E.T - What Happened? 

Holy crap it's the historiganngaming

i love your avatar

GAMING HISTORIAN!!! 🤘😛🤘

Cool

This feels like Nick Fury showing up in the end of Iron Man.

You can't make anything in 5 weeks, except mac and cheese.

They said Chase the Chuckwagon had to be made in under a week.

Idk man if it takes you 5 weeks to make mac n cheese you've got bigger problems​@Mintylight

Activision lived long enough to become the villian

Also very differnt people in charge now. We taking about decades.

And Disney was founded by a man who hated how animation companies had more control than individual artists.

That analogy would work better if the brand hadn't died and then gotten resurrected. All of the Activision founders had left the company by around 1984 and by 1988 the name was no longer even in use. The Activision we know now didn't really start until Bobby Kotick and co bought the brand in the early nineties because they wanted something with some recognition they could bank on.

The apple fell far from the tree but rolled back to it

You should check out the EA mission statement when they formed. Absolutely painful.

Buried? It’s practically in the fucking crust of the Earth at this point

@@tonybones5509 Can a computer make you cry? We may never know. But seeing the path Electronic Arts took over the decades might make one get a little misty eyed from what they became.

"We are passionate about our games, we are leaving this greedy giant corporation that is flooding the market with soulless games because all they care is money. We will never be like that!" Activision in the 80's

@@Noperare Also Activision: goes broke and gets bought up by Bobby Kotick, Lord of Destruction, who then turns them into a soulless mill and uses them to buy up other passionate game developers and turn them into soulless mills; it's like the system rewards greed and exterminates creativity and passion.

what a Hissance....

*throws cartridge in landfill

That snake emoji on my iphone 11 probably takes up more space than half of the entire ET game

@@b-mansly7550 If that snake is a 32x32 icon, than it would be.

Well why the heck not; if 6 pixels can be charitably called a "hat".

Almost as if the producer doesn't understand the planning and programming of a video game 🤔 But seriously it really is the producers fault most of the time when they push the game to come out much sooner than the developer wanted.

There is a reason why there is always a push for the holiday season. Most people are gearing up for Christmas shopping, and they know kids all want the latest and greatest new toy/game/doohicky, so they always try to hit that post-thanksgiving time frame since thats when lists/shopping usually begins.

Spielberg wanted a pacman clone like alien movie to game, he was convinced other wise by a guy knowing he was on a tight deadline Spielberg was most likely correct.

It didn't for Metroid Prime 2 and Sonic 2 at least. Though those were sequels that reused a great deal of assets from the previous game.

Someone said video games were different than other toys because they could sell year-round. Pac-Man came out in March-April 1982 and sold well. But the mentality that it had to be ready by Thanksgiving for Christmas was imbedded. I think Space Invaders came out in March 1980 and it's what made the Atari have 70%+ market share. Of course that programmer had been working on it even before they got the licensing rights so had a head start.

@@Kukaahi Well that's because generally the programmers, Artist or what ever have a degree of pride about their work and thus want to do the best work they can, while management can be divorced from this process and thus give the development team unreasonable goals. It generally isn't that developers are incompetent but rather those in charge have them do things way too fast (nothing good comes from rushing), with not enough money, with no clear direction or some combination of these 3.

@@SampoPaalanen There's a reason why some call it manglement instead of management

Executive meddling is the nemesis to good art.

Yeah it can't be understated just how much of the crash came down to retailers and the like being sick of Atari's shit.

Huh, interesting. The whole 83 "crash" is fascinating. Demand for good games didn't stop, and there was ok stuff coming it, especially on C64 and early home computers. Even atari had great games like Chopper Command, Star Master and Pitfall, with H.E.R.O just around the corner....and the 8-bit console era was what, 18 months away? Seems like a completely preventable crash.

@@davidprice7162 Funny enough, the Crash didn't really affect PC gaming at all, since at that time it was essentially a completely different thing from console gaming, with almost none of the games and developers being shared.

I think we had 3 layers of disappointment and loss of confidence: (1) Consumers who didn't like Pac-Man, Donkey Kong and E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial games for Atari, (2) Investors who didn't like it that 3rd party competition and Atari not making the best games resulted in their forecast of profits increasing by 50% to increasing by 15%, and (3) Retailers that over-ordered because of not getting their previous orders due to a chip shortage as well as retailers that wanted to get into the video game business but didn't know what they were doing so got a lot of stock that didn't move especially from 3rd parties. (Both Atari and Imagic had a return or exchange policy, so returning stock to those companies shouldn't have been a problem.) I hadn't heard that Atari forced retailers to take games that didn't sell. I figured they didn't want to remove from their catalog games from 1977-1979 that weren't selling, to make the claim they had more games than other systems and these old, ugly games took up shelf space. Claiming they could play a lot of games seems to be the strategy for Mattel (Intellivision) and ColecoVision by offering backwards-compatible plugins to play Atari 2600 games.

That's funny, they did that all the way back in the early days of movies...it was called block-booking, to get the studio's new hot movie, you had to run the crappy ones...

Given how long Atari's been around in one state or another, it could probably support an entire Wha Happun mini-series.

They sega'd themselves. I.e go from hardware manufacturer to publisher infamous for publishing a lot of shit (Sega atleast has Yakuza and Atlus though)

@@stevethepocket I can explain that in one word: Driv3r

@@stevethepocket The funny thing to me about Atari is that it's passed around due to its already burned legacy from *4 fucking decades* ago. If you were born the day Atari figuratively died you'd be old enough now to be a Dad with grown ass kids.

@@LOLquendoTV Sorry for the late comment, but the funniest thing about *that* Atari is that it has nothing in common with the Atari that made the 2600 and all the other games; it's just rebranded Infogrames that for one reason or another decided to buy Atari's trademark. It's like if Ubisoft randomly changed its name to Coleco

WW2: Wha Happun

@@SerPinkKnight Wha Happun?: The Big Bang

@@SAPProd The Universe was changed numerous times during development, and after eons of delays, finally released as an unbalanced glitchy mess.

@@christopherlundgren1700 the huge amounts of DLC beginning in the 20th century did a lot to both improve and ruin the experience, if you could afford it all.

Lol it's kind of odd seeing you post without a gif of Phobos attached to it

More like *THE* OOF There's literally nothing positive in this story

Crunch culture on the video game industry started with this game 😂

it was self-inflicted...

It turns out that after losing their programmers, they farmed out games for the 5200 in 1982, and 2600 in 1983 to 3rd parties. Perhaps that's why Jungle Hunt and Moon Patrol looked so good (even if I didn't like the controls of the former). The idea that carts had to be a one-programmer's job with no help in graphic design or sound and music should have been put to rest, especially if the lead programmer isn't getting credit.

the Landfill wasn't a rumor, it was a well known in the 80s. And ET was only a small portion of that was dug up

I heard that some of those cartridges were still playable.

@@absolutez3r019 a lot of people were dismissing it as a myth

Don't forget the movie scene where the Government agent grabbed ET, set him down in some random house and just wandered off, leaving ET to just casually bumble back outside. But admittedly, the movie's "ET falls down a pit for the hundredth time" scene was more iconic. ^_^

Irony: the main game for Christmas was called "Pitfall!" They say that changing the pixel checker might have solved that problem or putting E.T. clear of the pit upon leaving. I'm told someone did fix that for some kind of home brew version.

...in the same way that Bubonic Plague was important to medieval Europe, I'd say! Or would that comparison be an insult to Bubonic Plague?

Sounds like you made Paperboy but cut out the newspaper bit.

@@viscountrainbows6452 my imaginary game would have probably made more money

Yeah like - have a blob that’s supposed to be a bicycle controlled by the player, have a blob that’s supposed to be a car chasing you, have (random position) trees zoom in from right to left to make it look like a high-speed chase, and make the score count up the longer you go. If you hit a tree or get caught, you restart the game. Seems like it would be both easier to make and a better game? But then, that’s hindsight for you. I mean for one, we probably know more about the movie than Warshaw did at the time (he didn’t exactly have time to rewatch it every day). And we also have 30 years of collective game design knowledge on him, knowledge that only came about because of high-profile failures like these. Also stuff like “market desires” - people might not have wanted an ultra basic arcade-style game that has like five seconds of unique gameplay as a major movie tie-in. Of course, the market didn’t want what actually happened either. But again, hindsight.

@MetaruPX So I just played a "bugfix" version of ET. Pit detection is moved to the feet, all movement costs 0 energy by default (normal settings are moved to the black and white switch) and socring is now consistent with the manual. I found it a bit too easy so I turned on energy loss while hovering and running and now it feels like a proper hunt game. And I was skilled at the game as a kid already.

@MetaruPX I dunno about easy to fix- I looked over the notes of the person who implemented all the fixes and memory contraints were tight, as far as building a patch that fits in the same cartridge space goes. It'd probably be doable for me, but about the only thing I'd want to fix could be done with just two bytes which is a trivial change. Fixing the scoring almost looked to me to be more trouble than it was worth. And I'll say it again, I already liked the base game, and read all the material for the game including the warning notes about holding up while coming out of holes. I just never played with FBI or Scientists as a kid because I wanted to actually win the game more often than lose. As to the idea of having the game be just the bicycle scene, I'd have loved that too. Those are pretty common game formats in the Atari 2600 library as well.

The multimedia rollout may have been a flop, but damn I loved those games.

At the very least, the anime would mark the debut of a little known animation studio called PRODUCTION I.G.

Nintendo after being rejected by Atari: Fine, I'll do it myself

I'm sure there will be a PS5 episode.

Fun fact: The 2600 was AWFUL to create graphics for. ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-sJFnWZH5FXc.html explains it pretty well.

I met the guy at a convention, great dude

I enjoyed that game lol, the concept was really cool

@@SwooshJush83 bro that game was a blast and also it holds a special place in my heart for the first PS3 game I owned

I loved that game. I still think its fun to play.

The reviews it got are still burned in my head and made me sad....... my friend and I who were very big Battlefront 2 fans loved the game.....

@@Sonichero151 I watched Watchmojo’s video on the Lord of the Rings games best to worst and the footage they got for Conquest was a joke because they were not showing any story or they just played bad on purpose and besides that game is a blast, I know it has many flaws but I still enjoy the game even to this day because it’s really fun (well for me anyway).

Maybe trashy games from 3rd-parties that retailers bought and couldn't sell didn't make it to the PAL format and Europe and Brazil? I heard they were 1 year behind.

I remember playing Airlock for the Atari 2600. Airlock was produced by Hell if I Remember Industries. And Airlock did indeed suck sour frog ass. I brought it back for a refund less than two days later.

The worst were those games that used the B&W/Color switch to do something for the game. Who'd have thought to toggle that without the instructions? And I don't think they even have that switch on later versions or flashbacks!

Assuming that Warshaw had a connection to Hollywood through Spielberg, he must've gotten a decent supply of the latter.

Oh thank god

@@tjmauser6954 The early days of all-star programmers were wild. The show Code Monkeys wasn't too much of an exaggeration of the inflated lifestyle those guys were living. Meanwhile over in the UK you had studios like Imagine Software, where the guys were all driving around in Ferraris while failing to ship games on time and the company was crumbling around them.

They still make the christmas version of capn crunch? Wait, i think you meant crunch time, my bad

@@Poever Yeah. As he said, many covered it in the past. But I'm glad he did, there were details I didn't know here.

Nah the pricetag is actually still roughly $1 actually 😂 i bought one myself for a laugh

Not to mention other parts of the world didn't have a "crash" around that time, gaming was still doing fine in Europe for example.

@@pentelegomenon1175 TBH I've always like the Japanese term for the '83 Crash over "The Great Video Game Crash of 1983", which is "The Atari Shock". It pretty much sums up the situation more clearly than the broad implications of "Great Video Game Crash", the relative collapse of a major industry titan who didn't kill off video games world wide (Japan and Europe were still going strong), but definitely significantly shrunk the US Video Game market and left a big open hole for Nintendo to swoop into - making the Video Game industry predominantly Japanese lead until the release of the Xbox almost 2 decades later

also there is the new advanced 5200 console that came out. The one with the 360 degree joystick that was ground-break....Dammit It Broke.

@@magnafoxodyssey2127 The Atari Shock rolls off the tongue a lot better I do admit (Plus you also have to factored in that the US and Japan has a symbiotic relationship with each other since the end of WWII)

I think it's a myth that Pac-Man was a prototype, alpha or beta. It just wasn't that good, and was put on a 4K ROM (like Donkey Kong) to reduce costs. And considering the time, kids would play anything like Pac-Man, even the hand-held Coleco Tabletop Arcades. What's amazing is that Donkey Kong for Atari and Pac-Man were still top-sellers when E.T. fell off the top-ten chart, shown in this video. 8:52. They and Raiders of the Lost Ark were disappointments. I liked adventure games, (and Haunted House could have been better having 1 screen per room, like Adventure and Superman, instead of 4 screens for 6 rooms each). I played three Scott Adams text adventure games for the VIC-20 back in the day and was able to win eventually without help. As for Raiders of the Lost Ark I couldn't discover anything new on my own that I didn't read in the manual. One hint is wrong since you lose points by using the grenades, (the game doesn't tell you that!) and the gun with bullets isn't supposed to be used to solve problems either. Apparently kids called Atari for them to send them a walkthrough. Also he took away some points so Indy can never get enough to reach the top of the Ark like he's supposed to. I finally read online how to dig years later to win, as well as to find the hidden Yar. This is another game that sold because of its name and Atari's name. It's amazing to think games that sold over 1 million could be failures, but this one (and the other three) are because of disappointing consumers and perhaps over-production. PS: I think they were able to move 1-2 million more Pac-Man games by bundling them with new consoles in 1983.

surprisingly a lot of the history of computers and video gaming is scattered around Texas, The 8 Bit Guy has a bunch of really nice videos exploring parts of the history, and even visiting some of the locations from the building that birthed Duke Nukem to Texas Instruments and a bunch of other early manufacturers and game company offices.

Makes me wonder if they had more than one dump site.

I blame some of that on lack of competition. If Mattel got Space Invaders, then they might have become the dominant player and Atari would have had to come out with a better system (and games) to compete. But the Atari's 1977 system was just good enough and sold 10 million through the end of 1981 (before Pac-Man) and another 5 million after that, compared to 3 million Intellivisions in its life. Even with one joystick button and a cheaper processing chip than what it could have had, programmers were able to squeeze out more from that system to keep it going. (The Odyssey² compared favorably to Atari in 1978-9, but its games never got any better.) When Atari VCS came out in 1977, industry people expected it to be replaced in a few years, as previous generation one systems were. But somehow they didn't present that to consumers or do a "give Atari to your little brother" campaign to sell the latest system as being so much better.

This was clearly some ancient ritual.

Not even when ET died? You..."monster"!

I have cried like a small child to maybe 3 games. Not a lot, but haven't been moved to tears by any of Ol' Stevo's films either. Hell, I've shed far more tears watching anime than any of the "real grown up art forms".

I got a bit misty-eyed when ET damned near died in that Government lab, but I actually lost a few tears over Schindler's List. Damn...I was _so_ sure that the little girl in the red coat was going to get out of that ghetto alive, too. :(

What I think about is how Hollywood breaks down sets, then decides whether to store them (for a sequel) or just trash them. Just imagine if you could go to England and see the sets for _The Empire Strikes Back!_ But they didn't think people would want to tour sets! Even if they moved sets (or video games) to a warehouse somewhere, storage costs money.

Funny how Nintendo has been on both ends of that kind of deal falling through.

Raiders of the Lost Ark - with its generous nine-month development - wasn't exactly the best Atari 2600 game (and it certainly paled in comparison to Warshaw's magnum opus, Yar's Revenge), but at least Raiders was quite playable, perhaps even enjoyable and actually _beatable._ I always had trouble figuring out _which exact pixel_ I had to drop the bag of gold on so the giant bearded head _wouldn't_ telekinetically kill Indy, but that was the only distinctly sucky part of Raiders. Raiders beat ET by _leagues._

@@BloodyBay Today, (or three years ago) I played E.T. and finished multiple rounds before dying from lack of energy. I know little kids couldn't do that. But I never learned anything in _Raiders of the Lost Ark_ that wasn't in the manual. I finally won it after reading how to online over a decade later. Even though it sold 1 million, I think this was a disappointment and failure too that only sold because of its name and is worse than E.T. He should have made it an action game, like chasing the truck.

The Great Crash that occured nowhere outside the US, that's how huge it was.

Yeah. It was quite a messy development that it was a miracle that it came out and didn't flop. Sure, the practice of releasing episodic characters stories lead to some players leave a bad taste in their mouth but what can Tabata do when Square gave him a strict deadline whilst piecing together what Nomura left on the project. Just concepts without having a great foundation on the actual game itself (The game engine) Anyway, I am glad that the game aged well. I hear nothing but praise when the Royal Edition came out. There are still who are dissatisfied but they are only the minority. Well, as far as the various Final Fantasy communities in social media are concerned that is.

Someone else watched that? Nice.

It might have been playtested and the pixel-detection would have been better to not fall back in pits. I saw a video about Imagic developing Atlantis and they brought in kids to playtest and say what they felt. Whether anything was changed based on feedback, I don't know.

Well, when you drive off all the good programmers, I guess that means the one who remained gets to set his own terms! But of course they went to third-party developers for the 5200 games and in 1983 games for the 2600.

Well, it looks like they didn't want to drop the prices to sell them, so that's a strategy to keep the prices up. I saw they were trying to sell games from the 1970s on Atari Age for $10 in 1983 rather than remove them from the catalog, even though games like Skydiver and Outlaw made the system look bad, like Odyssey².

Twenty-seven video games for Atari sold over 1 million, and only 4 were disappointments. I don't fault Activision at all, unless you say they kept Atari alive so people didn't buy a different system and Atari didn't retire it and put out a new system earlier. If Activision hadn't existed, then Atari still would have made Pac-Man, Raiders of the Lost Ark, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial and a bunch of junk like Swordquest and RealSports in 1982, but likely less consoles would have sold without Activision games to play on it.

@@sandal_thong8631 I made that comment 2 years ago, I can't remember the context of why I stated that nor do I care to rewatch the video now to find out why I said that.

@@rubz1390 Activision wasn't mentioned much in the video, but there must have been plenty of hate for Activision in 2021 since yours isn't the only comment like that. (There wasn't in 1980-83.)

@@sandal_thong8631 My comment would have been due to something in the video, I haven't bought a COD game in like 15 years so I'm not really that invested in the hate train.

It stopped because it never sold well. Not a complicated mystery to figure out.

JSRF wasn't a huge production that flopped, it was always a niche franchise that never really took off. It's a "cult classic" if you will.

Smilebit was shut down after the Sega and Sammy merger and the team either left(like the creator) or were folded into Sega sports to make the sonic and Mario Olympics games, before that was shut down to and the ip passed to another dev. So basically just a case of corporate restructuring and change of direction