Howard Scott Warshaw is a man who knows what he likes, and being a high ranking systems engineer at Hewlett Packard is not it.  Programming games for Atari, however, is.  This is how he came to leave the former for the latter, and find himself tasked with writing the video game companion to Steven Spielberg’s ET: The Extra Terrestrial.  For now, let’s just agree that it was a bit of a howler, and discuss why in a minute.

In an early meeting with Spielberg, Warshaw pitched the project as ‘the game that would make the movie famous.’  Spielberg’s reaction to this is unrecorded, but a brief examination of subsequent events tells its own story: in 1981, E.T. became the biggest grossing film of all time – bigger even than Star Wars – and in its first six weeks alone personally netted Spielberg $9 million.  It’s a well loved and enduring classic, and perhaps the most charming representation of diverse individuals overcoming common adversity ever to grace the big screen.

Warshaw’s effort fared less well.  Routinely cited as the worst game ever released, it was rated by Gamespy’s Classic Gaming as ‘…too horrible to describe.’  It effectively bankrupted Atari, and very nearly destroyed the entire gaming industry.  It’s a lot to take in.  Nonetheless, it’s time to grit our teeth, phone home, make our fingers light up like a Christmas tree, and see what all the fuss wasn’t about.

It’s very boring. That’s the main thing. You play the wrinkled nice-Yoda main character, and you wander around falling into holes. That’s it. Occasionally you find one of three parts of an intersteller telephone in one of the holes. Oh, the holes are hard – really, really hard – to get out of. As you traipse about the place, there are slow moving scientists and government agents to avoid. Well, avoid them if you like. If you run into them, nothing happens. Nothing at all. To keep E.T.’s energy levels up, he must consume Reece’s Pieces, which are scattered hither and yon around the tedious, unending landscape. If E.T. runs out of energy, he dies. Actually no. No he doesn’t. He falls over, and Ethan restores him to life. What happens in this game is this: the player moves around the screen, doing nothing, with nothing happening to him. It’s like an aquarium where you move the fish yourself. If you manage to find all three parts of your intersteller telephone, the game resets, and you do it again. It’s very boring and incredibly frustrating, but on the plus side, it’s also appallingly bad.

The nastiest aspect of the game though – and there are a lot of nasty aspects, from the burning hatred of the world and everything in it that builds in the player as the payback-less hours slip by, to the lime green and purple colour scheme – is the sheer cynicism which surrounded the whole unfortunate carry on. It was assumed by Atari that people would just buy it on the basis of the box having E.T. written on it. Bouyed up by this premise, they spent $21 million on acquiring the rights, and optimistically churned out more games than there were consoles in existence. Breathtaking stuff. Commercial avarice of this kind has blighted the film industry ever since – although, of course, the public fall for it every time. Or rather, the children of the public fall for it every time, and persuade the public itself to pay for it all.

The thing is, it wasn’t entirely Warshaw’s fault. Not really. Spielberg insisted that the game be released in time for the Yuletide Festivities, which allowed just five weeks for a single unsupported programmer to write and develop the entire thing. More usually, it would take a team of four or five between six months and a year. The fact remains that it was a remarkable achievement on Warshaw’s part to produce anything at all within that deadline. Also, putting ourselves in Warshaw’s early ’80s Hush Puppies, drainpipe jeans and Blondie t shirt for a minute, who wouldn’t take a shot at working directly for Stephen Spielberg on the official tie in to a blockbuster? If by some miracle he’d produced a belter, Warshaw would’ve been a legend. As it was, he did what he was paid to do to the best of his ability, and unfortunately everybody hated it.

Following the collapse of Atari in the aftermath of E.T.’s release, Warshaw enjoyed success with other projects as varied as Conquering College, a book in which he outlines his techniques and theories for academic success, The Complete Book of Pan – a study of the eponymous card game – and a documentary about the bondage scene in San Francisco. The bloke can obviously produce the goods. If you’re going to get him to design your video games for you, though, at least give him a decent timescale.