Racing the Beam : the Atari Video Computer System - Index of

movie are fairly clearly represented in the Raiders cartridge, which features
a splash screen, a diverse world, numerous graphically detailed
objects, an unusual control scheme in which one player used both joysticks,
and in-game music. The cartridge may have made the most signifi -
cant advances in the action-adventure genre between the appearance of
Robinett’s Adventure in 1978 and the debut of The Legend of Zelda for the
NES in Japan in 1985. Raiders added a graphical inventory and subquests,
helping to focus and refi ne the action-adventure genre. The cartridge
ended up being a hit for Atari. It helped land Warshaw another Spielberg
project, one with a seemingly impossible deadline.
That project was E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, which Warshaw managed
to complete in only fi ve weeks. (In comparison, Warshaw said he put in
four or fi ve months of work on Yars’ Revenge and six or seven months on
Raiders.) The ill-fated 1982 fi lm-licensed game followed in the tradition
of Adventure, Superman, and Raiders, using between-screen navigation and
challenging the player to avoid colliding with scientists and police. E.T.
has been ranked, more than once, as the worst video game of all time.
Atari’s fi nancial collapse is sometimes attributed to this one specifi c
game—although this is certainly an exaggeration. A legend tells of mounds
of unsold E.T. cartridges being buried by Atari in the New Mexico desert. 4
The legend is likely true, too. Although E.T. was not specifi cally named,
the New York Times did report that fourteen truckloads of equipment,
including game cartridges, were dumped at an Alamogordo landfi ll and
covered in concrete while guards kept reporters and other would-be spectators
away from the site. 5
There are certainly reasons for the poor quality of E.T. Most obviously,
the development schedule—imposed because of the pending holiday
shopping season—precluded a high-quality game, unless one were to be
developed by some incredible stroke of luck. A general problem that the
makers of licensed games faced was the need to tailor their schedules to
the release of other media properties or to the Christmas season, along
with the need to maintain qualities of the particular property being used.
All of this was added to the usual constraints and pressures provided by
the platform and the market. Conceptually, regardless of the production
pressure that was brought on by the Christmas deadline, E.T. suffered
from the potential inappropriateness of translating a fi lm largely about
the relationship between a boy and a helpless alien into a work focused on
moving around and running into things.
Although the arcade may have been the fi rst to host an exploitation
fi lm game (Death Race), at least one third-party developer for the Atari
VCS wanted to see if it could out-schlock the coin-ops. Wizard Video
7 Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back [127]