SPEAKER_02: Following in your parents' footsteps is never easy, especially when mom or dad happen to be superstar athletes. What kind of lessons do Hall of Famers like, oh I don't know, NBA legend Tim Hardaway and NFL icon Kurt Warner impart on their kids as they chase professional sports stardom? How do they teach them the importance of prioritizing health and how to overcome adversity? Well, you can join Heart of the Game as they explore these questions and more with some of the greatest families in sports. Listen to Heart of the Game on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
SPEAKER_01: Regulatory fees included in $50 price for qualified accounts plus $5 per month without AutoPag, debit or bank account required. Hey everyone, it's Josh from For This Week's Select. I've chosen our 2018 episode on E.T. the video game.
SPEAKER_11: It's one of those topics that you thought you knew about, but after you hear this episode, you'll realize that you've been grossly misinformed by the internet. Who knew that could happen? Enjoy this trip down nostalgia lane.
SPEAKER_07: Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
SPEAKER_11: Hey and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and there's Jerry and it's like the holiday season. I feel great. It is holidays.
SPEAKER_02: Uh huh, with a Z.
SPEAKER_02: And we're going to do what we almost did for a short stuff. Oh yes, Chuck, you're commended for that call.
SPEAKER_11: Well, I was just like, I kind of wanted to do this one always as a long stuff. We don't have a show called Medium Stuff yet.
SPEAKER_02: No. We have a so-so stuff called Stuff You Should Know.
SPEAKER_11: Yeah. But yeah, I saw that documentary, Atari Game Over, a few years ago.
SPEAKER_02: It's a good one. And I also guested on tech stuff and did a two-part episode on the history of Atari. It's a good one. With Strickland. He's great too. And we could probably do Atari on its own at some point too.
SPEAKER_02: I agree. I think we definitely should.
SPEAKER_02: But this is, I mean, I was about to say if Strickland and I could get two episodes out of it, but you know how that guy goes on.
SPEAKER_11: Oh my God. He's the hardest working man in podcast business, I'll tell you that. Just ask. So we're talking today about what is widely believed to be the worst video game of all time. Except that it's not. Except that it's not, yes. It's true. I love stories like this where it's like everything you thought you knew was wrong and really stop and ask yourself, how did you even know that this truth that you knew before? I love that, man. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02: E.T., the Atari video game, a lot of people, it's that whole internet bandwagon thing, I think. Yes. Worst game of all time. They tried to bury it in the desert. It was so bad. Right. Killed Atari, killed the whole stinking industry.
SPEAKER_11: Right, but it was just that bad of a game. Yeah. But you've played it?
SPEAKER_02: No? Yeah. I will say this. It may be one of the most disappointing games of all time. It could be, yes. Because if you were a kid back then, like me and you, and you played Atari like I did, it was a disappointment.
SPEAKER_11: It was greatly anticipated, I'm sure. A lot of anticipation.
SPEAKER_02: That was probably the biggest reason why it gets all the attention. It's because it was E.T. It wasn't, what was that dumb game, Sorcerer. Yeah, or Fast Food. There were so many bad video games for Atari. There were a lot. It was awful.
SPEAKER_11: So we'll just come out and say, no, E.T. is not the worst video game of all time. There were a lot of worse, far, far worse video games than E.T. But, like you were saying, as far as the anticipation went, as far as the letdown went, as far as the loss of money went, you can understand how people would say this is the worst of all time. But also the timing of its failure was so utterly, amazingly perfect that it just took it from worst video game of all time to worst video game of all time.
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, it's like here, Atari, in video home console game industry, you're not doing well. And I notice you're sinking. Let me tie this anvil around your ankle that's shaped like E.T. Yep, that's right. It's just really bad timing.
SPEAKER_11: So let's get into the story because it's one of the more interesting ones. And it features a great guy named Howard Scott Warshaw, who, if you've seen the movie Game Over, you have probably come to really like and admire. Good dude. Good dude. Brilliant designer. Uh-huh. And like just a genuinely great guy. He, the story begins back in 1982, I believe. Yeah, it was 1982. He was a designer at Atari. He'd apparently started out writing code at Hewlett-Packard and was very unhappy. So he made the move over to Atari, even though he had zero experience with game design. But he was really an exciting game designer because he came up with some really innovative ideas. Yes, he, Yars Revenge is one of the best Atari 2600 games of all time.
SPEAKER_11: Did you have that one? Oh, yeah. I never played it.
SPEAKER_02: It's great.
SPEAKER_11: It's like kind of Space Invaders or something. It's like a shooter thing, kind of. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02: Single screen shooter. Well, you're a, I guess you're a Yar, and you're this sort of bug-like creature. And instead of shooting at something to chip away at it, you do so with your body. So you just fly into this. Oh, I think I actually did. It goes, it went, you would fly into this, I mean, of course, all this stuff was supposed to represent like a spaceship or a planet. Oh, okay. And it was made up of, you know, blocks and cubes. So I don't even know what it was. Yeah. But your whole point was to make it smaller. Gotcha.
SPEAKER_11: And you would fly into it. I know what you're talking about.
SPEAKER_02: Instead of, yeah, shooting, you would fly into it.
SPEAKER_11: For my money, that kind of game, the best of all time was Centipede.
SPEAKER_02: Centipede is great. It was great. I mean, a lot of those games I played at A, when I happened upon an arcade, Galaga and Frogger and Centipede and Defender, like those are still really good, challenging, joust, hard, fun games. Sure, Ms. Pac-Man. Yeah, Ms. Pac-Man. They just stand up still. For sure. It's not like you go to Galaga or joust now and you're like, this is easy. What was I thinking? I was such a stupid kid. Yeah. Those are still hard, challenging games. And I think that's sort of the key to a good video game is it's got to be winnable, but it's got to be hard. Because a kid doesn't want to, you know, a pushover.
SPEAKER_02: Right. But a kid also wants to win.
SPEAKER_11: So Howard Scott Warshaw knew this. Like he was a game designer. He wasn't like a code monkey or anything like that. He was a game designer, an artist. I'm sure he considered himself, especially at the time. And he should have. One of the other things he was known for was he was the guy who realized that you could make a game way more enjoyable if you created a backstory for it. So rather than like drive this car there, you're actually running away from this gang of, you know, international mafia guys who are trying to kidnap your girlfriend or whatever.
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
SPEAKER_11: You make up a backstory for it. The player reads this backstory and then plays. They care that much more about the person because their imagination is now kicked in. They're not just doing a mindless task. They're imagining what's going on in computer world. And he did that for games. And he was one of the first, if not the first designer to create backstories and biographies for his characters and games.
SPEAKER_02: Yeah. And you know what? Right now it's sort of hitting me that part of the appeal was the imagination of the kid. So like when you got the game Adventure or Asteroids, in Asteroids you were a pencil drawn triangle. Right. Shooting at pencil drawn shapes. Shooting pencils at pencil drawn shapes. Shooting dots at pencil drawn shapes. In Adventure you are a cube that flew around with an arrow attached to you that was supposed to be your sword. But when you look at the actual cartridge or the box that it came in, they had this great artwork of this knight on a horse with his sword drawn. Or in Asteroids, this Han Solo like pilot cruising through an asteroid field. And that kick starts the imagination of a 10 year old. And then they forget they're a cube or an arrow.
SPEAKER_11: Yeah. It makes it that much more real. Yeah. It was really, really cool. And the imagination can do some pretty amazing stuff with eight bytes of graphic. Yeah. You know? For sure. So Warshaw figured this out.
SPEAKER_02: Yeah. Designing worlds.
SPEAKER_11: He would design Easter eggs into his games too. Yeah. He wasn't the first, but yes. No, but he was an early person to do that.
SPEAKER_02: Yeah. Adventure was the first, I think.
SPEAKER_11: And in addition to Yars Revenge, he also already had a hit in the Raiders of the Lost Ark game. He had designed that. And it's still. I played that so much. I read, you did? So from what I, I never played that one. From what I understand, it was extremely difficult. It required both joysticks. Yeah. There was, I think I read somewhere that there were 33 screens, which is unheard of. I could buy that. And that, like, people still have trouble beating it today.
SPEAKER_02: Well, it was really hard. I remember very specifically there was one part where you were to parachute, parachute from one screen, and it would all of a sudden, you went to the bottom and it would pop up and you're on the next screen going down. And there's a tree on the left. And you had to start that jump early going hard left and hook onto that tree with your parachute. If you hit it the wrong angle, it burst your parachute and you would die. And if you didn't, you would hook onto it and slide perfectly. And it was probably one of the hardest things I've ever had to do in a video game.
SPEAKER_02: I thought you could say in your life.
SPEAKER_02: No, as far as video game play, though, it was very, very challenging. But it was possible. So when you tried it 27 times and you nailed it on that 28, like you would run around the neighborhood telling all your friends that you nailed the parachute jump. Very cool.
SPEAKER_11: Really, really hard. But it was so hard that it was like you would get frustrated or it kept you sucked in? No, no, no. You're like, I know I can get it. There is the key.
SPEAKER_02: And that's where E.T. messed up. But we'll get to that.
SPEAKER_11: OK, so on June, it's funny, he remembers this, the date on June 27th, 1982, Howard Scott Warshaw is hanging around Atari and he gets a phone call. He gets a phone call from the CEO, Ray Kassar himself. That was a big deal back then. Oh, sure. And Ray Kassar says, hey, kid, we know you. We love you. We've got something going on with Steven Spielberg. He remembers that you made the Raiders of the Lost Ark game for him. He thinks you're a certifiable genius. We have a special assignment for you. We want you to make the E.T. video game. Can you do it? Wait, don't answer yet. Can you do it in five weeks? And he went, sure. Yeah. He said, yeah. Which I mean, even today, you're like five weeks. That doesn't sound like very long. That was less than a tenth of the time that it would normally take.
SPEAKER_02: Yeah. And the little secret is that he had already called some other people in the company and said, the CEO, yeah, like, is this even possible or am I just crazy for asking this guy to do this in five weeks because it takes five or six months? And they all said, no, it's not possible. And he said, well, I'm going to ask him anyway.
SPEAKER_11: Right. And Howard Scott Warsaw didn't realize that. They'd already told him, like, no, this can't be done when he said yes. But he was locked in the punch and he was 24 years old. Full of exuberance and hubris and all sorts of stuff and said, I can do this. So he did. And the reason we should say the reason why this schedule was so shortened, it usually took five to six months for a game to be developed. And he had five weeks to do it. And the reason why is because the haggling, the deal to get the rights for the ET game for Atari to purchase them, which they bought for $21 million, took way longer than they expected. And they really wanted this game out for in time for Christmas.
SPEAKER_02: That was the whole deal.
SPEAKER_11: So because of the because the deal had worked all the way up into the summer and Christmas was on the other edge, they needed also several weeks to manufacture the actual cartridges and get them into stores. If you laid all this timeline out, they left five weeks to develop a game from scratch. So they knew just the guy to do it. And it was Howard Scott Warshaw and Howard said, I'll give it a shot. I'm going to do it.
SPEAKER_02: Yeah. And I should point out that when you say five or six months is the usual time, five or six months was fast. The usual time was more than that.
SPEAKER_11: Well, you also probably had a team working on it. Like five or six months was the Rush version.
SPEAKER_02: Right. Anyway. Yeah. I mean, I think the Raiders, I think that's a pretty delightful prog rock version.
SPEAKER_11: Did that have a, they should have their own video game. I'm surprised they didn't. They were like right there in that wheelhouse.
SPEAKER_02: Wouldn't surprise me. We would know. Like the 2112 game or something? We would know. Yeah.
SPEAKER_11: There's no way we wouldn't know about the Rush 2112 Atari game.
SPEAKER_02: So Warshaw gets to meet with Steven Spielberg in LA and was not given direction or a brief. He meets with Spielberg, says, here's what I propose, this adventure game that follows a plot of the film somewhat where the kid is ET playing the game. You are ET. Right. And you got to go around and collect all these pieces to build a phone so you can phone home and the government's after you and these bad doctors are after you. It's just like your movie. Right. And Spielberg was like, well, can't you just have him like running around eating Reese's Pieces like Pac-Man? Yeah. And he went, oh. There's this great quote where he's like, here's one of my idols, Steven Spielberg,
SPEAKER_11: asking me to knock off Pac-Man for the ET game. And I thought, well, gee, Steven, couldn't you make something more like the day the earth stood still? Yeah. Burn. Right. Burn. So he apparently had to do a little fancy footwork to talk Spielberg into going with his vision rather than a Pac-Man knockoff of ET. Yeah. Which who knows, may have sold a lot better. But it was, he got him to agree to his vision for this game. He said, no, this is a groundbreaking movie. We need to make a groundbreaking game. And so Spielberg agreed to it and Warshaw started to get to work. So we should probably take a break before Howard Scott really jumps in. Let's do it.
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SPEAKER_09: I'm Lauren Bragg Pacheco, host of Symptomatic, a medical mystery podcast, a production of Ruby Studio from iHeartMedia. Every other week, we get to know the everyday people living with a mysterious illness and hear their firsthand stories of struggle and perseverance on their quest for answers.
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SPEAKER_11: All right, Chuck, so it's basically the beginning of July 1982, and Howard Scott Warshaw is the sole programmer for an E.T. video game, Atari's biggest bet that they spent $21 million on the rights to that they're going to spend an additional $5 million on the advertising budget for the most anyone's ever spent on a video game up to that point. He's the only programmer who's going to make this game and he has five weeks to do it, which from what I understand, no one had ever done before.
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, and this was Atari was a giant at the time. If video if the video game industry was beginning to slip, it wasn't like the public didn't really realize that yet. The industry may have, but Atari held about 80 percent of the market. They were at about $2 billion in annual sales and about three quarters of a billion in profit, which is just unheard of.
SPEAKER_11: About $2 billion in profit in today's money.
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, so a ton of money, but they saw the writing on the wall. They knew that the personal computer like the Commodore 64 that could play games but also do a lot more was a real genuine threat to the home console.
SPEAKER_11: So I read a contemporary article in the New York Times from 1983 talking about this and Atari said they did not see the writing on the wall. One of them said the first six months of 1983 was one way. The second six months it was like we were in a totally different business.
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, but if you read interviews with them now, I think that might have been.
SPEAKER_11: Oh, the guy covering his... Well, yeah, I don't think you want to go out in the press in the moment and say, hey, everyone,
SPEAKER_02: we're super scared, investors.
SPEAKER_11: Don't freak out. Don't panic. You're right, Chuck. I feel a little foolish.
SPEAKER_02: So what they did was they set Warshaw up with everything he would have at work, they set him up at home. So the only time he could not be working on this game was his very short drive over to the office. And he worked on it almost nonstop for five weeks.
SPEAKER_11: He had a manager that was assigned to him to make sure that he ate. That was, I'm sure, not the manager's only duty, but it was one of the manager's new jobs was to make sure that Warshaw ate every day. How about a waffle? Sure, whatever. Stop bothering me. ET's in the pit again. So for five weeks, he worked almost, like you said, 24 hours a day. He said it's the hardest he's ever worked in his entire life. And when five weeks came and went, he handed off the game.
SPEAKER_11: He finished it. He completed it in time. And it wasn't done, in his opinion, or it would turn out in anybody's opinion, but it was done. It was a complete game that he had finished in five weeks, the ET video game. And it wasn't just something like a Pac-Man knockoff. He'd given real thought to it and created a world that was much different from a lot of the other games at the time. At the time, it was a cube-shaped world with six screens. And so if you walked to the left, you knew you were going to end up on this other screen. If you walked up, you would end up on the other screen. It was a world that you were navigating rather than say like Yars' Revenge, which is just one screen and everything's happening on the one screen. And it may imply motion or something like this. With the ET game, you were moving from one area of this world to the next. Which is- It wasn't new. It wasn't standard to have six screens, especially if you had five weeks to do it. Give the guy a break.
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah. No, I'm not saying it should. What I'm saying is that it wasn't like some big revolutionary thing. Like the Raiders game was pre-this and it had 30-something screens. Okay, all right, fine.
SPEAKER_02: And adventure-like. Kids were used to this by this point. So it wasn't like, oh, wait till they get a load of- Six screens. Like leaving the screen. I see.
SPEAKER_11: I think Howard Scott Warshaw should have gone to everybody's house and been like, here's your copy of ET game. I just want to let you know, I made this in five weeks.
SPEAKER_02: Well, he designed Easter eggs in there too. And I kind of wondered like how much time did he spend doing that? With his own initials and like the little Yars' Revenge flower.
SPEAKER_11: I hadn't really thought about that. I don't know. So he says-
SPEAKER_02: His time was of the essence though. I just maybe put that last on the list.
SPEAKER_11: He says today that had he had one more week to just troubleshoot, he could have worked out all the kinks.
SPEAKER_02: He could have worked out the kinks and one more Easter egg. But he handed it out.
SPEAKER_11: He handed it off to Atari and Atari said, genius. They gave it to Steven Spielberg to play. Spielberg apparently liked it. And in the game, it wasn't just some dumb clunky game. It was a mediocre game, but it was a game and it was done and it was out the door. And they got it out in time for Christmas. The cartridges shipped. If you go back onto YouTube and search ET game ad or commercial, it brings up some extraordinarily nostalgic ads of ET dressed as Santa Claus playing his own video game of a kid like receiving the ET video game from ET out in the shed. Oh yeah, yeah. I remember that. Just amazing stuff. So not only is it like Christmas time feeling, but like Christmas time 1982 feeling. Christmas plus ET over the top. It's nice. It's just like the taste of ice sugar cookies swells from the inside of your mouth. You almost gag on it. It's so overpowering.
SPEAKER_02: So they produce, well, we don't know for sure how many, maybe as many as 12 million copies of this. No. At least 4 million.
SPEAKER_11: That's part of the urban legend. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02: I mean, I don't think there's an exact number, but millions of copies of these were produced. $21 million invested in the licensing. Plus 5. $5 million in advertising and marketing. Right. Not just, I mean, who knows what they paid Warshaw or for the actual production. Right. I mean, I doubt if it was millions of dollars, but. It was probably salaried. They sunk a whole lot of money into this thing. Right. And sold okay at first. They sold about a half a million copies. And then, and I remember.
SPEAKER_02: Oh, you do? Oh yeah. Oh, nice. Word got around. And this was obviously long before the internet. Like, you could still sell some stuff back then before everyone realized it stunk. Right. But, and that's what was going on. But literally kid to kid to kid in cul-de-sacs and classrooms got the word that the ET game stunk. Yeah. And it killed it. It did. Little kids killed it.
SPEAKER_11: They sold like a half a million copies right out of the gate almost. And then it peaked right there very quickly right around the Christmas season, right?
SPEAKER_02: Yeah. And think about that though. It was children led to the demise. It's not like kids read an article in the newspaper, even a review on the ET game. It was kids going, man, that game stinks. Yeah. What? You bought that? Oh, don't buy it. It stinks. Yeah. It's terrible. And that happened like a game of telephone all around the country. That's really cool. Simultaneously. Kids get things done. They do, man.
SPEAKER_11: So like you said, it happened pretty fast. It peaked at a half a million copies. And over time, it managed to sell another million on top of that. So a million and a half copies. That's a success. I think it's like actually in Atari's top 10 of bestsellers. But the problem is if this story is a story of everything or anything, it's not the story of a overconfident game designer making a terrible game. It's a very confident game designer making a middling game. If it's a story of anything, it is of executives being drunk with confidence and hubris that no matter what they put out, if it's tied to a hot property of like a movie or something, it's going to sell. It doesn't matter what the game is. It's going to sell. Problem one. Problem two was they forecasted based on that hubris too. So not only did they say it's going to sell no matter what we put out, it's going to sell bigger than anything we've ever put out before. And they ordered four million cartridges. Well, again, it sold a million and a half and two and a half million cartridges were sitting in warehouses, not to mention ones that were starting to be taken back. Because not only did kids go, I don't want this game, I want to take it back and take it to the stores, the stores started taking their games back to Atari. So Atari's like, wait, wait a minute, everybody. This is E.T. the game. What are you doing? Put this in your 2600 and shut up. And people didn't listen.
SPEAKER_02: Yeah. And you can hardly blame the executives. I mean, they were like Warshaw plus Spielberg is going to be another hit because we had it in Raiders. So I sort of get it. But it was just it was that timeline. Right. Like that was that was the big problem. It was all the timeline. He could have created a game as good as Raiders.
SPEAKER_11: Right. Yeah. And it took five, six months, I'm sure. Even given two months, he probably probably could have made an even better game. But it was it was kind of a boring game. It wasn't that fun. There's a very famous quote from a New York Times article in 1982 where a little 10 year old said it wasn't that fun. Yeah, that was kind of it. Yeah, that's all you need to say.
SPEAKER_02: And it wasn't. And not only was it not fun, but and I don't know, I guess you could call it a bug. It was a bug. It seems more like bad design than just a mistake. But what would happen is E.T. would fall into these pits and then he could levitate back out. But depending on which way you were or even how you're holding the joystick, the slightest little move would cause E.T. to fall back into that pit.
SPEAKER_11: No matter what direction you went sometimes.
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, but it wasn't like all the time. It happened enough, though, to where as a kid, remember you asked me earlier if it was frustrating trying to parachute as Indy? It was not because you knew you could do it. This was frustrating. I got kids got frustrated. You don't want E.T. was falling in the pit and he would get out and fall in the pit. And then you do that enough times and you're like, I'm going to play yards revenge. Or any of my other games. Do you have fast food?
SPEAKER_02: And kids put it down.
SPEAKER_11: Yeah.
SPEAKER_02: You know, they put down, well, they didn't put down the joystick and go outside and play. That would be like the movie ending. They just popped it out and put in the game that they liked. Exactly.
SPEAKER_11: So this was a big deal for Atari because it came at the worst possible time. And speaking of the worst possible time, let's take a break and do an ad break and we'll come right back.
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SPEAKER_09: I'm Lauren Brag-Pacheco, host of Symptomatic, a medical mystery podcast, a production of Ruby Studio from iHeartMedia. Every other week, we get to know the everyday people living with a mysterious illness and hear their firsthand stories of struggle and perseverance on their quest for answers.
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SPEAKER_11: All right, Chuck. So like I was saying, this came at a really terrible time for Atari. You kind of talked about how the personal computer industry was starting to eat into their profits big time. And they really needed this ET bet to pay off. And not only did it not pay off, they lost tens of millions of dollars on this. It was a huge catastrophic bet for Atari. And the numbers are just stunning. Like you said, in 1982, Atari's profits were $2 billion in, um, well, in today's money.
SPEAKER_11: No, that was, yeah, the profits, I'm sorry, in today's money. Their gross was 2 billion. In the second quarter of 1983, they posted a loss of $310 million, $536 million loss for the whole year. By 1984, the company had been sold. So it went from $2 billion in profits to a loss of $536 million over the course of a year.
SPEAKER_02: Yes, and it was not because of ET.
SPEAKER_11: But this is the thing. Okay, so it gets even worse. Hold on, we're not there yet. I'm getting excited. The whole video game industry actually went down. So there's something called the North American video game crash of 1983, where not only did Atari go under, basically, the industry did. So the whole, the whole industry in 1983 had a $3.2 billion in sales. By 1985, two years later, they had $100 million in sales. It was a crash. Like that is a catastrophic crash. And like you're saying, no, it wasn't because of ET. But imagine this, think about this. All of that has been laid ever since then at the feet of ET, the video game, and Howard Scott Warshaw. People look at him and say, you ruined the video game industry single-handedly. That's how he's thought of.
SPEAKER_02: I think that was the case.
SPEAKER_11: Up until like 2014 or 15, right?
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I mean, I think people in the know knew that that was not the case.
SPEAKER_11: But the popular pop culture opinion of him.
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, maybe. Yeah. But let's say ET was a big hit. It would not have saved Atari.
SPEAKER_11: No, it might have like staved the bleeding a little bit. Maybe for a quarter. It would have been a drop in the bucket, basically.
SPEAKER_02: Yeah. I mean, I certainly feel bad for Warshaw. But he has, he's a good inning. So stick around for that.
SPEAKER_11: Don't go anywhere.
SPEAKER_02: After ET, he took some time off. He said that he just needed to sort of recover, I believe was the words he used. He went into real estate and did not enjoy that at all. And eventually, he became a psychotherapist. And that's what he does today. He's labeled the Silicon Valley psychotherapist and sort of specializes in talking. He jokes that he's fluent in English and nerd. So I think kind of specializes in talking to Silicon Valley types about their work problems. Yeah. Certainly, a man can identify. Right. You know? Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_11: He seems like he definitely would be. Yeah. So he definitely made peace with the whole thing. And I think he very frequently jokes. I've seen it in more than one article that he says he kind of enjoys it when people say that ET is the worst video game of all time. Because people also say that Yars' Revenge is one of the best video games of all time. So he has the greatest range of any video designer ever. So he definitely has like a, I think it took him a little while. That's the impression I have to make peace with it. But he made peace with it. I think one of the reasons he was able to make peace with it, and I'm just armchair psychologizing here, but he came to realize. Psychologizing? Yeah. I've used it before. And you said the exact same thing. Did I? Yeah. He realized that it wasn't the worst video game of all time. And that a lot of the people who were saying it was the worst video game of all time didn't know what they were talking about, which has to be super liberating. Sure. When the whole world's like, you ruined everything. And then you realize like they don't even know what they're saying. You can just kind of like roll off your back a little more easily.
SPEAKER_02: So the cherry on top of this story, we mentioned this documentary, Atari Game Over. It is about the legend of the story of the ET game, which continued after its demise with this urban legend that Atari was so distraught and embarrassed by this game that they had all the remaining boxes shipped out and buried in the desert under cement.
SPEAKER_02: Initially, you're like, that doesn't make any sense. Why would Atari spend all this money to do this when they could just burn them? Sell them in the dollar bin. Do anything other than this weird plan to bury them out in the desert of New Mexico. Yeah.
SPEAKER_11: And a lot of people took it when it was kind of an initial rumor that Atari was trying to bury their shame. It just went that much further to point out how bad the ET video game was. Atari was trying to bury it and forget about it. Right.
SPEAKER_02: So in 2011, there was a party where there was an Atari, former Atari person there. And a guy named Mike Burns was talking to him and said something about, yeah, this urban legend that you guys did this. And apparently the answer was just sheepish enough to where he was like, wait a minute. Is that true? Right. So did he fund this documentary? Is that how that worked? I think he's a guy who makes things happen.
SPEAKER_11: He brings people together. OK. I think, yes, he definitely put some of his own money into it, but I think he also got others to put money into it as well. OK.
SPEAKER_02: I didn't know if he was involved in the doc itself. Yes, yes, he was. Or just financing the dig. Both. But Zach Penn made this documentary. Zach Penn, great, great writer. Ironically wrote the movie Ready Player One. Oh, he did? Which talks about adventure and Easter eggs and all that fun stuff. Nice. So he's written a bunch of movies, a bunch of the Marvel movies and stuff. And it was clearly a labor of love, this documentary, if you've seen it. You know, Zach Penn is like super excited about all this stuff. Yeah. So the old Alamogordo landfill in New Mexico has 300, it's 300 acres and then 100 cells, which are these, it says holes, but they're just these big square deep pits where, you know, if you listen to our landfills episode, then you know what goes on there. They just dump stuff in there and cover it up. And the legend was that the ET is in one of these cells. And these days they chart it and it's mapped out so they know what's where generally. And if a cop comes and says, hey, there's some evidence from four years ago, they could say, oh, well, that's going to be in this cell. It was from this area of town where it was picked up. And we buried it here. Back then they didn't have anything like that.
SPEAKER_11: No, it was like they just dug a hole, put garbage in it, covered it up and went home, according to a guy named Joe Lewandowski. And Mike Burns lucked out that a guy named Joe Lewandowski worked at the Alamogordo City Waste Department because he is basically the institutional memory of Alamogordo's waste. And he worked at the dump for so long that he had a pretty good chance of remembering where the stuff was put. But he was kind of like, no, we don't we didn't document it. I have no idea. Leave me alone. And apparently Mike Burns is not the type to just be like, oh, OK, thanks. Didn't mean to bother you. He'll keep pestering you until you do what he wants, from what I understand. And so he finally got Joe Lewandowski on board. And in just an astounding turn of good luck, Joe Lewandowski's wife had made a scrapbook of Joe's time working for Alamogordo's waste department that included pictures of the dump from around this time. So they were able to narrow down these hundred cells over 300 acres to two, to just two, which narrowed the search enough that they could actually start taking samples to try to find it.
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, that was a very big breakthrough. And if you watch this documentary when they're taking these samples and they come across like newspaper clippings from that year and that month where these cartridges were supposedly buried, it's really exciting. It is. I got to admit, it's like, oh, my gosh, like it's like finding buried treasure. So they narrowed it down. All of these people showed up, fans, what's his name, Ernest Cline, who wrote the book Ready Player One. He showed up in his Back to the Future DeLorean. And it was a very big deal. Howard Warshaw came in and he was there. And people were just like embracing this guy instead of like, it's not like he showed up and people are like, there he is. He's like this beloved, cherished dude. I get the sense that this is a very big deal for his closure, which is interesting because burying something is usually the closure. In this case, digging it up was the closure. Yeah, good point. And they did find 1300 game cartridges, which it makes you wonder like how they got there,
SPEAKER_02: how the rumor got started to begin with and the fact that there is some truth to it.
SPEAKER_11: Yeah, they feel like it definitely confirms that urban legend, like Atari definitely did cover up. They did dump these cartridges, but it wasn't just ET cartridges and it wasn't like the millions that they supposedly dumped, but they probably buried some elsewhere in either California or Texas or both. But it confirmed that, yes, this actually did happen. The urban legend was real. And at the very least, it gave Howard Scott Warshaw that closure you were talking about. When he got to see 30 something years on, people were still vibing out on his creation, although in ways he could not have possibly predicted when he was spending that five weeks programming this game.
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, he said he was full of gratitude. That's really cool. That's a very cool way to go through life, my friend. Oh, man.
SPEAKER_11: If you can remember to have gratitude, it truly does make you happy. It's insane. It's just remembering to be grateful is the trick.
SPEAKER_02: So they ended up, a lot of these went on eBay, auctioned off. I think they sold about $100,000 worth of these things that went to the city of Alamogordo. Of course, they owned them. It's not like they just gave them out to everyone that was there. As a party gift? They should have. They should have given everyone one copy.
SPEAKER_11: I think some of the, like Mike Burns and some of his crew got some and Alamogordo kept some. But I think the ones that were auctioned were auctioned by Alamogordo to go to fund a museum. I would love a copy, a signed cartridge from Warshaw.
SPEAKER_02: I mean, the most I think one went for was $1,500.
SPEAKER_11: I don't want it that bad. No, I'm saying that's the most. That's the highest any of them went for. So you could probably get one for a couple hundred bucks if you tried. I wonder if he listens to this show. I hope so. You never know. I hope so. I hope we cleared it up for you, Warshaw.
SPEAKER_02: You're a legend, sir. Yes, hats off to you. Send me a signed cartridge. Send two.
SPEAKER_11: Josh needs one. You got anything else? No, ET was not the worst game.
SPEAKER_02: There were games that were so bad that you don't, they were just in the dustbin of history. They were so bad.
SPEAKER_11: Yeah, like Sorcerer, like you said, manjas, apparently pretty bad. Yeah, they were terrible.
SPEAKER_02: Like all these, not knockoff companies, but Atari opened it up to where anyone could design a game that fit their console.
SPEAKER_11: And some people say that that was one of the reasons why Atari lost market shares because there's so much crud on the shelves. People were tired of buying cruddy games for 25 bucks. And they just oversaturated the market themselves, but they oversaturated with terrible stuff.
SPEAKER_02: Oversetched.
SPEAKER_11: Well, at any rate, that's ET the game, not the worst video game of all time, but a heck of a story. I'll tell you what. Good one. And hopefully it gave you a little bit of nostalgia this holiday season. Yeah, agreed. Feel that warm tingling? It's either a bladder infection or nostalgia. Let's see, since I said bladder infection, everybody, it's time for listener mail.
SPEAKER_02: This is about bird poop. Hey, guys, listen to the olive oil podcast and loved it very much. Living in Italy, I use it every day. That's my wonderful complexion and youthful looks. I want to tell you about a problem, though, that we have in Rome every year indirectly caused by olives. Every winter, the city center is home to millions of migrating starlings who spend their days out in the local countryside eating olives and having a great time. In the evening, they come back to our warmer city center and sleep in the city center trees for the night. Great news for bird watchers, but bad news if you like to avoid being pooed on. The city gets covered in the stuff. And he sent me a video of these cars parked on the street, and it literally looks like it was painted with bird poop. Gross. Completely solid, every square inch.
SPEAKER_11: That's got to be bad for the paint.
SPEAKER_02: Yes, it's really bad. He said, what does this got to do with olive oil? Well, the olive stones may not come out of the starling bird's bottoms, but the olive oil infused greasy poo does. It makes driving along the roads almost impossible. I've fallen off my scooter twice in the past few years. Oh, my gosh. Because of this. So I guess it's slippery, oily poop. Oh, my gosh. And that is from James in Rome.
SPEAKER_11: Wow, thanks, James. That email's kind of petered out at the end there. Yeah. I was expecting a big finish. No, just oily poop. All right, well, thanks. Regardless and stay safe on your scooter there, James.
SPEAKER_02: He said people use umbrellas.
SPEAKER_11: And hats off to you living in Rome. Have you been to Rome? Sure. When I went, I was like, I could live here. Pretty great. I told you, she's like, maybe. It's lovely city.
SPEAKER_02: It really is. Old world charm, cats. What else? Food. Beautiful people. Yeah. Man, I remember seeing men and women at every turn that looked like runway models. Sure. And they were just regular newspaper boys. Well, the fact that they do like a little twirl every once in a while as they were walking
SPEAKER_11: really kind of sold it to you. Yeah, and go, ciao. Ciao, Bella. Ciao, Bella. Wow, this turned out weird. If you want to get in touch with us, you can go on to stuffyoushouldknow.com and hit us up through our social links, or you can just send us a good old fashioned email to stuffpodcasthowstuffworks.com.
SPEAKER_07: Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts on iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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