ClassicGaming Expo 2000:
Atari 2600 KeynoteSeven former 2600 coders chat it up about the good old days - By Fragmaster
Howard Scott Warshaw
While Howard Scott Warshaw produced one of the 2600's best-selling original games, Yars' Revenge (as well as Raiders of The Lost Ark) he's immortalized in the annals of videogame history as the guy who made E.T., a game so disappointing that it's been credited as the impetus for the great videogame crash and the near-death of the industry in the mid-'80s.
After Atari, Howard left the industry. During that time he wrote some books and produced a few documentaries, including the Once Upon Atari series. Today, he's back in the business and working at 3DO.
Howard did the most talking and had a lot of stories to share. Here's a few of 'em:
The Monterrey Hotel Story
"We used to retire to our rooms during the brainstorming sessions for a little 'brain refresh' of various herbal types. So we're having one of these breaks and we're getting pretty blasted... We were on the fourth floor of the Hotel and Tod [Frye, responsible for the 2600 Pac-Man port] like hanging out by the window... and the next thing you know Tod is standing on the railing of the balcony. And we're all feeling pretty good so we're like 'haha.'.. and then Tod goes 'I'm gonna jump!' and when Todd says stuff like that you have to take him seriously... and we're thinking 'ahhhah... really?'... he's like 'yeah' and he's playing like he's going to jump... and he jumped, he jumped off the balcony and we freaked out and we all go rushing to the balcony and we look down but it turns out because of the slope of the hotel it was only like one story or so before the ground [near a patio]... he suckered us all in... but then he's standing on the patio and we're all looking at him and he says 'You know... I got to take a piss!'... so then he goes wandering around to these bushes... and he begins his operation... and Steve (Atari Director) yells 'Tod, you can't piss in those bushes, we could have customers in those bushes!'"
E.T.
"E.T. was one of the few cases where the game had to go out. They needed the game by September 1st to meet the Christmas market... they needed the game in five weeks... I spent the next few days just designing up the game and figuring out what I was going to do with it. [Then he and a few of the Atari big cheeses flew up to present it to Spielberg] And I lay out the design and we go through the whole thing and he looks at me and goes… 'Couldn't you do something like Pac-Man'?.. And I just said 'You know Steven… no. Could you do E.T. again? Could you make the same movie again?… Everybody's doing that!' But then in retrospect… it may not have been a bad idea! But the game had to be done in five weeks so you did it. What you did was design a game you could do in five weeks… and, you know… well, they didn't return all of 'em."
On Where Game Developers Get Ideas for Games
"Ideas come from everywhere. Ideas are a dime a dozen, it's execution that pays, is what a lot of people say. Where do you come up with ideas for games like… my idea for Yar's Revenge was easy, I ripped off Star Castle… I took Star Castle and I took the 2600 and I merged them in my mind… You analyze the gameplay. You look at the game play and say, really, what's happening, what's the objective, what is the style of play. And then you look at the hardware and you say what is the hardware optimized for. There's certain types of play that a hardware is optimized for and certain types that it's not. And if you can mix those two in your mind, that's where game ideas come from. Nowadays it's very different."
With Great Power...
"We used to have a lot of fun messing with [Atari head Ray Kassar] because there was nothing he could do... never before in the history of business had single units of labor been responsible for such large quantities of profit, nor had they been aware of it as we were. So we used to take advantage of that fact."
On Single Developer Games
"To me, I've gone through all manners of production since I got out of videogames after I left Atari completely and I wrote some books and I got into video production and I got into all kinds of creative production and then coming back into videogames and seeing what's happening… the difference to me now… I don't see it as one person versus many people, to me it's a work of authorship versus a collaborate effort. Which are the two options in any kind of greater production, there's nothing unique about it in videogames. When… I've done the documentaries that I've done, those were works of authorship. I basically ran around with a camera and did the whole thing myself. There's other projects that I've worked on that have required a team. You need a cast, you need a script, you need a variety of technical assistance and things like that and it becomes a collaborate effort. When a project in scope increases it beyond the real capacity for one person to do it. And so as a creative individual you got to say, what do I want to do? Do I want to do something that's within the scope of what I can handle and then it can be a work of authorship and then you have complete control and it's truly your piece, it's your work. Or do you want to do something more ambitious or larger in scope in which case, realistically you aren't going to do it well by yourself. And then the creative challenge shifts. Instead of realizing my own creative vision and implementing it myself it becomes can I find a group of people, can I find a team I can share a vision with and still produce something that's worthwhile."
"Knowing the fact that it's going to change your vision. The vision I go into when I do a work of authorship can be the vision I come out with. But when I go into a collaborative effort, the vision I go in with… unless you're really not with it, you've got to realize that vision is going to change throughout the scope of the project. But that can be a good thing if you have good people that you're working with, your vision can become improved, it can get better… So to me it's different now, it's definitely different work of authorship versus collaborative effort, but there's some neat things about collaborate effort. From my own preferences I like a work of authorship, I like the idea of realizing the concept I began with. But there's a lot of things to enjoy about the large scale. But the thing about it is is that the games that are produced now you couldn't produce as individuals, not in less than 3 or 4 years, at which point there'd be no point in releasing the game anyway."
On Homebrew Development and New 2600 Game Designers
"That in some ways is the greatest reflection of what the video game business was twenty years ago, much more so than places like 3DO and EA and stuff like that. ... you see people... who have Master's Degrees in Computer Science, 'course you know when I got to Atari I had a master degree in Computer Science, but they're not gamers. Now you see people who are programmers, you see people who are commercial artists and you may have... a few people who are really into games. That's not to say there are no gamers, but you don't need to be a gamer to develop a videogame anymore. There's a part of that that I have to say, well that's OK because you don't need everybody to be to make the game. But ... if you're a game lover you like to be around game lovers. So the people now who are actually using all their spare time and scratching up resources and putting together things... and actually making a game, they're having the experience that we had. For those people, they're probably enjoying exactly what we went through twenty years ago, they're just not getting paid as much."
Barnstormin' with Steve Cartwright
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