Howard Scott Warshaw on creating E.T. and Atari: Game Over

Legendary game designer Howard Scott Warshaw talks to us about creating the E.T.

videogame in just five weeks, Atari’s collapse, and more.

and paying witness to Ataris precipitous fall in 1982-83. licensing deal to Warshaws frantic efforts to make a playable, even innovative game in just five weeks.

I think this documentary was about getting the record right.

And so they were on that mission from go.

I was just participating in it, and I was really happy to do so.

This was a topic Ive been talking about for 30 years, on and off.

He had a fresh take, and a really some really interesting points of view.

What you see in the documentary is a very small window of six to eight hours of interview.

There were all kinds of things covered it was a great experience for me to go through all that.

I think its a good summary.

I dont talk in big generalities; I pick a face.

Particularly in America, of late, there needs to be someone or something to blame.

Its easier to say, They fell off this cliff.

Thats very comprehensible, that makes sense to people, regardless of accuracy.

Its like Nolan [Bushnell, Atari co-founder] said at one point in the documentary, right?

Thats a brilliant summary.

Because the documentary reminds us that human beings were affected by this.

Dozens of people lost their jobs.

Should Atari have worked harder to stem the tide and do something about it?

Thats a really interesting question.

Its a really good point.

What I want to say to that is… this was a brand new ball game.

It was literally a new medium that was being launched.

This was the age of turning television from a passive to an active medium.

And thats a huge thing to happen.

This was state of the art.

[Chuckles]

Right!

Lets go take a look.

Unfortunately, that was going on in the executive suite as well, apparently!

I dont know if everybody who was there at the time knew if that was happening.

With the gift of retrospect, its kind of clear.

One of the people I have a lot of empathy for is Ray Kassar.

Ray Kassars another guy who people point to and say, Heres the dude who blew it.

He messed it up.

You dont risk as much making one game as you do making a movie.

At least, historically.

You just dont see the kind of risk-reward gamble in games that you do in movies.

But the thing is, this is a guy who came from very traditional corporate management.

He came from, I think, Burlington.

A big multi-national textile firm.

If anything was classic, corporate profile, that was it.

And they put him in charge of a breakthrough entertainment technology company.

Brand new, in a new medium.

And hes going to come in and say, I know how to spin up the company.

And thats what you hire someone like that for.

So it makes sense.

The story of Atari is the story of everyone agreeing and making sense while we walk off a cliff.

There was nobody psychotic in charge going, Oh, lets just do this.

But its wonderful, its genius.

Then the company starts to succeed.

So the mindset shifts.

We dont want someone whos a wild, dynamic breakthrough kind of person, because thats already happened.

The need for that has gone.

What we need now is someone who can sustain growth someone more conventional.

One of the things I read was that Atari was over-producing quantities of its games.

Something likePac-Man,which sold well, but still had millions of cartridges left over.

See,Pac-Manwas just as big a problem asE.T.in a lot of ways.

Thats what I thought.

People were disappointed inE.T., but people didnt have any expectations.

E.T.s a great movie.

Okay, I want the game.

But what are you expecting from the game?

And thats how they got rid of a lot of those carts.

They didnt actually sell them.

So what are your memories of those five weeks working onE.T.?

They must have been frantic.

Oh the actual making of the game?

I mean literally crazy making.

Because, the metaphor I always use in my mind for it is climbing a mountain.

I needed a mountain to climb.

Its not really doable.

The way it registered with me was, Ah.

This is my challenge.

And I really wanted to climb it.

So I went into it with a zeal and determination that was intense.

In all fairness, thats the way I approach pretty much everything I enjoy.

It was a real edgy proposition.

What I needed to do was innovate.

Theres also the thing where, when you make a game, youre trapped inside of it.

Its like editing your own work.

I didnt have that time.

I didnt have that reflection time.

I didnt have that time to release myself from being stuck in it.

It was a game made by someone entirely stuck within the perspective of the system.

No real external perspective.

From a design point of view, thats a problem a limitation.

Because for one thing, nobody else wanted to participate in it!

[Laughs] This was literally something nobody would touch.

The truth of it is, when they finished the deal, they didnt call me up right away.

And he said, You cant have it.

You cant do a game in five weeks.

It just isnt going to happen.

So after that, they called me.

Ray Kassar called me directly I didnt know this other conversation had taken place.

He said, Can you do anything in five weeks?

And I said, Absolutely.

I can do that.

So I stood up in the meeting, and I said Yeah, its due September 1st.

This was like August 1st or 2nd.

I said, Id be happy to give it to you.

No one said anything.

But there was no more complaining either!

There was no more complaining about who was going to doE.T.They got that it was that tight a deadline.

Sometimes it takes longer to organise than to get something done.

In longer term projects, I dont think thats true there should be organisation time built into the schedule.

But on the 2600, it was more like, Get out of my way.

Its not that big a project in some ways.

Its a question of getting it right.

Its about having people play the game and consulting on the game, which I had people checking it.

Normally it takes a couple of months just to get to a playable version of the game.

You cant really get a lot of feedback on something until its at least minimally playable.

It was just balls to the wall, head down, just trying to get it going.

Its basically a game that needs to launch on first playable.

It turns out that I violated one of the fundamental rules of programming videogames.

Would you like to know what that is?

To me, one of the fundamental rules of game design is that its okay to frustrate a user.

Its not okay to disorient a user.

A videogame can be really tough to do.

Frustration is knowing what Im trying to achieve I just cant seem to do it.

Disorientation is, I dont know what the hell is going on.

I dont know what Im trying to do, I dont know what happened to me.

I dont know how I got to this place.

Im tired of winding up here.

Videogames are all about frustration, right?

Because the satisfaction of a videogame is overcoming a challenge.

The definition of a challenge is something that was frustrating before you achieved it.

Because if you just went and achieved it, it wasnt a challenge its just something you did.

It was quite trailblazing in a way, wasnt it?

It was, absolutely.

The idea that theyre people to be celebrated.

Theyre people who need a different pace and a different kind of celebration.

Its a very interesting take on what it is.

It was a different mindset for a company how to get productivity out of your people.

It was a different kind of carrot.

He really established something like that.

Theres another aspect to it, which is what I refer to as the intellectual blue collar.

It was one of the root causes for the eventual fail, the big problems in the gaming industry.

It was this big transition.

Or had a stereotype of them instead of relating to them.

Nolan was someone who made breakthrough, creative technology.

So he understood what thats like.

But the science of making the widgets that became very different.

Because for 150, 200 years, the production line had been enforced, in effect.

Ever sinceEli Whitney, a long time ago.

And that production line had been the basis of manufacturing and product development.

Nobody reports to them, just like a line worker.

Except line workers, if theyre really sharp, will usually graduate to management, right?

Because the managers are looking for people who will take a broader perspective.

But theres a difference there.

Managers certainly have control over the people that report to them.

And in a lot of cases they think theyre smarter than them.

And in a lot of cases, they may be.

And they like to dick around with their boss!

You didnt see that before.

It just wasnt done!

I mean, thats not a frame of mind youre used to seeing in business.

When Ray Kassar came in, he was a classical manager.

Bushnell was never a classical anything he was an innovator.

He created a new thing.

It wasnt that he was some tyrant that comes in to lord over people.

It was anathema to his model.

You dont hear people framing it that often, but I think thats really the story of what happened.

The seed was planted.

The die was cast.

Its just no way.

He really gets where its about to go.

I dont quite buy that.

I think what they had with the VCS was a mouse trap.

This thing was set to take off whatever it was.

This thing was going to go.

It was already set to take off.

But since it happens after theyve installed Kassar, Kassar gets a lot of the credit for it.

And whats Kassar going to do?

Say, I didnt have anything to do with it?

Hes getting million dollar bonuses from Warner!

Hes getting a lot of positive feedback from his bosses, saying, Hey, nice job.

Hes not going to say, Ah, I dont really know what Im doing.

He takes his style and really shoves it down peoples throats, because he believes in it.

But then it turns.

It starts to shift.

It starts to reverse.

And when it does, that when you find out what he really missed.

Atari was the fastest growing business in American history.

It was also the fastestfallingcompany in American history.

Whats up with that?

Its a very interesting thing.

Theyd basically built an abattoir for themselves.

And it was done with the best intentions.

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Was it a chance for you to reassess what happened, and your part in games history?

You know, that seems to be happening.

Its a good point.

For many, many years Ive talked about this, and Ive always joked with it.

Because Ive had my own way of dealing with it.

Ive never believed that E.T was the worst game of all time.

I never believed I was the cause of the crash of the videogame industry.

I was there, and I knew that didnt make sense.

But I wore that badge.

Im an extremely upbeat kind of person.

I liked that, thats how I related to it.

But people would always talk to me aboutE.T.and they wouldnt talk to me about Yars or Raiders.

So it was kind of a bummer to be focused on for all the negativity.

But in my mind, I had my own defences.

It was tremendously meaningful.

The promise of really going back and rewriting history certainly from my point of view, correctly, accurately.

Ive been speaking at conferences.

Im going to be at the Game Developer Conference, doing a post-mortem on Yars Revenge this year.

And I dont know what else will come of this.

I wasnt aware I was missing something.

To be appreciated for what you did is a huge, huge thing.

I was clear about this from the very beginning: what I was doing was helping people fight boredom.

Boredom was a big problem for me growing up.

I was bored with a lot of stuff, and I didnt have videogames.

For me, that was a noble ambition.

I see things like that, and I think, Wow, I did it.

I made a positive difference in literally millions of peoples lives.

Howard Scott Warshaw, thank you very much.