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The man who made 'the worst video game in history'
- freditup 11y agoA couple of comments based off of the first ET poster/ad in the article: * Atari games like this cost $40? That seems expensive! * Why did Pennsylvania residents have to call a different number? * Funny that a point of advertising was getting the game before everyone else. It reminds you that these were real games people wanted and not just nostalgic blasts, how I view them now. (Link to poster: http://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/624/cpsprodpb/1972/production/_88241560_976_etposter.jpg http://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/624/cpsprodpb/1972/production/_...)
- brandonmenc 11y ago> Why did Pennsylvania residents have to call a different number? I remember seeing this sort of thing a lot back then. Probably a sales tax thing - maybe the fulfillment center was in PA.
- Hydraulix989 11y agoLong distance calls? Remember those? :) It was probably short distance in PA.
- drfuchs 11y agoBack in the day, AT&T had technological issues that meant that there were separate "in-state" and "out-of-state" 800 numbers, so every national advertisement always mentioned a main 800 number, plus a different one for the one particular state where they actually had their call center. Single-state institutions sometimes only had in-state 800 numbers, so, for instance, you literally couldn't call California's Franchise Tax Board (the state's IRS-like tax authority) from outside of California (as I learned from bitter experience). Look up "InWATS" in Wikipedia for more details. Now, get off my lawn.
- brandonmenc 11y agoMy mom worked at GTE and when I went to college in 1997 she got us a WATS line so I could dial 1-800 to call home. One of her jobs in the early 80s was to calculate the bills for WATS lines. There was a room full of mechanical counters, like odometers, that would increment while people were talking on their line. Every day she'd write down the new counts, subtract the previous day's counts, and they'd bill the difference.
- sehugg 11y agoIt sometimes blows my mind that this would be $100 in today's dollars, or $12.50 per kilobyte.
- voltagex_ 11y ago$100 is a normal (Xbox One/PS4) game price in Australia.
- coke12 11y ago100 AUD is 71 USD.
- junto 11y agoWow. That's really expensive. Is it a 95% fun tax?
- Buge 11y agoWhere did you get 95% from? The normal new game price on Amazon seems to be $60. The Division and Far Cry Primal are both $60 for both systems. It's an 18% "fun tax".
- junto 11y agoIt was just an observation that Ozzies seem to get screwed by both corporations and their own government these days. 95% I plucked out of my head, as an extreme percentual screwing value! :-)
- NamTaf 11y agoIt's a 95% Australia tax. We pay more for almost everything just because. It was originally justified by our exchange rates (which got down into the AUD$1 = USD$0.5x) but persisted at the same dollar values even when the rate went to AUD$1 = USD$1.2. Basically, we get screwed because there's precident establishing that we can. And it permiates almost anything that is produced overseas including phones and laptops but also all kinds of software, not just games. Here's an article from when it was a hot topic in the news: http://www.smh.com.au/technology/technology-news/adobe-chief-dodges-questions-over-pricing-20130214-2eetr.html http://www.smh.com.au/technology/technology-news/adobe-chief... At the time it was literally cheaper to fly from Sydney to LA, buy the software in LA and fly home.
- jonathankoren 11y agoYup. My grandmother bought me it for christmas, no doubt full retail. It was inordinately expensive. It would be inordinately expensive today with a retail cost of $100 inflation adjusted dollars. Best 2600 title screen ever though. No one ever mentions that about the game though.
- mrspeaker 11y agoAnyone who is in to Atari 2600 knows that ET is verrrrrry far from the worst game available on that system! And it's so sad making it a great game would have take so few tweaks! http://www.neocomputer.org/projects/et/ http://www.neocomputer.org/projects/et/
- BEEdwards 11y agoWas going to post this, then got caught up reading it and you beat me too it. Good read, interesting fixes.
- knieveltech 11y agoThis. I played the hell out of that game when it came out. I mean, who in their right mind would rank "Skiing" or "Combat" higher that this game?
- cgriswald 11y agoI would definitely rank Combat higher. I was quite young when ET came out. I loved ET, but the game was basically impossible for me to play because I couldn't get out of the pits very well; which was exacerbated by falling into them when I shouldn't have. In contrast, Combat was easy to figure out and play and I could play it with loved ones.
- ASalazarMX 11y agoI'd suppose most kids learned quickly that you could float mid fall and bypass the energy penalty. Even if you fell by accident, it cost practically nothing.
- krapp 11y agoOne of the reasons ET flopped was because the game was confusing. Combat, meanwhile, is literally just player 1 and player 2 trying to shoot each other. In terms of accessibility, engagement and gameplay Combat is objectively better.
- Gratsby 11y ago
- purpled_haze 11y agoIf you want to learn much more about this, watch the movie, "Atari: Game Over": http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3715406/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3715406/
- otobrglez 11y agoLet me save you some time. Atari: Game Over on Netflix ~> http://www.netflix.com/title/80042198 http://www.netflix.com/title/80042198
- cjslep 11y agoHere I thought I Wanna Be The Guy was the worst video game.
- minimaxir 11y agoOf all the memes IWBTG has created, "bad game" is not one of them. (the deliberate difficulty of that game has in fact created a new genre of games, leading to things like Super Meat Boy)
- kstenerud 11y agoI still don't get why this game is so maligned. It was one of my favorite 2600 games! The only game I liked better was pitfall.
- ctdonath 11y agoMy wife remembers that game quite fondly. May be hip to dis it now, but a lot of people did enjoy it.
- purpled_haze 11y agoI played it a lot. I can't say I ever enjoyed it. It was a frustrating game with very little reward.
- gyardley 11y agoI also remember really enjoying it as a six or seven year old. I remember how excited I was when I figured out how the forest and the government linked to the various screens with the wells, and which directions would guarantee you fell into a well and which didn't. Bouncing in my chair excited. Then again, I had weird taste in video games when I was a kid.
- kintamanimatt 11y ago> "It's awesome to be credited with single-handedly bringing down a billion-dollar industry with eight kilobytes of code. But the truth is a little more complex." Eight kilobytes?! How do you build anything meaningful, especially a game, with just eight kilobytes?
- krapp 11y agoAssembly?
- theandrewbailey 11y agoQuite a lot, turns out. The demoscene does miracles in 4k. http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=52938 http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=52938
- userbinator 11y agoMight be better to show some actual Atari 2600 demos: http://www.pouet.net/prodlist.php?platform%5B0%5D=Atari+VCS http://www.pouet.net/prodlist.php?platform%5B0%5D=Atari+VCS Here's one of the higher-ranked 8k demos: http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=32203 http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=32203 (YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WogMZn87hkk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WogMZn87hkk )
- gauthr 11y agoGet a copy of Racing the Beam to get some insight into how programmers were able to wring out every bit[1] of potential from the Atari 2600: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/racing-beam https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/racing-beam [1] Yes, I see what I did there.
- quicklyfrozen 11y agoWell you also have 128 bytes of RAM to work with...
- kabdib 11y agoYou have a little more than this: - In 2600 coding you often don't need a stack, so you can use 'S' as a temp register. Very useful in the display kernel. - The 2600 has a standard parallel port chip. There are configuration registers (e.g., port direction) that can be temporarily hijacked as RAM, when you don't care about input or output (which you generally only sample once a frame). That's a whole 8 more bits of RAM, not to be sneezed at. One of my cow-orkers at Atari decided that he'd try to learn 2600 programming (he was mostly doing Atari Home Computer stuff). Over three or four months I saw him go through what I can only describe as deterioration and utter discouragement. The people who could get even an awful game out of the 2600 were pretty damned good hackers.
- Animats 11y agoWhat, not "Desert Bus"?[1][2] (Now available for IoS and Android.) [1] http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/desert-bus-the-very-worst-video-game-ever-created http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/desert-bus-the-very-w... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nBr7EhL6Jpg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nBr7EhL6Jpg
- theandrewbailey 11y agoIt was never released for sale, and it certainly could not be blamed for destroying an industry.
- purpled_haze 11y agoPlayed that game for a good hour and a half at least. Fun for the whole family. Also, Desert Bus for Hope raises money for charity: https://desertbus.org/ https://desertbus.org/ At time of writing, they've raised $3,112,329.72. More info here: https://desertbus.org/about/ https://desertbus.org/about/
- krapp 11y agoDesert Bus doesn't count - it was purposefully bad. Big Rigs Over the Road Racing, meanwhile, was for all intents and purposes an alpha build sold as an actual game, in a box and everything.
- AndrewKemendo 11y agoProbably because it's satirically bad, not actually. Expectations are different from the outset.
- kqr2 11y agoAnother contender for the title of worst video game: Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing was critically panned. The game's criticism is largely directed at its "blatantly unfinished"[2] state: lack of collision detection and frequent violation of the laws of physics, frequent and major software bugs, poor visuals, and severe lack of functionality. As a result, the game is now widely regarded as one of the worst video games of all time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Rigs:_Over_the_Road_Racing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Rigs:_Over_the_Road_Racing
- taspeotis 11y agoYes there's plenty of them. I thought this article was going to be about Daikatana.
- minimaxir 11y agoDaikatana was never called the "worse game ever," but the worst game relative to the amount of investment/hype/ego.
- louprado 11y agoThere's a long list on Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_video_games_notable_for_negative_reception https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_video_games_notable_fo... A close friend of mine worked on PaintBrawl, which made the list (#2.11). PaintBrawl is a first person shooter but used paintball guns since WalMart wouldn't carry violent video games in the 90s.
- pmiller2 11y agoLet's not forget, the same person also created the best-selling original title for the Atari 2600: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yars'_Revenge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yars'_Revenge
- wyldfire 11y agoSure, the article seems to acknowledge as much: > "I actually prefer it when people do identify it as the worst game of all time because I also did Yars Revenge and that's frequently identified as one of the best of all time. So between the two, I have the greatest range of any designer in history!" I really liked Yars' Revenge. That constant droning sound -- it was really unlike anything I'd heard at that point.
- krapp 11y ago...or that his biggest failure still sold over a million copies.
- tomphoolery 11y agoI remember learning about this game on a G4 special, and seeing Warshaw's spots talking about how it was made. I wasn't alive when this game was released, but it seems to be very frustrating to play. But hey, that's what you get on the first try when you rush things (coughJavaScriptcough). I'm glad to see someone's "fixed" it just to see what it would have been like had Warshaw been able to get the time needed to really complete the project. It looked like a great idea, just a terrible execution.
- joeax 11y agoIf we're going to rate Atari games adjusted by the level of effort and time put into them, I'd say this is one of its better games. This is one developer coding non-stop for five weeks straight, and he had the temerity to push back on Spielberg's ideas. I wouldn't say he caused Atari's demise, but rather he almost saved the company.
- raverbashing 11y agoYes, I'm not blaming someone with a limited time and very limited hardware for not putting up an all-star game Of course, not all of the time was coding, there was a lot of hand-drawing stuff, converting it to numbers, paper calculations, testing, etc
- gillianseed 11y agoOf course this game did not lead to the 'videogame crash' of 83, other videogame areas like the arcades was doing just fine, and home computers as well. The problem was that the console games of the time were incredibly poor in graphics/sound, and typically also in game play. Consumers wanted better games than what the console hardware at the time could produce, once something came along which was a technical leap compared to the Atari, Coleco etc, it did fantastically well, this was the NES.
- Patrick_Devine 11y agoCuster's Revenge has to be the worst Atari 2600 game ever created. Overt racism and sexism combine with bad game play in one rape-y package.
- pmarreck 11y agoExcept that it was never really distributed per se and mainly became available via illegal ROM downloading channels. So whatcha been up to?
- dzdt 11y agoI actually knew someone who had this piece of garbage. In rural mid-America. It sure as hell was distributed!
- detaro 11y agoWikipedia claims 80,000 sold copies...
- pmarreck 11y agodamn, i should have checked. Found out there are some other games in that genre, some quite a bit more shocking. :O
- JacobAldridge 11y agoTo be described as 'the worst' in any genre on an international site does, of course, warrant a degree of scale that separates you from those who are, really, probably no better than you. The worst movie ever made probably doesn't have enough Rotten Tomato or IMDB reviews to be considered. I was once told I had hosted the "worst program on television"[1], but being community tv there were probably 100 people watching each week and as far as I know no extant copy has survived - we'll never appear on a "worst TV shows of all time" list. So almost by definition on a site like BBC.com, 'the worst video game in history' means 'which also sold tens of thousands of copies [2]', which is a measure of success and recognition most genuine failures won't achieve. [1] Someone actually called the station and left a voicemail to that effect. I took it as a compliment - it meant he'd watched the whole show, because nobody calls to complain if they just changed the channel. [2] Or, in ET's case, 1.5 million.
- CM30 11y agoThat's a good point about any list. Best game ever, worst game ever, hardest level/boss/game ever, you name it. The percentage of works or parts of works that ever become popular enough to get noticed is dwarfed by the (couple of hundred) times larger number that simply fall off the radar or never get any attention in the first place. I mean, what's the hardest game ever made? Probably if you're really picky, some ultra obscure shoot em up or kaizo esque Mario ROM hack. But the average list will only name titles like Battletoads, Dark Souls and I Wanna Be the Guy, because those are the ones many people (including the authors) have actually heard of.
- Nadya 11y ago>I mean, what's the hardest game ever made? Probably if you're really picky, some ultra obscure shoot em up or kaizo esque Mario ROM hack. Probably some bullet hell game which requires pixel perfect movement. Such as: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nscP9QpXoFM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nscP9QpXoFM I'm 99% sure near the end there (the last minute or so, last phase of the boss) it is literally unbeatable without buying more lives and if this wasn't an arcade game that allowed purchasing new lives, I don't think it'd be beaten by anything short of a tool-assisted run.
- nkozyra 11y agoThe narrative has always been about hubris, to some degree, but shifting the blame to E.T. was always a distraction from some of the bigger lessons. Atari had reached a point where it thought it could print money in perpetuity regardless of what it did. And that was true for a while. But you can't screw customers over forever. Eventually they bail, and that's what the big "video game collapse" was all about. Poor quality products being pushed at absurd prices. The lesson here is for startups with lock-in or few competitors: it doesn't take much to have it all fall apart. Make the best product you can. I mostly marvel at the fact that this was done in 5 weeks. That's absurd. And while it was, objectively, a "bad" video game, there were far worse. They just weren't as high-profile. The second lesson is for developers: always appreciate the fact that you live in a world where patches, releases, and iterative development allow you to retroactively fix the things you had to do in a hurry.
- moonshinefe 11y agoIt's a cool story. I'm actually really amazed he managed to make a game that sold 1.5 million copies (@ $40 per unit that'd be $60mil) in _5 weeks_. As the sole programmer. In an era when programming was far more tricky and low level. It isn't his fault the managers were being unreasonable in the timeline, and the company grossly over-manufactured the cartridges. If I made something in just 5 weeks that sold 1.5 million units, I'd be proud of myself! hehe, and as others have pointed out, it isn't actually the worst game.
- hartpuff 11y ago> As the sole programmer. In an era when programming was far more tricky and low level. In the same era, early 80s, kids across the UK were single-handedly writing games packed into 1-16k, some of which (Manic Miner being a prime example) sold in their hundreds of thousands in the UK market alone. There was some pretty amazing programming skill going on back then.
- moonshinefe 11y agoThat sounds pretty interesting. Do you know if anyone has written on that history yet? It sounds like it'd make a great article in one of the tech magazines.
- fit2rule 11y agoCountless books have been written on this subject: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_books_about_video_games https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_books_about_video_game... :)
- vidarh 11y agoLots and lots. There are and have been any number of Kickstarters for whole books covering various older game developers.. Also another source that springs to mind is the Llamasoft blog [1] - Jeff Minter behind Llamasoft fits the profile above perfectly. There's also a number of magazines devoted entirely to retro gaming, such as retroGAMER [2] that regularly have articles and interviews with the people involved. [1] http://minotaurproject.co.uk/ http://minotaurproject.co.uk/ [2] http://www.retrogamer.net/ http://www.retrogamer.net/
- jvoorhis 11y agoGotta say, ET was not all that bad. But my expectations were low after playing too much Big Bird's Egg Catch.
- nickpsecurity 11y agoNo, the man who made the worst video game in history was Hideo Kojima with Metal Gear Solid 2. Hardcore fans of prior game(s) felt a combination of let down, shock, and anger at the details. Imagine my surprise when I find out it very well could've been an ingenius plot to screw with the players. As others noted, the games overall plot against the protagonist was what he was doing to the players. Start here on a nice analysis here if you're curious why MGS2 had the effects it did: http://www.deltaheadtranslation.com/MGS2/DOTM3.htm http://www.deltaheadtranslation.com/MGS2/DOTM3.htm
- tadfisher 11y agoMGS2 is quite possibly the best example of a postmodern video game: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T-2YuPGYabw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T-2YuPGYabw
- nickpsecurity 11y agoPostmodern is a word I heard a lot but didn't understand. That was a pretty good explanation. You could say I do post-modern INFOSEC here and elsewhere. :) The video was really good esp with its fake ending and vindication of Hideo's predictions via social media. Today, they call those echo chambers. Altogether very interesting stuff that kept me up longer than I wanted to be. Thanks for the link and lack of sleep. :)
- eropple 11y agoI had a feeling that link would be George Weidman before I clicked on it. Was not disappointed. =) Metal Gear Solid 2 is one of the more amazing things I've ever played, and George's video about MGS2 is awesome, if a little bit overwrought. I was a big fan of Metal Gear (I'd emulated an MSX to play the originals), loved MGS, and liked MGS2 when it came out, but that might have been because it was more Metal Gear Solid. Despite being a "hardcore fan", as the OP would put it, I never felt disappointed or betrayed by MGS2. And, in retrospect, I've learned to like it more by what it tried to do. Ambitious games deserve respect for their ambition insofar as attempts to push outward and expand gaming as an art form, and MGS2 pulls off its goals better than it probably should have. Today, I find it's one of the better popular-gaming litmus tests for whether or not somebody treats games as experiences to which critical analysis can be applied. (One doesn't have to like the game, there are lots of reasons not to even if I happen to, but does one get the thrust of it?)
- JoeAltmaier 11y agoWell, the tale grew in the telling. Howard used to say that nobody else would take the project because the deadline was so short. He thought it was worth a try. Now the story is, he was hand-picked by Spielberg. Ok, Howard.
- ai_maker 11y agoWorse is better [1]. [1] https://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html https://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html
- chvid 11y agoSome amazing takeaways from the article: - 5 weeks development time, one person. - 5 mio 1980-USD marketing budget. - 4 mio units produced - 1.5 mio units sold The units probably listed at 15-20 USD (corresponding to 50-60 USD at today's prices) and cost around 5-6 USD to produce. Amazing facts if you have any idea on how the game industry work today. In particular the little resources spent at development stands out. Showing that video game development back then probably was more akin to making a board game or a toy than the huge software development projects it is today.
- softawre 11y agoIt sold at 40$, according to the image in the article.
- krylon 11y agoI only recently watched the episode of Code Monkeys that tells this story. I did not know this was based on a true story. (I would not have suspected that a company would only assign a single programmer to such a big title, and on such a crazy schedule. Although, now that I think of it, I guess game industry veterans can tell lots and lots of these stories...)
- rangibaby 11y agoI would like to read the story of "Big Rigs"!
- unsupak 11y agoI used to like this game.
- rado 11y agoAnyone else remember the "E.T. Comes Back" text/graphic adventure for Apple II?
- rplnt 11y agoThis is a great video review of the game https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2DTjLG3usQo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2DTjLG3usQo (if you want skip the intro the actual gameplay starts at around 2:00)
- linagee 11y agoET from Atari had a better cover than game. (But that was actually true with most games from the era. Just double true with this "game".)
- SeanDav 11y agoTalk about screwed up priorities. Atari spent $21 million on ET video game rights, $5 million on an advertising campaign and gave 1 programmer, 5 weeks to deliver something that would justify that cost. No wonder they went bankrupt!
- moonshinefe 11y agoHahaha, yeah, when you put it that way, it's pretty ridiculous.
- m-i-l 11y agoI wonder how much they paid the 1 programmer for the 5 weeks of development time. I'm sure nowhere near the $5m they spent on advertising or $21m on game rights. Also, if they did indeed sell 1.5m copies at $40 per copy, that's $60m. Even allowing for large amounts of unsold stock that surely can't have been too far off covering costs, and can't have been the only reason for their subsequent $310m loss. EDIT: Fair points about distributors margins, retailers margins, manufacturing costs etc. But even if they only saw $10m-$20m of the $60m in retails sales, that is still a reasonable amount, and mean their losses on that one game would only be in the millions or low 10s of millions, so there must have been additional reasons for the company's $310m loss.
- InclinedPlane 11y agoThat's $60 mil retail, not what Atari took, I'd be surprised if they hit breakeven since you need you factor in manufacturing costs and they likely took maybe a third of the retail price.
- stevoski 11y ago$40 would be the retail price, no? After retailer's margin and distributor's margin, maybe Atari got max $15 per cartridge. Making the whole debacle a money-losing affair.
- mathgeek 11y agoDon't forget licensing, as well. There was likely a percentage cut on top of the rights.
- nielsencfm123 11y agoSo Atari spent $21,000,000 to buy the rights and $5,000,000 on marketing but having more than 1 developer on the project was too much...
- Sharlin 11y agoTo be fair, I don't think multi-programmer gamedev teams really existed back then. You can't divide work very meaningfully when your whole application consists of eight kilobytes of assembly with zero room for abstraction or good coding practices.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- harel 11y agoTo be fair, people have made worst games in recent times. The fact we are hanging on to ET as The Worst of all, is a bit unjust. If someone can screw up a game with today's technology they deserve the title even more than a game created in 5 weeks on very limited tech.
- jmadsen 11y agoI didn't remember people still being that hairy in '82. I thought we were mostly cleaning up by then, unless you were in a band.
- alblue 11y agoThere was an interesting write up in 2013 of someone who reverse engineered the game to develop a fix for the main flaws in the gameplay: http://hackaday.com/2013/04/06/fixing-the-worst-video-game-ever-e-t-for-atari-2600/ http://hackaday.com/2013/04/06/fixing-the-worst-video-game-e... It's quite an interesting read and exposes some of the concerns that must have been present in designing games for incredibly limited memory at the time, including where to put the patched instructions.
- TheAndruu 11y agoThis guy's job is what originally attracted me to software engineering... the idea you could be so good and important to a company that they just pay you to pump out something awesome and let you do it. Granted this focuses on a failure, but he had many successes and the failure is Atari's fault for pushing an impossible deadline. Of course times have changed and this isn't a practical scenario anymore, and likely for good reason. But it still reminds me of how a simple DOS game that a man could do on his own was state of the art. Sure there's the odd app like Flappy Bird that goes viral and garners success, but that's the luck of the lottery, really. It's different from back then. I miss that simplicity.
- dsmithatx 11y agoI was 8 years old when the game out and I actually enjoyed the game, bugs and all.
- mschaef 11y agoHere's a great piece on how E.T. can be fixed with a few relatively minor changes: http://www.neocomputer.org/projects/et/ http://www.neocomputer.org/projects/et/ As much grief as Warshaw has gotten for E.T., it really is an amazing accomplishment that he put it together in five weeks. (This is particularly true, considering the extreme resource impoverishment of the 2600 platform.)
- danatkinson 11y agoI can't imagine any sane person actually blames him for his work and not the company that decides to put one developer in charge of writing such an important game in such a short space of time.
- dudul 11y agoThe guy single-handily coded, in 5 weeks, a video game that sold 1.5 million copies! I'd like to be responsible for this kind of screw up any day :) Granted that the sales were probably mostly due to intense marketing and ad campaign.
- alecsmart1 11y agoThere is a very nice documentary if anyone wants to hear from the actual game developer - http://m.imdb.com/title/tt3715406/ http://m.imdb.com/title/tt3715406/ It's on Netflix as well.
- Swannie 11y agoI enjoyed this a lot. Especially the bits from the developer! And the comments about how technically unique the game was at the time.
- grillvogel 11y agothat is not Beat Takeshi
- CM30 11y agoPersonally, while I'd say ET was a disaster in a lot of ways, I've always thought the talk of being the 'worst game ever' is just ridiculously overblown. I mean, for the time it was moderately impressive on a technical level, and as dull as it ended up being, it wasn't really all that broken as far as bugs go. No, if you want something a bit more worthy of the title, try Big Rigs (mentioned below), Action52, Superman 64 or Sonic 2006. Something that is literally broken beyond the point you can easily repair it, and which were a lot less impressive for the time they were released in.
- DanBC 11y agoBurnout for DS was laughably bad. Rise of the Robots was extensively hyped, but was a terrible game. (Winnable by mashing A.)
- gozur88 11y agoHah! The worst? Penn & Teller's Desert Bus is the worst. By design. From the wiki page: >The bus contains no passengers, there is little scenery aside from an occasional rock or bus stop sign, and there is no traffic. The road between Tucson and Las Vegas is completely straight. The bus veers to the right slightly, and thus requires the player's constant attention. If the bus veers off the road it will stall and be towed back to Tucson, also in real time. If the player makes it to Las Vegas, one point is scored. The player then has the option to make the return trip to Tucson for another point, a decision which must be made in a few seconds or the game ends. Players may continue to make trips and score points as long as their endurance lasts. Although the landscape never changes, an insect splats on the windshield about five hours through the first trip, and on the return trip the light fades, with differences at dusk, and later a pitch black road where the player is guided only with headlights