E.T.

When Steven Spielberg's movie E.T. appeared in May of 1982, it was an instant hit. Ray Kassar, the CEO of Atari, decided that Atari must have an E.T. game for the Christmas 1982 season. He therefore flew to New York, camped out in Spielberg's outer office, and eventually got the video game rights for the appallingly high figure of $20 million. He immediately called the programming department of the VCS division, instructing them to get to work on an E.T. game for Christmas sale.

The VCS people were aghast at this. In order to have a game cartridge ready for Christmas, the game program had to be completely finished by September 1. This was because the process of manufacturing the ROMs was slow and required long lead times. Kassar had called them at the beginning of July: They had eight weeks to design, develop, test, and debug a major game. Typical development cycles in those days took nine to fifteen months. Kassar's demand bordered on the physically impossible.

Nevertheless, Howard Warshaw, one of Atari's best programmers, endowed with a better-than-average dollop of self-confidence, volunteered to tackle the impossible task. His plan, fully supported by management, was to modify a previous design in such a way as to get an E.T. game. He reworked the gameplay slightly, replaced all the graphics, and jammed E.T. into the game. The result was execrable, but it was without doubt the very best that could be done in the ridiculous amount of time available. After all, Ray Kassar had noted, people would buy the game for the brand name, not for the gameplay.

Like any licensed product, this game had to be approved by the licensor, in this case Steven Spielberg himself. Due to the tight timing, it was impractical to take the game to him; he would have to come to the lab in Sunnyvale and witness the game being played on the special development system there. And so one day in late summer, a caravan of limousines paraded down the broad streets of the industrial park where Atari lay scattered, and drew up in front of the programming labs for the VCS group. A crowd of bigwigs emerged and oozed into the lab, where Howard awaited them. After the introductions, Howard began his presentation by declaring, "This is the game that will make the movie famous."

Despite this inauspicious beginning, Spielberg approved the game and off it went to the ROM factory. Certain that it would be a huge hit, Kassar had millions of cartridges built. Lo and behold, everything worked perfectly and the game appeared on store shelves in time for the Christmas rush. Unfortunately, consumers proved to be less stupid than Kassar had thought. Word quickly got out that the E.T. game was a turkey, and sales drooped, then plummeted. Kassar was a man ahead of his times; like any good Enron or WorldCom executive, he dumped his stock in the company before word of the disaster got out. When the news was released, and people realized that Kassar had dumped stock, the stock price fell even further. The E.T. game did not, after all, make the movie famous, but it did manage to seal Atari's doom.