美国国家公共电台 NPR Total Failure: The World's Worst Video Game

 

ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:

Today we meet Howard Scott Warshaw, the man behind one of the early failures of the computer era.

HOWARD SCOTT WARSHAW: I did the "E.T." video game, the game that is widely held to be the worst video game of all time.

SIEGEL: The Atari Corporation made millions of copies of his game, and it flopped². Some have claimed it was so bad it caused a collapse³ of the video game industry in 1983. NPR's Geoff Brumfiel has the story.

GEOFF BRUMFIEL, BYLINE⁴: From the very beginning of life, Howard Scott Warshaw was in a hurry.

(SOUNDBITE OF VIDEO GAME MUSIC)

WARSHAW: When I was a kid, I wanted to be older. When I was older, I wanted to be an adult. I wanted to get out, and I wanted to engage life 'cause that's - that's what I always pictured as the first time I'll be free.

BRUMFIEL: Free of what?

WARSHAW: Whatever.

BRUMFIEL: He wanted to get through school fast, make a quite tidy fortune in business and retire by 30. Now, the other thing to know about young Howard is that he was smart - really smart. He got his degree in computer engineering, headed to Silicon⁵ Valley and eventually got hired at a new company called Atari.

Atari was basically an early Silicon Valley startup. It had this gadget⁶, the Atari 2600, which was the first really popular video game console. Howard's job was to design games. While others were programming black and white stick figures and balls...

WARSHAW: I tried to make every single thing on the screen move and pulse with color and sound.

(SOUNDBITE OF VIDEO GAME MUSIC)

BRUMFIEL: His games were hits, and then Atari got a big contract. They would make the game for Steven Spielberg's first Indiana Jones movie, "Raiders Of The Lost Ark." They put Howard on the job. Now, to put this in perspective, no one had ever done a video game based on a movie. And at 23, Howard was going to be the first programmer to ever attempt it.

It took him 10 months to design the "Raiders" game, write the code, get feedback, re-program it and put it all through quality control. When that was finished, he shows Steven Spielberg the final product.

WARSHAW: He looks up at me, and he says, it's just like a movie because I feel like I just watched a movie. I thought, oh, my God, you know, Steven Spielberg thinks that the game, the adventure game that I produced feels like a movie. To me, that was the ultimate compliment I could possibly receive on this work.

BRUMFIEL: And here's where the trouble begins. The next movie Steven Spielberg makes is "E.T." Spielberg wants an "E.T." video game, and he wants Howard to program it.

WARSHAW: Spielberg had requested that I do "E.T." OK, so fine. I'm not going to argue. But what had happened was the negotiations⁷ for getting the rights for "E.T." had run very long.

BRUMFIEL: Atari and Spielberg haggled⁸ over rights and money until the end of July, 1982. And to get the game out in time for Christmas, Howard would have to have it built from scratch in five weeks. The CEO of Atari called him directly.

WARSHAW: He goes, we need an "E.T." game, and we need it for September 1. Can you do it? And I said, you bet I can. I absolutely can. I don't know what I was full of at that time exactly, but whatever it was, I was overflowing⁹ with it. And I believed I could pull it off. I mean, the hubris¹⁰ of it.

(SOUNDBITE OF VIDEO GAME MUSIC)

BRUMFIEL: Howard wasn't the only one full of hubris. During this period, Atari was one of the fastest growing companies in America. Its profits were soaring, and bonus checks were rolling in. Inside the headquarters were drugs and sex and booze.

WARSHAW: It was a ridiculous excessive sort of, you know, fall of Rome kind of environment.

BRUMFIEL: And everyone believed that nothing could stop them.

WARSHAW: We can do no wrong.

BRUMFIEL: So Howard has just 36 hours to come up with the concept for the game. In the movie, E.T. puts together a communicator he uses to phone home, so Howard makes that the basic plot of the game too. The player will be E.T. and go around gathering¹¹ parts for the phone.

WARSHAW: Another issue with me is like it's not enough that I'm just going to do a game in five weeks, I wanted to do something that was a step up, not just an add-on.

BRUMFIEL: Howard creates this elaborate world for the Atari E.T. to explore. In this world, he puts lots of pits in the ground where he hides parts of the phone. We'll get back to those pits later. Anyway, Howard flies down to LA to show Spielberg the concept.

WARSHAW: And I lay the whole thing out, and here it is. And Spielberg looks at me, and he goes, couldn't you just do something like "Pac-Man"? And I thought, oh, my God.

And I had an impulse - just to give you an idea of how full of myself I was at that point. I'm sitting there with Steven Spielberg, and what I wanted to say was, well, gee¹², Steven, couldn't you do something like "The Day The Earth Stood Still"?

BRUMFIEL: In the end, Spielberg signed off on Howard's concept. Howard goes back to Silicon Valley. He has a game development system moved into his home so he can work on "E.T." day and night.

WARSHAW: That was the hardest five weeks of my life. It was the hardest five weeks I ever spent doing pretty much anything.

(SOUNDBITE OF JOHN WILLIAMS' "FLYING")

BRUMFIEL: And at the end of those magical weeks, he took the blockbuster film "E.T." and turned it into a horrible, horrible video game.

(SOUNDBITE OF VIDEO GAME MUSIC)

BRUMFIEL: OK. So E.T. has landed, and he's in some sort of weird¹³ forest thing. He does look like E.T., I'll give you that.

WARSHAW: He's in the forest. Yeah. Now he's got to run around to the areas with the pits and try and find some phone pieces.

BRUMFIEL: Oh. So he just fell into something.

WARSHAW: That's a pit.

BRUMFIEL: OK. He comes out. Oh. He's back in. And now another guy in a tan jacket's after - oh.

WARSHAW: That's the FBI agent. He steals whatever you're carrying 'cause they want to know what you've got.

BRUMFIEL: So now I'm back to square - well, I don't even know what square I'm on really.

WARSHAW: You're back to naked and lonely in a cruel world. It's a tough place to be.

BRUMFIEL: Here comes the FBI agent again. What's he want? Oh, no. I'm in a pit.

WARSHAW: (Laughter).

BRUMFIEL: Oh, man. This is terrible.

WARSHAW: (Laughter).

BRUMFIEL: Now, here's the fundamental problem with "E.T." It violates one of the basic rules of video game design.

WARSHAW: There's a difference between frustration¹⁴ and disorientation. OK. Video games are all about frustration. It's OK to frustrate¹⁵ a user. In fact, it's important to frustrate a user, but you don't ever want to disorient a user.

(SOUNDBITE OF VIDEO GAME MUSIC)

BRUMFIEL: At first, Howard didn't know he'd made a dud. Sales around the holidays were strong. "E.T." was at the top of the charts. But then in the halls of Atari, people started coming up to him and saying things.

WARSHAW: You know, Howard, nobody blames you.

BRUMFIEL: Things that made it clear "E.T." had flopped.

WARSHAW: You know, Howard, we really don't think it's your fault. We think you really came through for us. You did what you could, and we really appreciate that. It's all good.

BRUMFIEL: Millions of copies went unsold.

WARSHAW: It hurt. I mean, it hurt to hear that people aren't liking¹⁶ my game.

BRUMFIEL: And meanwhile, Atari was running into some real trouble. The company's owners were making bad business deals. Programmers like Howard were making bad games.

WARSHAW: Now, we have an expression in video games that greed kills. The time you die in a video game is usually when you're trying to get too many extra points.

(SOUNDBITE OF VIDEO GAME MUSIC)

BRUMFIEL: And just as quickly as it had risen, Atari was falling.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

UNIDENTIFIED JOURNALIST: The Atari Corporation has announced the layoff¹⁷ of 1,700 employees at its Sunnyvale plant in the Silicon Valley.

BRUMFIEL: Now, some game aficionados¹⁸ have blamed "E.T." for the death of Atari. Howard says that's not really true. "E.T." was more of a symptom, the same ambition, arrogance¹⁹ and hype that made the game a flop¹ ultimately doomed²⁰ Atari to collapse.

WARSHAW: Atari was the world to me. It was the world that worked and made everything I dreamed about being a reality. You want to talk about a failure? The failure of "E.T." was really nothing at that time in my life compared to the loss of Atari as a workplace.

BRUMFIEL: But when it came to failure, Howard was just getting started. Atari made him a millionaire, but he squandered²¹ it on bad investments. And then the IRS came after him for back taxes. Howard hit bottom.

WARSHAW: Until one day, I really had to sit down with myself. You know, we have a lot of meetings. And so at one of the summits, I decided²², you know, the IRS can only take my money. That's really all they can do. If I give them my happiness, that's on me.

BRUMFIEL: And he began a long, slow journey towards finding that happiness again. He went from job to job - computers, videography.

WARSHAW: Had a real estate broker's license²³ for a while.

BRUMFIEL: Some gigs were better than others but none compared to his time at Atari. The months stretched into years, eventually, more than a decade. And then one day, he was talking to his girlfriend at the time, and she asked, what do you really want to do?

WARSHAW: I said, well, I'd be a therapist. I mean, I didn't even think for a second. I knew exactly what I wanted to do.

BRUMFIEL: Therapy. It made perfect sense. Silicon Valley was booming, except instead of videogames it was smartphones and apps. Startups were failing. People's careers were crashing and burning. And after everything he'd been through, Howard knew he was the guy who could help.

WARSHAW: I have been there. I do know what it's like. I have succeeded, and I have failed. And I have lost it, and I've had it, and I've lost it. And I've seen all this go. And I can help people really understand and relate and find a way around and through it.

BRUMFIEL: Howard got his license. And today, he calls himself the Silicon Valley Therapist. His clients are a lot like he was back in the day - young, ambitious, rushing ahead. Business is good. Geoff Brumfiel, NPR News.

1 flop   

n.失败(者)，扑通一声；vi.笨重地行动，沉重地落下

参考例句：

• The fish gave a flop and landed back in the water.鱼扑通一声又跳回水里。
• The marketing campaign was a flop.The product didn't sell.市场宣传彻底失败，产品卖不出去。

2 flopped   

v.（指书、戏剧等）彻底失败( flop的过去式和过去分词 )；（因疲惫而）猛然坐下；（笨拙地、不由自主地或松弛地）移动或落下；砸锅

参考例句：

• Exhausted, he flopped down into a chair. 他筋疲力尽，一屁股坐到椅子上。
• It was a surprise to us when his play flopped. 他那出戏一败涂地，出乎我们的预料。 来自《简明英汉词典》

3 collapse   

vi.累倒；昏倒；倒塌；塌陷

参考例句：

• The country's economy is on the verge of collapse.国家的经济已到了崩溃的边缘。
• The engineer made a complete diagnosis of the bridge's collapse.工程师对桥的倒塌做了一次彻底的调查分析。

4 byline   

n.署名；v.署名

参考例句：

• His byline was absent as well.他的署名也不见了。
• We wish to thank the author of this article which carries no byline.我们要感谢这篇文章的那位没有署名的作者。

5 silicon   

n.硅(旧名矽)

参考例句：

• This company pioneered the use of silicon chip.这家公司开创了使用硅片的方法。
• A chip is a piece of silicon about the size of a postage stamp.芯片就是一枚邮票大小的硅片。

6 gadget   

n.小巧的机械，精巧的装置，小玩意儿

参考例句：

• This gadget isn't much good.这小机械没什么用处。
• She has invented a nifty little gadget for undoing stubborn nuts and bolts.她发明了一种灵巧的小工具用来松开紧固的螺母和螺栓。

7 negotiations   

协商( negotiation的名词复数 )； 谈判； 完成（难事）； 通过

参考例句：

• negotiations for a durable peace 为持久和平而进行的谈判
• Negotiations have failed to establish any middle ground. 谈判未能达成任何妥协。

8 haggled   

v.讨价还价( haggle的过去式和过去分词 )

参考例句：

• The cook and the grocer haggled over the price of eggs. 厨师和杂货商为蛋价计较个没完。 来自《现代汉英综合大词典》
• After they had haggled for some time, the two men decided to close the bargain. 那两个人经过一番讨价还价以后，决定成交。 来自《简明英汉词典》

9 overflowing   

n. 溢出物,溢流 adj. 充沛的，充满的 动词overflow的现在分词形式

参考例句：

• The stands were overflowing with farm and sideline products. 集市上农副产品非常丰富。
• The milk is overflowing. 牛奶溢出来了。

10 hubris   

n.傲慢，骄傲

参考例句：

• There is no safety in unlimited technological hubris.在技术方面自以为是会很危险。
• The very hubris of French claims alarmed the other powers.法国贪婪的胃口使其他大国惊恐不安。

11 gathering   

n.集会，聚会，聚集

参考例句：

• He called on Mr. White to speak at the gathering.他请怀特先生在集会上讲话。
• He is on the wing gathering material for his novels.他正忙于为他的小说收集资料。

12 gee   

n.马；int.向右！前进！，惊讶时所发声音；v.向右转

参考例句：

• Their success last week will gee the team up.上星期的胜利将激励这支队伍继续前进。
• Gee,We're going to make a lot of money.哇！我们会赚好多钱啦！

13 weird   

adj.古怪的，离奇的；怪诞的，神秘而可怕的

参考例句：

• From his weird behaviour,he seems a bit of an oddity.从他不寻常的行为看来，他好像有点怪。
• His weird clothes really gas me.他的怪衣裳简直笑死人。

14 frustration   

n.挫折，失败，失效，落空

参考例句：

• He had to fight back tears of frustration.他不得不强忍住失意的泪水。
• He beat his hands on the steering wheel in frustration.他沮丧地用手打了几下方向盘。

15 frustrate   

v.使失望；使沮丧；使厌烦

参考例句：

• But this didn't frustrate Einstein.He was content to go as far as he could.但这并没有使爱因斯坦灰心，他对能够更深入地研究而感到满意。
• They made their preparations to frustrate the conspiracy.他们作好准备挫败这个阴谋。

16 liking   

n.爱好；嗜好；喜欢

参考例句：

• The word palate also means taste or liking.Palate这个词也有“口味”或“嗜好”的意思。
• I must admit I have no liking for exaggeration.我必须承认我不喜欢夸大其词。

17 layoff   

n.临时解雇，操作停止，活动停止期间，失业期

参考例句：

• Finally, prepare an explanation about what led to your layoff.最后，要准备好一套说辞来解释你被解雇的原因。
• Workers were re-employed after the layoff.在暂时解雇不久后工人们又被再度雇用了。

18 aficionados   

n.酷爱…者，…迷( aficionado的名词复数 )； 爱看斗牛的人

参考例句：

• West Coast aficionados of postwar coffee-shop architecture(Karal Ann Marling) 西海岸战后咖啡店式建筑的狂热追随者（卡拉尔安马林） 来自互联网
• Clay developed a radical style which appalled boxing aficionados. 克莱发展出一种震惊拳击迷的全新风格。 来自互联网

19 arrogance   

n.傲慢，自大

参考例句：

• His arrogance comes out in every speech he makes.他每次讲话都表现得骄傲自大。
• Arrogance arrested his progress.骄傲阻碍了他的进步。

20 doomed   

命定的

参考例句：

• The court doomed the accused to a long term of imprisonment. 法庭判处被告长期监禁。
• A country ruled by an iron hand is doomed to suffer. 被铁腕人物统治的国家定会遭受不幸的。

21 squandered   

v.（指钱，财产等）浪费，乱花( squander的过去式和过去分词 )

参考例句：

• He squandered all his money on gambling. 他把自己所有的钱都糟蹋在赌博上了。
• She felt as indignant as if her own money had been squandered. 她心里十分生气，好像是她自己的钱给浪费掉了似的。 来自飘（部分）

22 decided   

adj.决定了的，坚决的；明显的，明确的

参考例句：

• This gave them a decided advantage over their opponents.这使他们比对手具有明显的优势。
• There is a decided difference between British and Chinese way of greeting.英国人和中国人打招呼的方式有很明显的区别。

23 license   

n.执照，许可证，特许；v.许可，特许

参考例句：

• The foreign guest has a license on the person.这个外国客人随身携带执照。
• The driver was arrested for having false license plates on his car.司机由于使用假车牌而被捕。