“To this day, every time I see Atari: Game Over, I get emotional”.
On Tuesday, July 27th, 1982, the video game designer/programmer Howard Scott Warshaw accepted a call from his bosses at Atari, asking him to put together the video game tie-in to Steven Spielberg’s latest blockbuster E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial for the Atari 2600. He had previously worked with Spielberg on a successful adaptation of the Indiana Jones film Raiders of the Lost Ark, but this time around, there was a catch; he had just 5 weeks in which to do it.
Young and eager to please, he jumped at the opportunity, but E.T. proved to be a major disappointment for players. In the decades following, it appeared on countless “worst video game” lists, with some even blaming it for the temporary death of the North American video game industry. There was even a popular urban legend that sprung up in its wake, which claimed that Atari had dumped a large amount of unsold copies in the desert after being left with millions in useless stock. For the longest time, nobody could separate the facts from fiction. Then, in 2014, a group of filmmakers excavated the burial site proving once and for all that the story was, in fact, true (albeit slightly more complicated than the legend had let on).
Read the full article on timeextension.com
“To this day, every time I see Atari: Game Over, I get emotional”.
On Tuesday, July 27th, 1982, the video game designer/programmer Howard Scott Warshaw accepted a call from his bosses at Atari, asking him to put together the video game tie-in to Steven Spielberg’s latest blockbuster E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial for the Atari 2600. He had previously worked with Spielberg on a successful adaptation of the Indiana Jones film Raiders of the Lost Ark, but this time around, there was a catch; he had just 5 weeks in which to do it.
Young and eager to please, he jumped at the opportunity, but E.T. proved to be a major disappointment for players. In the decades following, it appeared on countless “worst video game” lists, with some even blaming it for the temporary death of the North American video game industry. There was even a popular urban legend that sprung up in its wake, which claimed that Atari had dumped a large amount of unsold copies in the desert after being left with millions in useless stock. For the longest time, nobody could separate the facts from fiction. Then, in 2014, a group of filmmakers excavated the burial site proving once and for all that the story was, in fact, true (albeit slightly more complicated than the legend had let on).
Read the full article on timeextension.com
