6 weeks. If I recall, he made some absurd figure like half a million dollars from it.
I think the tvtropes page is misleading. I lived through that time, and what really happened around 1983 is that nobody played Atari games anymore, because gamers had personal computers by then, and Apple ][ games blew Atari games out of the water. The existing consoles had terrible graphics, 2K-4K of ROM and 1K of RAM per game, and you couldn't save a game.
2056223
I think they used to retail for $30-$40 when they released, and according to Wikipedia each cartridge cost about $4 to manufacture. Making that many was a bad move but no doubt but they still profited from it.
E.T. cartridge for the 2600 at a flea market in 1985: $1
Drawing terror from your younger brothers on demand: Priceless.
Also, we didn't have the internet or gaming magazines on 3 year old games back then, you only knew what you were getting into after you got it home.
2056278
Well, open-edit site... if you believe the evidence says it's Apple, go for it.
I think the no-save feature might be the biggest shock to modern gamers. Retro graphics are out there. Deliberately lousy gameplay is rampant, along with accidental. But 'play until you die, then start over from the beginning?' Anathema. I had to reinstall a Kindle game after the only solution offered to a problem was hitting the dreaded Reset to Factory Defaults button -- which worked -- and lost every bit of progress I'd made, with no way to get it back. Steam plumes were visible for several miles.
Admittedly, from what I've seen, most games of the time didn't go for the completion idea and you mostly did play until you died. But for those which could be finished... ouch.
Zero play value?
Hardly.
I bet you could make some sick domino tracks with 750k cartridges ;)
The true definition of shovelware.
2056289
well thats skipping a lot of details
for one only obout a half a million stayed sold the rest where returned by the customers^^
furthermore if a game was sold for 40$ atari didnt get 40$ (unless there where some kind of atari owned store and even that produces extra costs)
4$+production cost+the License+shipping+advertising+etc+taxes
all in all atari earned 25Million in sales and 100 Million in losses and even in today "redefine the meaning of success " mentality -75 Million isnt a good number
2056364
There are games no-save worked for, because you could finish them in one go. The challenge was more about becoming good enough to pull them off without running out of lives; if you could do that, 2-3 hours would be enough to win.
The crazy stuff is the RPGs from that era, where you did such things as mapped the game yourself. By hand. On graph paper. I was a little too young for -that- era, but only by 3-4 years
2056364 Ah, those were the days. I remember my college roommate's C64 that I bought a copy of Ultima IV for. That darned thing ran 15 pages of notes and cost me a full letter grade off every class I took that semester. Then the save floppy got corrupted and the world turned into fields of little clock sprites. That's the only thing that let me pass my finals.
I started back in the PDP-8/PDP-11 days with Adventure (spelled adventur when you ran it, because of 8 letter file names) played on a terminal in the top of Fairchild Hall at K-State on a very much older friends account, eventually graduating to Star Trek on a TRS-80 Model I at high school. 0-[ * -=<
The Gameloft MLP game lets you get a free pony every week if you do the dancing minigame. My Ponyville is getting kind of crowded and I haven't spent a dime on it (but no Princess yet...)
*reads the story* *posts portion of resulting skype conversation*
2056168
While it sold over a million units, it was not a financial success by any stretch; between the cost of the movie license (Atari reportedly paid Universal Pictures somewhere between $20-25 million for the rights), and the unsold or returned inventory, Atari netted a loss of around $100 million on that game.
2056223
That's pretty much it, yes. E.T., the movie, was a huge blockbuster success, and Atari was convinced that E.T., the game, would prove to be an equally huge phenomenon that would drive sales of the console just to get the game. Obviously, this did not happen.
2056278
Uhhhh... no. Commodore 64 games might've blown the Atari 2600 out of the water (though the C=64 would've been pretty new on the market in 1983) – but I lived through that time period as well, and I can categorically state that the Apple ][ had nothing on any of the game consoles of the day, technically speaking, and was never a significant factor in the home-videogame crash. While its graphics capabilities might have been superior to the 2600's in some ways (at least in terms of pixel resolution, though not in terms of simultaneous-colors-on-screen), its sound capabilities were virtually nil (a speaker that could be clicked by toggling an I/O pin, which meant that every sound required the programmer to tie up the CPU doing all the work of generating any kind of sound via a very primitive pulse-width-modulation method), and it was insanely expensive compared to a game console, especially with the cost of a disk drive on top of the base unit.
Even the Commodore VIC-20 and C=64, Radio Shack's TRS-80 line, and Atari's own Atari 400 and 800 computers didn't really dent the console market that badly. What really killed Atari's game-console division, and crashed the console market in general, was a combination of things:
(1) Competition entered the market, primarily in the form of Mattel's Intellivision and Coleco's Colecovision consoles, both of which had superior graphics and sound capabilities. The Colecovision was particularly competitive because it used the same graphics and sound chips found in a number of commercial upright games of the time, so it was able to do surprisingly faithful reproductions of those games, and Coleco capitalized on that by aggressively pursuing licenses for a lot of the then-hot arcade titles from Bally/Midway, Universal, and Sega.
(There were others, such as the Bally Astrocade, Milton-Bradley's Vectrex and the Magnavox Odyssey2, but they were minor players at best. Though the Vectrex was kind of cool, in that it came with its own vector-graphics monitor, and was the only console that could accurately reproduce vector games such as Star Castle. They managed to score the rights to all of Cinematronics' games, but alas, never could secure rights for Atari or Sega's vector games; Atari for obvious reasons, and Sega because Coleco snapped them up first.)
(2) Competition also entered the market in the form of an astonishing number of fly-by-night game companies, most of whom really had no business being in the videogame market to begin with (even Quaker Oats had a game division at one point – seriously!), trying to get a piece of the action by cranking out games for the 2600... most of which, frankly, sucked. Atari completely lost control of the platform as the market was flooded with games of inferior quality – and when they tried to reassert control, they were told by a surprisingly technically-savvy judge that since the 2600 contained all off-the-shelf components, with no copyrightable code inside the console and with all of those components' data sheets freely available for anyone to look at, not only could they not stop people from making compatible games for the console, they couldn't even stop Mattel and Coleco from essentially cloning the design and making add-on modules to allow their own consoles to play 2600 games! (Both of those modules were just Atari 2600s without TV modulators or power supplies.)
The fact that a couple of those rogue game companies were producing pornographic cartridges for the 2600 (yes, you read that right, porn games on a 2600 – look up Custer's Revenge if you don't believe me) didn't exactly help matters, either.
(3) Atari then proceeded to shoot themselves in the foot by producing a next-generation console, the Atari 5200, which was meant both to compete with the Intellivision and Coleco and to allow Atari to reassert control over their own platform – only to have the market soundly reject it because (a) it wasn't backwards-compatible with 2600 games, and (b) the analog-joystick controllers were terrible for any kind of game which required precise directional control. (Just try making quick, tight turns through the Pac-Man maze on those things!)
(4) In the meantime, Mattel and Coleco were busy shooting themselves in the foot as well, by pouring tons of money into developing expensive add-ons that mostly flopped (the IntelliVoice), even more expensive add-ons meant to turn the game console into a (laughably underpowered) home computer, insanely-expensive and overly-ambitious add-ons that never even made it to market, and doomed attempts to break into the home computer market with products that suffered from serious design flaws (such as the Coleco Adam's distressing tendency to erase any tapes left in the cassette drive when power was turned on or off
) and/or were obsolete before they even hit the shelves (the Mattel Aquarius).
Both companies wasted a ton of money on these bridge-to-nowhere projects; the "Keyboard Component" fiasco, in particular, damaged the Intellivision's reputation, and could easily have put Mattel Electronics into bankruptcy all by itself, when the FTC came down on the side of consumers who felt they had been misled into buying the console on the promise of a computer add-on that still hadn't materialized almost two years later, and slapped Mattel with a $10,000/day fine until they delivered.
(The result of that edict was the Entertainment Computer System add-on, which was a pale shadow of what was initially promised, and delivered just barely enough computer-like functionality to get the FTC off Mattel's back. Unfortunately, by the time it hit the market in 1983, it was already obsolete; you could buy a Commodore VIC-20 – which had already been on the market for nearly three years, was technically superior in every respect, and far better supported – for half the price of the ECS add-on unit, and the C=64 was coming on strong as its designated successor.)
Needless to say, between the fines, the R&D costs, and the unsold inventory of ECS units no one wanted, Mattel Electronics didn't so much shoot themselves in the foot, as shoot Mattel's entire electronic-game division in the head.
Repeatedly.
With a bazooka. 
All of the above left a lot of consumers confused and angry over buying $40 games (which,.to give you a bit of perspective, is about $95 in today's dollars when you take inflation into account!) that turned out to make E.T. look competently made, investing in $200 add-ons which ended up having less than half a dozen titles released which actually made use of them before they were abandoned, or being lured into chosing console X over console Y because of the promise of some amazing new future-expansion capability that never materialized.
Worse, all of the above left the retailers gun-shy over buying into any of this, because they got burned so often with unsellable merchandise and unhappy customers returning stuff that turned out to be unplayable or unusable. That's what really caused the 1983 crash in the console market.... and that's why Nintendo went to such lengths to brand the NES as an "Entertainment System" when they introduced it; the retailers wouldn't have even let Nintendo's sales reps in the front door if they'd called it a "videogame console" by then. (And in a rare display of intelligence, they actually learned from those other companies' mistakes, and made damn sure they kept control of the platform by tightly controlling, both via ironclad licensing agreements and restrictions enforced at the hardware level, who was allowed to make game cartridges for it.)
I had E.T. on my 2600. It wasn't a great game, but it wasn't terrible for a 2600 cart. Though frankly, I was too busy playing Tunnels of Doom on my TI-99/4A to spend much time on it.
2056364
You don't necessarily have to beat the graphics of something else to be a better game and I'm not sure how much you can gain/lose in competing 8 bit sound. Granted I wasn't even around then, but I think the Apple II's specs (particularly the IIe) probably could have given the C64 more of a run for it's money if the price were less at release. It seems like a lot of the machines then had some quirky advantages and disadvantages that might have made comparison besides price difficult on occasion.
Of course, having a game like Prince of Persia probably helps too.
Honestly, I'd bet that the sinker then, as it is now, was really the benefit for the money. A slightly less awesome computer that only a costs a few hundred is always preferable to a slightly more awesome one that costs say, two to three times as much.
2059981
Ah, but there's the rub -- the Apple II didn't even have 8-bit sound. At best, it had 1-bit sound; the speaker was "clicked" by toggling an I/O pin on and off, so making any kind of sound required the programmer to manually "click" the speaker thousands of times per second to make psuedo-tones.
The Commodore VIC-20 and C=64 both had actual sound-generator chips.
Well, I was around then... and no, it couldn't have.
Apple likes everyone to think they single-handedly created the home-computer revolution, but that perception is mostly the result of an orchestrated PR campaign (as is the whole image of "two guys in a garage") combined with lazy journalism. (Because it's so much easier to just have Apple's "two guys in a garage" myth spoon-fed to them by Apple's PR department than to do any actual research.
) They were but one of several players, and not even the most influential of them, certainly not by the time the 1980s came around; the Commodore offerings, and even the Atari 400 and 800 computers, offered far better capabilities for half the price.
2060232
Were you a programmer? Because otherwise I'm going to have a hard time believing that stretching the capabilities of a given machine is undoable. Besides, you can put a sound and video card in an apple II, it's going to be awkward to enhance your c64 without a clunky peripheral.
They may not have created the revolution, but they were ultimately one of the more successful companies. Which part of two guys in a garage are you calling a myth, because that single fact is probably true. Granted the cost, but could anyone else offer anything like the apple's expansion slots? Also the internet says that the C64 came out five years later. That's a lot of time and plenty of perspective to improve on another computer and I seem to recall it being said somewhere that the C64's disk drive is almost like another C64 which seems really silly.
2056174 Fun note about that episode as it opens there's a brief shot of a AVGN MLP figure in the background
2057068 Apple ][ games blew Atari 2600 games out of the water by 1981, but not mainly because of graphics or sound. The sound on the Apple was primitive. The graphics had higher resolution, but the CPU wasn't fast enough to get much use out of that (though resolution was the main factor when replicating arcade games like Galaxians and Pac-Man, which were atrocious on the 2600). Programming the Apple was harder, as it had no hardware support for anything, and its firmware was written by mad genius Steve Wozniak, who made the screen memory mapping pseudo-random in order to save 2 bytes in the ROM. (Tho 2600 programmers eventually had to stop using hardware sprite support, because it only had 3 sprites. That's why the sprites flashed in Pac-Man.)
The big advantage was memory, and imagination. The big memory allowed much bigger, more elaborate, more emotionally compelling fictions--games like Castle Wolfenstein, Ultima, Zork, Wizardry, Aztec, and Below the Root. The games were also much more creative than the recycling of tropes on the 2600, because there were thousands of Apple ][ developers, and only a handful of licensed 2600 developers. So we had innovations like Flight Simulator, Choplifter, Archon, Lode Runner, One-On-One, Skyfox, Bilestoad, Way Out, Bolo, and many others.
I agree that it didn't own the console market. That was partly because Steve Jobs spent years struggling to kill off the entire ][ line, because he couldn't take credit for it & couldn't control it, but mostly because it cost about $1500 at the time to get an Apple ][+ system running, and I think $300? for a console. There were about 3 times as many Atari 2600 units sold as Apple ][. My recollection is that then, little kids played on consoles; high school & college students played on computers. Consoles couldn't yet support games that could keep teenagers interested.
It was strange, though, that the superior Apple // games had so little effect on later console games, which had plenty of processing power to run //-style games. The developers for consoles seemed unaware of the entire Apple gaming tradition, and when they did know an Apple game, they only knew it thru its PC version, and didn't know it came out on the Apple first.