Once Upon Atari: How I made history by killing an industry

by Howard Scott Warshaw

Howard also created the first video game adaptation of a movie, Raiders of the Lost Ark.

What are we doing here? We’re searching for evidence. Specifically, we’re hoping to unearth the murder weapon with which I allegedly killed a multibillion-dollar industry back in the early ‘80s.

Games on this system usually take at least 6 months to develop. I’m committing to do one in 5 weeks.

This is an excavation (or “dig”) to literally uncover the truth behind an enduring urban myth. Specifically, that decades ago Atari trucked millions of unsold E.T. video game cartridges into the desert and buried them here in this dump.

If you want to change your “fate” in life, just start paddling.

As a child and teen, boredom was a problem. My solution was playing games. Games were my go-to anti-boredom device. Be it card games, board games, games of skill or games of chance, I was fascinated by them, interested in them, paid attention to them and thought about them.

“Please don’t mistake my levity for shallowness any more than I mistake your gravity for depth.”

Was the VCS limited? We had 4K of ROM for code and only 128 bytes of RAM for game state. Seriously.

To my view, creativity is taking unrelated things (or ideas) and putting them together in a fresh way (possibly counterintuitively), creating a new capability or opportunity. How can I make this happen?

“[Engineering needs] an environment with little discipline and yet with clearly stated goals. In general, that’s in conflict with a corporate form.” I’ve worked in creative environments where people think conflict is necessary for inspiration. I disagree. I believe conflict and competition are distractions. I believe organized chaos with low conflict, high comradery, and enough courage to keep pushing limits and busting through barriers… that’s the most potent recipe.

Locking ourselves into limited perspectives shrinks the world. When we are free to adopt different points of view, more solutions become available to us. We become more effective problem solvers when we work less on our problems and more on ourselves.

MRB is the acronym for Marijuana Review Board.

In the movie, Atari: Game Over, Nolan Bushnell says, “A simple answer that is clear and precise will always have more power in the world than a complex one that is true.”

Here is the simplest statement of why the video game market crashed: It was the first product life cycle.

The story of the demise of Atari and the early video game industry isn’t simple. It’s a complex web of characters and circumstances and agendas and motivations and nuanced ramifications.

One day in the spring of 1979, some programmers came to talk with Ray Kassar. This was not just any group of programmers, they were known collectively as The Fantastic Four. Headed by David Crane, they had produced the lion’s share of Atari’s best games to date.

The real cause is the transition from Nolan Bushnell to Ray Kassar, and what their differing philosophies meant culturally for the company and its employees.

Are video game makers rock stars or towel designers? An odd question? Perhaps, but this was the difference between Nolan Bushnell’s upstart Atari and Ray Kassar’s corporate Atari. And as time passed, the difference grew louder.

Rob is the guy who created 2600 Missile Command for Atari, then left and created 2600 Demon Attack for Imagic. Both rank near the top of any credible great games list.

And by B.I.G., I mean: Bluster, Ignorance & Greed. Three key undercurrents of the dynamics which truly killed (or at least severely maimed) the video game industry in the early 1980s.

BMOBS (pronounced Bee-Mobs) stands for Believe My Own Bullshit Syndrome.

“State-of-the-Art means when it’s broken, nobody knows how to fix it.” That is so true. We also discovered an interesting corollary to this: “When it works, nobody knows what to do with it.”

There comes a point in every development where all the key rules and components are reasonably represented. They may not look good, but they work correctly. Now you can finally experience the actual gameplay. This is an important milestone in every video game. It is called (unsurprisingly enough) First Playable.

Listen earnestly to feedback. This is not as easy as it sounds. Sometimes suggestions can feel like a threat to my vision or my implementation skills.

“The Yarrian Revenge of Razak IV.” I’m too tired to realize it, but I’ve just created the first backstory in video game history.

Under no circumstances would Atari reveal the identity of any internal game developer. To the outside world, we were nameless Atari employees, period.

Activision and Imagic made it a selling point, putting the programmer/designer profiles right out front.

They were inspired by my backstory and decided to turn it into a comic book which would be “packed out” with the game. This is called an ancillary product. It was the first of its kind in video games.

I learned that people can reliably tell you if they like something, but they cannot reliably tell you why.

The black box effect is about impact. The greater the black box effect, the more helpless I feel when dealing with the tech. Therefore, the more I’m willing to pay someone to do it for me. The black box effect determines the pay scale of experts for any given black box.

Programming languages are not designed to be easy for humans to use, but rather to be absolutely unambiguous for the computer to understand.

Programmers may use more words to describe a situation than most people do (as illustrated previously in the wake-up example). This is due to their need to be specific and exact in their communication.

The hacker is a very romantic image. But it’s not what software development was supposed to look like at the time. In fact, it was the opposite. We were guerilla programmers, forging a new frontier in the unspoiled, untamed software wilderness.

Making video games at Atari required a rare mixture of technological prowess and creative flair. You must be nerd enough to master the machine, and artist enough to do something worthy of a player’s attention. You had to be a hybrid, because the VCS forced you to exploit both skillsets. This mixture of tech and art was eye-opening for me.

Think small. I need to remember the words of Leonardo Di Vinci: “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.”

There is also a classic design mantra reverberating in my head, the KISS principle. KISS is an acronym for Keep It Simple, Stupid.

The best games, the classic games, have the magic balance of few rules and a huge number of possible outcomes.

It was deemed the E.T. game had to be available for the Christmas sales market.

A Video Game Easter Egg is an object, image or sequence which has little or nothing to do with the basic game action. It is obtainable only by performing some obscure action which is unlikely to happen during normal gameplay. Easter Eggs are the buried treasure of video games.]

The original video game Easter egg was created by Warren Robinett in his VCS game, Adventure. Adventure was a breakthrough concept, offering the first graphic quest-style experience on a TV screen. It was an amazing feat in just 2K of code, and it created an entirely new genre for gamers. That was his contribution above the surface.

Sneaker-net is a data transmission technology in which I place the data on some storage media (i.e. disc, thumb drive, tape, etc.) and physically walk it over to another location.

Each day I come in to work and head directly to the game room for my morning triathlon, one of the few rituals I’m maintaining. My morning triathlon consists of breaking 100,000 points on Defender, Robotron and Millipede.

This ticket takes me to London, where I’m reunited with my grandboss George and a very cool guy from international sales, Steve Race. I’m here to attend the British premiere of the E.T. movie and do some TV interviews to promote the video game.

Ernie wrote one of my favorite novels: Ready Player One, but that’s not why he’s here. He came because Ernie loves classic games and he cannot resist this kind of opportunity.

First, Raiders was going to be Atari’s (and the world’s) second adventure-style video game. The first one, Adventure by Warren Robinett, is a genre-defining masterwork. Warren blew players’ minds, creating a killer app for video games.

Nolan’s Law, handed down by Nolan Bushnell himself, was the fundamental video game design principle at Atari. It states: “The best games are easy to learn and difficult to master. They should reward the first quarter and the hundredth.”

the fundamental sin of video games: Thou shalt not disorient the player. Please do not confuse this with frustration. Disorientation and frustration are very different emotions. Frustration is knowing what I’m trying to do but feeling unable to do it. Disorientation is feeling completely lost as to where I am or what’s happening.

Honing and simplifying are expensive processes. It’s a sentiment as old as revision itself. As Mark Twain put it, “I apologize for such a long letter - I didn’t have time to write a short one.”

In true E.T. style, Atari snapped into reaction and rushed to market with too little too late. The Atari 5200 made it out just in time for the 1982 Christmas market.

Consumers were upset to learn about a new technical term: Backwards Compatibility. No one can play their existing VCS games on the new 5200 console.