Why E.T. For The Atari Was NOT a Failure (The Story of Howard Scott Warshaw)
Channel: Video Game Story Time
Date: 2018-03-24

E.T. The Extra Terrestrial for the Atari 2600 is often called the worst video game of all time.

Legends have sprung up around this game, and its impact on the video game market crash of 1983.

There's a lot of misinformation that's often parroted around this game; rumors and oversimplified claims about its place in the wider culture of the time.

We had the idea of tackling this game for an April Fool's Day video; just a short story about how it came to be, and why it ended up being such a disaster.

When we started researching, though, we read creator Howard Scott Warshaw's opinion, and it really opened our eyes. Howard doesn't consider the game ti be a failure - instead, he sees it as a fantastic success that people are still talking about his game this long after its creation.

This led us to dig deeper, learning about how the game was made in just five weeks at breakneck speed, which probably accounts for a lot of its flaws.

If you've already seen the Zak Penn documentary, Game Over, in which a team of enthusiasts dug up buried E.T cartridges from a landfill in Alamogordo, New Mexico, you'll have heard a lot of this before.

If you haven't seen the documentary, it's well worth checking out - so long as you supplement it with similar videos from the Video Game Historian that clear up some of the murkier parts of the documentary's story.

For a video that was meant to be over and done really quick, this has taken a lot of work. Next week, expect something a lot shorter - 18 minutes is just too long when we also put out a reaction video for Sonic Mania Plus.

That video ended up being a weird one. We certainly didn't expect it to become one of our most viewed videos of all time, and some of the comments are less than positive, which was a new experience for us. Thank you to everyone, whether you agreed with us or not, who was polite and respectful in the comments section for the video, we really appreciated it, more so than usual all things considered!

(Not that anybody reads these descriptions anyway...)

Anyway, have a great week, we're going to sleep.

BretonStripes (http://twitter.com/bretonstriped) and Kotor (http://twitter.com/kotorcomics)

Patreon? Please? http://patreon.com/videogamestorytime

Sources for the video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GXs_pI4Tcmk
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-35560458
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ew8j62WaZ7Q

Music: Drone in D by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/