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Psychotherapy must be up his alley, he seems to have come to terms with it quite well and taken it with a sense of humor. An initial run of 4 million copies is
by aleem 11y ago
Psychotherapy must be up his alley, he seems to have come to terms with it quite well and taken it with a sense of humor.
An initial run of 4 million copies is a lot of pressure on a single developer, the sort that can make you a legend or a catastrophe. I wonder if release management was considered to allow for bug fixes in subsequent production runs or phased production runs with hedged risk.
Probably adding to the pressure is the frustration that immediately following the production run you find a one-liner bug fix but you are 4 million copies too late.
Interestingly, Pac-Man also had millions of unsold cartridges left over. This candid Q&A talks more about the failure of ET, the frustrations and challenges:
http://www.denofgeek.com/games/howard-scott-warshaw/33708/howard-scott-warshaw-on-creating-et-and-atari-game-over http://www.denofgeek.com/games/howard-scott-warshaw/33708/ho...
- scholia 11y agoHe sounds like a cool guy. He did an interview on Soundcast /r/retrogaming Podcast Episode 05: Howard Scott Warshaw Talks Programming And Psychology https://soundcloud.com/retrogamingreddit/rretrogaming-podcast-episode-05-howard-scott-warshaw-talks-programming-and-psychology https://soundcloud.com/retrogamingreddit/rretrogaming-podcas... There was a precursor to the BBC story in Playboy last September: The Guy Who Made the ‘Worst Game Ever’ Has Nothing to Apologize For http://www.playboy.com/articles/the-guy-who-made-the-worst-game-ever-has-nothing-to-apologize-for http://www.playboy.com/articles/the-guy-who-made-the-worst-g...
- Grishnakh 11y agoWith this guy clearly being such a talented programmer, it's too bad he hasn't taken up some FOSS game programming as a hobby, just to "scratch the itch". It'd be great to have a really great old-school side-scroller; I wonder what he could come up with using more modern tools if he really wanted to make a new game. And this time, he could take as much time as he needs.