The storm of players and critics who named E. Media Genesis says the industry was already suffering from a combination of maladies , including "blind optimism, inflation, and competition. In , the gaming industry was relatively new, and the companies inexperienced. Atari had several consoles out at the same time, and constantly fielded challenges from a glut of competitors , such as the Colecovision, Intellivision, and fledgling PCs.
Additionally, the industry started to focus on releasing games in huge numbers rather than creating and selling innovative concepts.
The New Yorker reports , for example, that Atari's Pac-Man sold 7 million copies, but 12 million copies were made — despite the fact only 10 million Atari s were in homes at the time. The industry wide crash, which reportedly resulted in a 97 percent revenue reduction in two years, may have been exaggerated.
After all, you could still play games on plenty of consoles and in arcades, and Nintendo came along pretty quickly after that — in to Japan, and to the U. So, at worst E. Whether it deserves all the hate is up for debate. The General Reaction score at the end is an average of these scores.
In three hours of play, not once could I return E. Atari insisted to writer Clarence Petersen that seven-year-olds had been able to figure it out. That the game was hurried through development was no secret the movie had been released three months before the game , and the review takes it to task for being a rush job, but admits kids may like it. Atari Gorf , from the same issue, got 2 joysticks. Ladybug for ColecoVision, an awesome port, got the full 4. This may have been written by the same person who wrote the Arcade Express review, as that newsletter was part of the Electronic Games family, but is rather more negative.
In addition to its version, Atari is also planning E. Not so much a review as a feature article. The article calls it an A-1 game with only one flaw: falling into the pits. It also mentions they got a preview package from Atari, which might have played a role in inspiring the writer to such superlatives not to mention that E. And, frankly, I don't think they cared if it was a great game or not — they just needed something in time [for] Christmas.
If I remember correctly, they made something in the order of just shy of 20 million E. If memory serves me correct, there were only about 12 million consoles in the U.
So you already had almost double the amount of cartridges as consoles to put them in, so naturally you weren't going to sell them all because not everybody is going to buy 1.
Even after returns, E. But its high sales were dwarfed by the overproduction of cartridges and the high cost of the game's license. People took this 12 million cartridges figure associated with E. The facts, I think, are a little bit different. Warshaw can list E. He thinks it was too easy for players to fall into the game's wells just as they were leaving them.
He thinks it was too easy for players to feel disoriented. If he had been given one more week to work on the game, he could have fixed a lot of its problems. If he had been given another week, that would have been a 20 percent increase to his schedule. Ernest Cline is the author of Ready Player One , a science-fiction novel partially inspired by the easter eggs in Warshaw's games. He says the fact that Warshaw made E. Time frame aside, he believes the E. First, the game presented players with a complete world.
Where most games of the time restricted players to one screen, E. The game was also full of easter eggs. Collecting all the E. Regenerating the game's Dranium flower at the right point in the game would turn the flower into Yar from Yars' Revenge. I was excited and a little teary when the John Williams music played at the end. So to blame the crash on E. It's ridiculous. It was an amazing, innovative, groundbreaking game that became overproduced.
There are many developers who would argue that there are plenty of Atari games that were significantly worse than E. Mike Mika is the head of development at Other Ocean Interactive. He says when he played E. T as a child, he thought it was fine. It had its problems, but he enjoyed the game and, if he had to rate the game out of 10, with 10 being the best Atari game and 1 being the worst, he'd give it a 6.
He cites a game called by Mythicon called Sorcerer , where he couldn't even figure out what he was supposed to do in the game. I remember reading the manual — I'd never liked to read manuals — and it gave me no insight on how to play the game any better.
There was also a game called Mangia , where the player's mother was trying to feed them plates of food, and the player had to toss the food to an owl in the window or a dog or a cat under the table.
Eating too much food would cause their stomachs to explode. For more than three decades, Warshaw maintained that there were no video game cartridges buried in a New Mexico landfill. It didn't make sense to him. Why would Atari — a company that was already losing money — spend more money to transport games that it felt were completely worthless to the middle of a desert to bury them? Earlier this year, a group of documentarians headed up a dig in New Mexico to find the cartridges.
Warshaw was there. To his surprise, they unearthed thousands of video game cartridges — few of which were E. Atari had essentially dumped a warehouse full of games in the desert.
0コメント