How NewKidCo gambled it all on E.T. with disastrous results.
If you have even a passing interest in video game history, you’ve probably heard the story of Atari’s disastrous E.T. adaptation, which saw unsold copies of the game being buried out in the New Mexico desert and blamed as one of the contributing factors to the 1983 North American video game crash. Something that’s a little less well known, however, is that almost twenty years after, another company gambled on the popular alien — again to disastrous results.
In the year 2000, NewKidCo, a New York publisher of low-budget children’s games, took a risk by obtaining the license for E.T. for an amount now estimated to be in “the millions”. Its plan was to produce a bunch of video games based on the iconic alien, hoping to capitalize on the film’s 20th anniversary, happening in 2002, but things didn’t go exactly as expected. The publisher soon overstretched itself with the number of licensed games it was creating and quickly ran into financial difficulties.
Read the full article on timeextension.com
How NewKidCo gambled it all on E.T. with disastrous results.
If you have even a passing interest in video game history, you’ve probably heard the story of Atari’s disastrous E.T. adaptation, which saw unsold copies of the game being buried out in the New Mexico desert and blamed as one of the contributing factors to the 1983 North American video game crash. Something that’s a little less well known, however, is that almost twenty years after, another company gambled on the popular alien — again to disastrous results.
In the year 2000, NewKidCo, a New York publisher of low-budget children’s games, took a risk by obtaining the license for E.T. for an amount now estimated to be in “the millions”. Its plan was to produce a bunch of video games based on the iconic alien, hoping to capitalize on the film’s 20th anniversary, happening in 2002, but things didn’t go exactly as expected. The publisher soon overstretched itself with the number of licensed games it was creating and quickly ran into financial difficulties.
Read the full article on timeextension.com
