4 ms·
> Atari was not. Atari had many cash grab games like ET the extraterrestrial where most budget was spent in box art and marketing than game development. It's a
by johnvanommen 1y ago
> Atari was not. Atari had many cash grab games like ET the extraterrestrial where most budget was spent in box art and marketing than game development.
It's a little bit ironic that Spielberg's love of videogames kinda ruined Atari.
It was Spielberg who pursued Atari, not the other way around.
Basically, the video game companies weren't looking to do movie tie-ins at the time. Spielberg loved videogames, and made a request to have Atari's Howard Scott Warshaw come out to SoCal to meet Spielberg.
That meeting led to Atari's "Raiders of the Lost Ark" game. Warshaw had previously done "Yar's Revenge" and "Adventure."
Then Spielberg asked Atari to make an E.T. game, and the rest is history.
Basically, if Atari had ignored Spielberg's call to make "Raiders," they wouldn't have made "ET" and they might have remained dominant for a few more years, preventing Nintendo from taking everything over in the mid 80s.
- chrisco255 1y agoThey could have just made the game not suck. The original Star Wars arcade game that Atari did was received quite well. Video game franchises based on movies did tend to have this cash grab quality to them though for long afterwards (with some exceptions), even on the NES.
- flomo 1y agoThe Atari 2600 had a certain type of "adventure game", which was basically walk-around until you found this blob of pixels (see manual). "Adventure" was famous, and "Superman" (also a Warner movie franchise) did well with this style. Atari "Raiders of the Lost Ark" seemed to be a game that sold very well on name value, but it was hard dexerity, and required reading the manual, and so most people probably didn't make it more than about 5 screens in. That and Atari "Pac-Man" and a few other games, and HEY Atari is just ripping us off!! "E.T." was pretty half-assed, but IMO a big part of it was the entire game design was not all that entertaining to begin with. It was "Superman" with pits.