How Spielberg’s gen­tle alien killed the video game industry

Sep­tem­ber, 2012: The rumoured remains of King Richard III are found buried beneath a car park in Leices­ter. Eigh­teen months lat­er, half the world away in Alam­ogor­do, New Mex­i­co, an alto­geth­er geeki­er group of experts and enthu­si­asts make a sim­i­lar­ly his­toric dis­cov­ery in a 30-year-old land­fill: a mass grave teem­ing with video game car­tridges report­ed­ly entombed in 1983, a fate­ful year for both the gam­ing indus­try and its pio­neer­ing com­pa­ny, Atari.

The video game indus­try may still be in its infan­cy when com­pared with cin­e­ma, tele­vi­sion, music and lit­er­a­ture, but it has already con­tributed its fair share of cul­tur­al his­to­ry, and gam­ing folk­lore has no larg­er leg­end than that sur­round­ing the myth­i­cal­ly-pro­por­tioned Video Game Crash. The num­bers speak for them­selves: what was a $3 bil­lion busi­ness at its peak in the ear­ly ​’80s shrunk by 97 per cent to a mere $100 mil­lion with­in a hand­ful of years. Atari, the indus­try leader with an aston­ish­ing 80 per cent mar­ket share (Accord­ing to Forbes the com­bined share of Nin­ten­do, Microsoft and Sony’s con­soles only make up 63 per cent of today’s indus­try), bore the brunt of the col­lapse, post­ing $500 mil­lion loss­es in 1982 and lay­ing off 80 per cent of its staff soon after.

Spoil­er alert: the video game indus­try even­tu­al­ly bounced back. But in the ensu­ing years, a tidy nar­ra­tive devel­oped, com­plete with its own scape­goat. Step for­ward E.T. The Extra-Ter­res­tri­al, an ill-fat­ed tie-in game for Steven Spielberg’s hit fam­i­ly flick designed by Atari wun­derkind Howard Scott War­shaw. Atari paid through the nose for the licence and set War­shaw, fresh from design­ing a pop­u­lar and acclaimed adap­ta­tion of Raiders of the Lost Ark, the task of com­plet­ing the project not in the usu­al time­frame of months, but weeks. An unprece­dent­ed five of them, in fact, to ensure a Christ­mas 1982 release. The result was by most accounts a ful­ly-func­tion­ing, but dis­ap­point­ing and pun­ish­ing­ly dif­fi­cult game. Atari hoped to sell four mil­lion copies, but many remained on store shelves. And a sig­nif­i­cant chunk of that stock, so the leg­end goes, was buried in Alamogordo.

Imag­ine if infa­mous box office bombs like Heaven’s Gate or Cut­throat Island didn’t just sink film move­ments or pro­duc­tion com­pa­nies, but scup­pered the entire movie busi­ness. That’s the rep­u­ta­tion thrust upon E.T., and even a casu­al Google of the phrase ​‘worst video game ever’ brings up legions of lis­ti­cles per­pet­u­at­ing the myth. Not­ed inter­net grouch Sean­ba­by, for exam­ple, places E.T. in the top spot of his ​‘Crap­strav­a­gan­za’ fea­ture, draw­ing a com­par­i­son to noto­ri­ous­ly un-PC Atari game Custer’s Revenge (which ranked #9) in his entry: ​“The Atari 2600 had a game where Gen­er­al Custer raped Indi­ans tied to cac­tus­es, and that couldn’t kill the sys­tem… Call­ing [E.T.] a piece of trash is actu­al­ly sci­en­tif­i­cal­ly accurate.”

But how does it all stand up to cold, hard, dis­in­terred fact? Like the case of the king in the car park, the exca­va­tion of this ancient video game bur­ial ground was spear­head­ed and chron­i­cled by a film crew, and was even­tu­al­ly cut togeth­er into a brisk, endear­ing doc­u­men­tary titled Atari: Game Over (ini­tial­ly launched, curi­ous­ly, on Microsoft’s Xbox Live media plat­form, now more wide­ly avail­able on VoD). Direc­tor Zak Penn, else­where known for co-writ­ing screen­plays for Last Action Hero, Inspec­tor Gad­get and X‑Men: The Last Stand, was one of the kids who expe­ri­enced the crash first-hand.

“It was mys­ti­fy­ing,” he recalls. ​“Every­body loved these games, they were real­ly pop­u­lar. And then it stopped.” But he was attract­ed to the E.T. sto­ry much lat­er, when the myth was in full flow, exag­ger­at­ed and pro­lif­er­at­ed by a younger gen­er­a­tion online: ​“The inter­net is a very good, crowd­sourced sto­ry­teller. What drew me into this spe­cif­ic sto­ry was… how the hell did all these pieces come together?”

Across 66 whol­ly enlight­en­ing min­utes, Atari: Game Over picks apart the accept­ed nar­ra­tive of the crash and inter­views devel­op­ers (Atari founder Nolan Bush­nell), his­to­ri­ans and oth­er notable game buffs (includ­ing Ready Play­er One author Ernest Cline and for­mer jour­nal­ist and cur­rent screen­writer Gary Whit­ta), lead­ing up to grand unveil­ing of the dig’s find­ings. In the process, the film mounts a defence case in sup­port of E.T. and, in par­tic­u­lar, design­er Howard Scott War­shaw, who tagged out of the indus­try after the crash to become a writer, film­mak­er and, lat­ter­ly, a psychotherapist.

Penn’s the­sis, which is borne out by his cho­sen talk­ing heads and, indeed, the bur­ial site’s con­tents (nowhere near the report­ed amount of car­tridges, and only a pro­por­tion of them were E.T.), is that Atari’s bub­ble was bound to burst any­way, thanks to mar­ket sat­u­ra­tion and lack of inno­va­tion. ​“The real issue about what hap­pened with Atari was a tech­no­log­i­cal one,” Penn explains. ​“They thought they had the hula hoop, they didn’t realise they had cin­e­ma.” Years lat­er, the likes of Nin­ten­do, Sony and Microsoft would build a new video game indus­try based on reg­u­lar hard­ware refresh­es, but Atari erro­neous­ly believed that their 2600 con­sole was a busi­ness unto itself. When it failed, both Atari and the gam­ing com­mu­ni­ty need­ed an easy expla­na­tion, and E.T. was it. Penn puts it in suit­ably Hol­ly­wood terms: ​“E.T. was the fall guy.”

E.T. design­er Howard Scott War­shaw describes the Video Game Crash as the community’s first shared tragedy, akin to the Great Depres­sion, and his game just pro­vid­ed the face. But when asked about the endur­ing leg­end around the game, he pin­points a mode of social behav­iour spe­cif­ic to con­tem­po­rary online cul­ture: ​“Being a hater is in vogue, par­tic­u­lar­ly in this gen­er­a­tion. It’s a social trend. I see it as a bunch of peo­ple exer­cis­ing their wit, and I’m always in favour of that. But my game hap­pened to be a light­ning rod for haters.” That most of these crit­ics plac­ing E.T. at the top of their ​‘worst game’ lists haven’t even played the game seems to be beside the point; its asso­ci­a­tion with the down­fall of the indus­try is enough to make it a wor­thy target.

What Atari: Game Over sig­nals, though, is a dif­fer­ent breed of video game dis­course dis­tinct from haters and myth-deal­ing nos­tal­gia. Through­out, Penn and co exhib­it a gen­uine curios­i­ty to read against accept­ed wis­dom, and there’s an infec­tious sin­cer­i­ty to the film’s approach to the game and its cre­ator, best wit­nessed in the scenes doc­u­ment­ing the exca­va­tion itself, which come across like a spir­i­tu­al cer­e­mo­ny, or a com­mu­nal hap­pen­ing. Enthu­si­asts gath­ered from all over the States, even abroad, to take part in the col­lec­tive experience.

War­shaw him­self was moved: ​“It was over­whelm­ing to me to think that some­thing that I did 32 years ago is still doing what I want­ed it to do, which is to cre­ate some excite­ment and relief from bore­dom for a few moments. And there it was, right in front of me, before my very eyes, and I wept. Some­thing that I found in this movie that I didn’t even know I need­ed as much as I did was redemp­tion. It was a hum­bling moment.”

A reclaimed E.T. car­tridge from the land­fill now sits in the col­lec­tion of the Smithsonian’s Nation­al Muse­um of Amer­i­can His­to­ry, com­ple­ment­ing the copy of Warshaw’s ear­li­er game, the crit­i­cal­ly-acclaimed space shoot­er Yars’ Revenge, which takes pride of place in the Archi­tec­ture & Design col­lec­tion at the Muse­um of Mod­ern Art. But, reflect­ing on the dig, War­shaw is clear about which is the more promi­nent work: ​“if I would have come up with a bril­liant game and every­body enjoyed play­ing the game, it would have been like Yars, and nobody would be there.”

By being hat­ed, slat­ed and entombed, E.T. was lift­ed out of its imme­di­ate con­text and cement­ed into pop cul­ture his­to­ry, sug­gest­ing, per­haps, that sim­ply being good isn’t some­thing worth phon­ing home about.