Advent Calendar 13: Snatching Defeat From The Jaws of Victory

Greetings, and welcome to Advent Calendar 2022! This year we're being self-indulgent and rambling about video games.

As usual, the Advent Calendar is also a pledge drive. Subscribe to my writing Patreon here by tomorrow for at least $5/mo and get an e-card for Ratmas; subscribe for $20/mo (and drop me a mailing address) and you'll get a real paper one!

I hope you're all having a happy winter holiday season. Let the nerd rambling commence!

Some of you, like moi, might be almost old enough to remember the great Video Game Crash of 1983 (known in Japan, as Wikipedia has just helpfully informed me, 「アタリショック」). Those of you who don't know what this is all about... brace yourselves.

You remember the Nintendo Seal of Quality? There is a reason for that -- or, rather, another one less obnoxious than Nintendo keeping a stranglehold on cartridge manufacturing. It's because Atari once managed to produce a game so terrible it tanked not just its own sales, not just sales of the console it was played on, but the entire console games industry.

This game? E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial.

The game is not without its points of interest. Retro Game Mechanics Explained uses it to elucidate how one could draw fairly elaborate pictures on an Atari 2600 by selectively interrupting the beam to change your instructions in the middle of executing them. The title screen was pretty cool. The rest of the game, unfortunately, was a disaster. See for yourself. It was confusing. No one grasped what they were supposed to be doing. The controls were janky, so even if you worked it out it was difficult to execute. And it was boring, a crime so terrible it has taken out even games that were superbly plotted and programmed. This game was so bad it was rumored that Atari had gathered up all the unsold copies and buried them in the New Mexico desert, an idea so ridiculous it was considered an urban legend right up until somebody found them.

Plenty of bad games have been published over the years, so how did this ruin the industry? It wasn't quite single-handed, but E.T. dealt the death blow. The problem was, Atari didn't have a monopoly on cartridge manufacture. The 2600 wasn't exactly complicated to figure out; Atari made their stuff out of parts you could buy at your local Radio Shack and made no real effort to obfuscate it, to the point where COLECO made an attachment for their COLECOVision console that played 2600 games by just being a 2600 that used the COLECOVision for power. Anyone who could wrangle a ROM chip could, and did, put out games for the 2600. 

A large number of these games were crap. Some of them were wildly racist pornographic crap. Most were just poorly-written crap. When you bought an Atari game, there was no way to know if it was any good, other than taking it home and playing it. Atari themselves did not have great judgement when it came to figuring out which of their own games were crap, Exhibit A being the 2600 port of Pac-Man. (Yes, that is supposed to be Pac-Man. Yes, the people who made it had actually played Pac-Man. No, they were not proud of themselves for that project.) They thought that because E.T. had been the hit movie of the year, E.T. was guaranteed to be the hit game of the year, and produced more E.T. cartridges than there were 2600s out in the wild, expecting people would be so eager to play the game it would drive sales of the console.

Consumers rose as one and cried enough! And quit buying video games full-stop until Nintendo came along with its stylishly-redesigned Nintendo Entertainment System, which swore blind that it was actually a computer that just happened to play games and absolutely nothing like that cheap tawdry toy Atari 2600.

Further disasters in the video game sphere tended to be a case of high expectations plus long delays, times shoving the game out the door just to get it out of the house. The example that dragged out the longest was the infamous PC game Duke Nukem Forever -- delayed so many times that the publisher reported the release date as "when it's done", and eventually spat it out almost 15 years late -- but console aficionados mostly cite Superman 64, which was almost as legendarily boring and bad as E.T.

Console failures tend to be less well-known, because, well, nobody bought them. There have been a few good disasters that didn't kill the sales entirely. Sega half-assed the 3D capabilities of the Saturn, making it difficult to program, and on top of that Sega of America got spooked by Sony's unexpected success. Instead of waiting for a proper rollout, SoA announced the Saturn would be available in North America "right now" for $399 at their E3 presser in 1995, which was news to the developers who hadn't finished any of their launch titles yet. Those of you who know your history know this is exactly the kind of fuck-up that brought down the Berlin Wall. Riots were averted when the Sony guy tore up his planned speech about the launch of the Playstation, walked to the podium, and said only: "$299", sending the audience into wild cheers instead.

A hilarious aversion to this is the Nokia N-Gage, a device that was set to be a blazing start to mobile gaming, until it turned out to suck. It was terrible at being a phone, and terrible at being a games console, and terrible squared at being both. Click on the video and let Uncle Derek explain.