The Most Expensive Video Game That BOMBED
The Most Expensive Video Game that BOMBED
10 Most Expensive Lego Video Game Characters To Unlock
Welcome to MojoPlays! Today, we’re looking at the most expensive video game that bombed. You couldn’t pay someone to play this all the way through. In the summer of 1982, “E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial” was released in theaters, smashing previous box office records to become the highest-grossing movie in history at the time. On a budget of just over $10 million, “E.T.” grossed an enormous $793 million. In the wake of this incredible success, it was only a matter of time before the merchandise came. And the most infamous piece of “E.T.” tie-in merch of all was the much-maligned video game, released for the Atari 2600 that very same year. But with such a beloved property for its source material, where did it all go wrong for the game? In a lot of ways, “E.T.” the video game was doomed from the start, before the game’s sole developer signed on to make it. That developer was Howard Scott Warshaw, or HSW, who was hand-picked to tackle “E.T.” by Steven Spielberg himself after Warshaw’s great job on the “Raiders of the Lost Ark” game. But publishers Atari were working against Warshaw from the beginning; they cared much more about pushing out the game in time for the holidays than making anything with any quality. The movie came out on June 11th, and Warshaw’s deadline to finish the game in time for it to be put onto cartridges and shipped was September 1st. Warshaw was hired to make the game in July, only a month after the movie had come out, giving him only five weeks to make a video game that could measure up to the biggest summer blockbuster ever made. Warshaw wanted to make something innovative but was constrained by his deadline. Even Spielberg told Warshaw he should just make a “Pac-Man” knock-off – ironic when “Pac-Man’s” Atari port was another of the 2600’s most critically-panned games. You’d think that when Atari paid $21 million, double the movie’s budget, for the rights to make the game, they’d care a little more about what they published; unfortunately for them, this wasn’t the case. Suffice it to say, “E.T.” did ship on time, but was notoriously bad. The gameplay consisted entirely of a little “E.T.” sprite wandering through green fields looking for pieces of an outer space telephone so he could contact his family. During this mission, he had to contend with angry cops and a series of pits he could easily fall into and die – the kicker being that if the sprite touched any pixel of the pits it would fall in. When you’re trying to dodge the authorities, this doesn’t make for compelling gameplay. It was frustrating, unrewarding, could be beaten in just a few minutes, and flopped both critically and commercially. Though, it’s difficult to shed too many tears for Scott Warshaw’s reputation when he got a $200,000 bonus and an all-expenses-paid Hawaiian vacation for his efforts. The failure of “E.T.” was a sign that the gaming industry was in trouble, and the video game crash of 1983 soon followed. With an oversaturated market and the burgeoning popularity of home PCs like the Commodore 64 for gaming, the console market collapsed – unable to be revived until the North American release of the NES in ’86. Atari reported losses of hundreds of millions of dollars. In 1983, the company was stuck with huge numbers of products they couldn’t move, including no small amount of “E.T.” cartridges, and they came up with a creative and legendary solution: burying their surplus stock in the middle of the desert. For thirty years, the story of Atari’s mass burial was thought by many to be an urban legend – surely they didn’t actually bury millions of unsold “E.T.” cartridges out in New Mexico? Even though it had been reported on by local papers at the time, it just seemed too weird to be true. But in 2014, with the cooperation of New Mexico’s government, an excavation was launched in the outskirts of Alamogordo as part of filming a documentary called “Atari: Game Over”. Many people gathered to watch the dig and finally, we knew the truth: 1300 items were recovered from underground, and many of them were copies of “E.T.” for the 2600. Faced with this smoking gun, Atari finally admitted that they’d buried around 700,000 objects out there after the 1983 crash; not the millions people thought, but still a huge number. But while the games were so worthless in the 80s that it was easier to bury them than sell them, thirty years in the ground has remarkably increased their value. Roughly 900 of the items recovered were put up for auction, fetching a grand total of $108,000. On average, copies of “E.T.” sold for $120 each, but one in particular earned $1500. This means that they have actually increased in value, which is a better fate than many other 2600 titles – not bad for the so-called “worst video game of all time” - though, still not enough for what’s left of Atari to break even. The copies that weren’t put up for auction have since found their way into museums, and this strange story will never be forgotten. It’s not enough to base a game on an IP everybody loves – the game has to actually be good, too. “E.T.” serves as a warning to any other big company that wants to rush out a bad game for quick money. And that’s the most expensive video game that bombed.
