Most Important Created/Release Game Of The Early Era Of Video Game
Game: Atari E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial
- Game Produced by Atari
- Production costs estimated to be US$125million (US$20-35 million for the right) // high figure for video game licensing at the time
- Team was not experience in making an action game out of movie [CEO claims back then]
- Short deadline given by client to rush complete the game before Christmas Holiday [less than 6 week development time]
- Atari was over confidence that this game was going to be a big hit
- popularity of the movie E.T.
- stability of game industry 1982
- Atari skip audience Testing for the product
- basically, Atari fallen into a false sense of security especially from the success of their previous releases
- difficult to learn to play [e.g. graphics not obvious enough, the hole look like patch of bush]
- market have high expectation for it due to the ET being a success
- retailer ordered more supplies than what was expected to be sold but also received an increasing amount of cancellation due to
- new competitors enter the market [Atari was not prepared]
- counterfeit was easy to made at the time which leads to the market lose of confidence in game industry
- cancel of contract
- Atari did not properly tracked cancel orders
- The game was discounted 5 times from US$49.95 to less than a dollar
- 3.5 million of the 4 million produced game were sent back to company
- Atari earned US$25million in sales, net loss of US$100million
- believed to be one of the cause for North America Video Game Crash at 1983
Importance of this Bad Game:
- Making the industry aware of the importance of play testing, diversifying console,
- PC games reached widespread popularity following the video game crash of 1983
- In my point of view without the failure of Atari [The E.T. Game especially] the industry might not have made the changes
- make the industry realized that they should not overproduce their game [may result in saturated (holding as much as can be absorbed by) market without the consumer interest it's needed]
- without this game failure [partially reason for the end of second generation of video game], the game industry might not have went in depth to see what was possibly wrong with the industry [taken for granted] and continued to rely on the nearest technology
- thus without the major failure of Atari's E.T. the industry might not have much changes over their game consoles and we might not have such advance technology for video games now
- e.g. measures were first implemented to control third-party development [licensing restrictions and a security lockout system]
- good representation of graphics is crucial to how players navigate and understand the surrounding
- PC games reached widespread popularity following the video game crash of 1983
- In my point of view without the failure of Atari [The E.T. Game especially] the industry might not have made the changes
- make the industry realized that they should not overproduce their game [may result in saturated (holding as much as can be absorbed by) market without the consumer interest it's needed]
- without this game failure [partially reason for the end of second generation of video game], the game industry might not have went in depth to see what was possibly wrong with the industry [taken for granted] and continued to rely on the nearest technology
- thus without the major failure of Atari's E.T. the industry might not have much changes over their game consoles and we might not have such advance technology for video games now
- e.g. measures were first implemented to control third-party development [licensing restrictions and a security lockout system]
- good representation of graphics is crucial to how players navigate and understand the surrounding
Comments
Post a Comment