8 ms·

Talk 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 deliv

by SeanDav 11y ago

Talk 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 ago
Hahaha, yeah, when you put it that way, it's pretty ridiculous.
m-i-l 11y ago
I 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 ago
  That'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 ago
    Don't forget licensing, as well. There was likely a percentage cut on top of the rights.
- SeanDav 11y ago
  It is not the loss for 1 game that is important here, but the decision making and approach that Atari took for this game and probably elsewhere as well. If Atari were making strange decisions here, they were likely doing it elsewhere, ultimately leading to their downfall.
- boldboy 11y ago
  Wikipedia says the programmer was offered $200K + a Hawaiian vacation. It doesn't say what he actually negotiated or received.
  - ido 11y ago
    Just for scale: $200k 1982-dollars is $491k in 2016-dollars. So he was probably quite motivated to get it done.
    - talmand 11y ago
      Someone could offer me $200k in today's dollars for a five week project and I would gladly take it.
      - ganeshkrishnan 11y ago
        Someone could offer me a vacation in Hawaii for five week project and I would gladly take it
        gravypod 11y ago
        Someone could offer me an unpaid summer internship and I'd probably take it.
        ido 11y ago
        I know it's a joke, but don't take unpaid internships - you're devaluing your own (and everyone else's) job.
- jarcane 11y ago
  E.T. was basically the "straw on the camel's back" moment for consumers. It wasn't just that the game itself was an overhyped blunder, but that by the time it came out, the market was already flooded with truly awful third-party games for the system. Seeing the manufacturer themselves turn out such an underdeveloped hunk of garbage (and E.T. is truly bad, even for a system with such terrible games) basically torpedoed what was left of consumer confidence. At the same time, home computers were starting to nip at the game consoles' heels. Computers weren't just "toys," you could sell them on their practical applications as well. It was easier for little Timmy to get his parents to buy him a computer "for school" and then sneak games on it anyway, than just plonking down for a piece of hardware that only played inferior crap like E.T. E.T. was the flashpoint, but the crash of 1984 had a lot of causes.
Nutmog 11y ago
In fairness, what else could they have done, given the time constraints? They even hired support staff to make sure he got fed! They surely didn't have source control or other systems to make it safe/easy for multiple programmers to work on it together. I imagine the code is some monolithic thing full of complicated Atari hacks that's best managed by being all together in one person'd mind. Perhaps they could have made two games in parallel so if one failed, they'd still have a spare.
- cornholio 11y ago
  Instead of force feeding the genius, how about giving him a competent team of 10 average programmers, and 15 testers / players ? This way, the genius if free to imagine great games, not fiddle with screenbuffer bits and lose all contact with reality.
  - muzani 11y ago
    10 programmers and no source control sounds like a recipe to make this even worse than it had been.
  - kabdib 11y ago
    Well, adding people to a project that's already impossibly late will make it even later. Atari had plenty of people imagining great games; they didn't ship much content that was compelling, and were generally held in contempt by the "real" game programmers (e.g., the folks in the coin-op division). Also, the 2600 has no screen buffer. It's all real-time raster generation with the CPU in cycle-by-cycle lockstep with the beam. Game design on the 2600 is very tightly bound to what the hardware is capable of. For instance, you can't just say "I want this game to have a spinning blue cube that defends against enemy fire," you have to see if you can make one. If you're a Real Programmer, maybe you can (and you might ship a killer game). If you're a poser in marketing or management who's wondering what all the fuss about this programming stuff is about and why the hell people are complaining about those blue cubes you demanded, you run the company into the ground doing design that way.
    - 11y ago
Jeema101 11y ago
And the fact that he even delivered, to me, is a testament to his superhuman programming abilities. Especially considering that this was all in assembly langauge. And the Atari 2600 is notoriously difficult to develop for, even as assembly language development goes...
kabdib 11y ago
I was asked to do a similar thing; hired in October, marketing wanted the game I'd just started designing on the shelves by Christmas. It was already too late. They didn't understand the business they were in; they didn't know anything about engineering, or game design, or what customers wanted. Atari did not hire very carefully.
vlunkr 11y ago
There were lots of terrible Atari games, they just put this one up on a pedestal where everyone could see that they didn't care about their products or understand their customers.
baldfat 11y ago
Overproduction was insane. I believe that they produced 5 million ET games. They thought it would sell more console units and at a sell rate of ET at 100%.
- Swannie 11y ago
  Watch the documentary. There was a reason for this, and it had to do with the "golden age" of gaming coming to an end...
neves 11y ago
1 programmer and 1 manager to see if he is being fed. Not even a tester? A billion dollar companies with zero quality control. No surprise the went bankrupt.

by SeanDav 11y ago

moonshinefe 11y ago

Hahaha, yeah, when you put it that way, it's pretty ridiculous.

m-i-l 11y ago

I 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 ago
That'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 ago
  Don't forget licensing, as well. There was likely a percentage cut on top of the rights.
SeanDav 11y ago
It is not the loss for 1 game that is important here, but the decision making and approach that Atari took for this game and probably elsewhere as well. If Atari were making strange decisions here, they were likely doing it elsewhere, ultimately leading to their downfall.
boldboy 11y ago
Wikipedia says the programmer was offered $200K + a Hawaiian vacation. It doesn't say what he actually negotiated or received.
- ido 11y ago
  Just for scale: $200k 1982-dollars is $491k in 2016-dollars. So he was probably quite motivated to get it done.
  - talmand 11y ago
    Someone could offer me $200k in today's dollars for a five week project and I would gladly take it.
    - ganeshkrishnan 11y ago
      Someone could offer me a vacation in Hawaii for five week project and I would gladly take it
      - gravypod 11y ago
        Someone could offer me an unpaid summer internship and I'd probably take it.
        ido 11y ago
        I know it's a joke, but don't take unpaid internships - you're devaluing your own (and everyone else's) job.
jarcane 11y ago
E.T. was basically the "straw on the camel's back" moment for consumers. It wasn't just that the game itself was an overhyped blunder, but that by the time it came out, the market was already flooded with truly awful third-party games for the system. Seeing the manufacturer themselves turn out such an underdeveloped hunk of garbage (and E.T. is truly bad, even for a system with such terrible games) basically torpedoed what was left of consumer confidence. At the same time, home computers were starting to nip at the game consoles' heels. Computers weren't just "toys," you could sell them on their practical applications as well. It was easier for little Timmy to get his parents to buy him a computer "for school" and then sneak games on it anyway, than just plonking down for a piece of hardware that only played inferior crap like E.T. E.T. was the flashpoint, but the crash of 1984 had a lot of causes.

Nutmog 11y ago

In fairness, what else could they have done, given the time constraints? They even hired support staff to make sure he got fed! They surely didn't have source control or other systems to make it safe/easy for multiple programmers to work on it together. I imagine the code is some monolithic thing full of complicated Atari hacks that's best managed by being all together in one person'd mind. Perhaps they could have made two games in parallel so if one failed, they'd still have a spare.

cornholio 11y ago
Instead of force feeding the genius, how about giving him a competent team of 10 average programmers, and 15 testers / players ? This way, the genius if free to imagine great games, not fiddle with screenbuffer bits and lose all contact with reality.
- muzani 11y ago
  10 programmers and no source control sounds like a recipe to make this even worse than it had been.
- kabdib 11y ago
  Well, adding people to a project that's already impossibly late will make it even later. Atari had plenty of people imagining great games; they didn't ship much content that was compelling, and were generally held in contempt by the "real" game programmers (e.g., the folks in the coin-op division). Also, the 2600 has no screen buffer. It's all real-time raster generation with the CPU in cycle-by-cycle lockstep with the beam. Game design on the 2600 is very tightly bound to what the hardware is capable of. For instance, you can't just say "I want this game to have a spinning blue cube that defends against enemy fire," you have to see if you can make one. If you're a Real Programmer, maybe you can (and you might ship a killer game). If you're a poser in marketing or management who's wondering what all the fuss about this programming stuff is about and why the hell people are complaining about those blue cubes you demanded, you run the company into the ground doing design that way.
  - 11y ago

Jeema101 11y ago

And the fact that he even delivered, to me, is a testament to his superhuman programming abilities. Especially considering that this was all in assembly langauge. And the Atari 2600 is notoriously difficult to develop for, even as assembly language development goes...

kabdib 11y ago

I was asked to do a similar thing; hired in October, marketing wanted the game I'd just started designing on the shelves by Christmas. It was already too late. They didn't understand the business they were in; they didn't know anything about engineering, or game design, or what customers wanted. Atari did not hire very carefully.

vlunkr 11y ago

There were lots of terrible Atari games, they just put this one up on a pedestal where everyone could see that they didn't care about their products or understand their customers.

baldfat 11y ago

Overproduction was insane. I believe that they produced 5 million ET games. They thought it would sell more console units and at a sell rate of ET at 100%.

Swannie 11y ago
Watch the documentary. There was a reason for this, and it had to do with the "golden age" of gaming coming to an end...

neves 11y ago

1 programmer and 1 manager to see if he is being fed. Not even a tester? A billion dollar companies with zero quality control. No surprise the went bankrupt.