3 ms·

It does not make any kind of business sense to spend that much money and rely on 1 programmer and such a short project time. What happened if the programmer fel

by SeanDav 11y ago

It does not make any kind of business sense to spend that much money and rely on 1 programmer and such a short project time. What happened if the programmer fell down some stairs or got hit by a bus? Normal project time for a game was 6 to 8 months, they gave this guy 5 weeks and no team. Obviously the programmer should never have agreed to the time frame, but he was 24 and at that age nothing seems impossible. This was not his fault, but shows a shocking lack of planning and communication within Atari at that time.

krapp 11y ago
Atari's contempt and disregard for its programmers at the time has become pretty legendary. Ray Kassar[0] (president and CEO) famously rebuked a group of programmers complaining about work conditions as being no more important than the assembly line workers who put the cartridges together - which then led to the formation of Activision. Atari also refused to credit programmers for their work (leading to the first easter egg in Adventure[1].) Given that atmosphere, Atari would have probably just given the job to someone else (on the same deadline, of course.) [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Kassar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Kassar [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adventure_%281979_video_game%29#Easter_egg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adventure_%281979_video_game%2...
vidarh 11y ago
This was clearly a project driven by externals. Christmas is a fixed time, and ET was going to hit the cinemas at a fixed time. If the deal is in place with 5 weeks to go to get things into stores for Christmas, then 5 weeks is what you have. And adding more than one programmer to a 5 week project for a platform like that would slow things down, not speed it up. There's lots of things they probably could have done better, such as having testers on standby, but the project timeline and putting one programmer on it doesn't seem like something they realistically could have done differently. Taking the risks they did on it in terms of volume and marketing costs, is a different matter. The poor planning that led to those timelines, likewise. > This was not his fault, but shows a shocking lack of planning and communication within Atari at that time. Here we are in total agreement.
- aswanson 11y ago
  They could have had the vision to lock down the rights earlier. Raiders of the Lost Ark was already a hit. It wouldn't take much to conjecture an alien movie by the same director would hit.

by SeanDav 11y ago

krapp 11y ago

Atari's contempt and disregard for its programmers at the time has become pretty legendary. Ray Kassar[0] (president and CEO) famously rebuked a group of programmers complaining about work conditions as being no more important than the assembly line workers who put the cartridges together - which then led to the formation of Activision. Atari also refused to credit programmers for their work (leading to the first easter egg in Adventure[1].) Given that atmosphere, Atari would have probably just given the job to someone else (on the same deadline, of course.) [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Kassar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Kassar [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adventure_%281979_video_game%29#Easter_egg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adventure_%281979_video_game%2...

vidarh 11y ago

This was clearly a project driven by externals. Christmas is a fixed time, and ET was going to hit the cinemas at a fixed time. If the deal is in place with 5 weeks to go to get things into stores for Christmas, then 5 weeks is what you have. And adding more than one programmer to a 5 week project for a platform like that would slow things down, not speed it up. There's lots of things they probably could have done better, such as having testers on standby, but the project timeline and putting one programmer on it doesn't seem like something they realistically could have done differently. Taking the risks they did on it in terms of volume and marketing costs, is a different matter. The poor planning that led to those timelines, likewise. > This was not his fault, but shows a shocking lack of planning and communication within Atari at that time. Here we are in total agreement.

aswanson 11y ago
They could have had the vision to lock down the rights earlier. Raiders of the Lost Ark was already a hit. It wouldn't take much to conjecture an alien movie by the same director would hit.