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Selects: E.T.: Is It Really the Worst Video Game of All Time? · Stuff You Should Know

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: Everyone. It's Joshua. For this week's select, I've chosen our
• 0:03
  Speaker 1: twenty eighteen episode on ET the video game. It's one
• 0:07
  Speaker 1: of those topics that you thought you knew about, but
• 0:09
  Speaker 1: after you hear this episode, you'll realize that you've been
• 0:12
  Speaker 1: grossly misinformed by the Internet. Who knew that could happen?
• 0:16
  Speaker 1: Enjoy this trip down nostalgia lane.
• 0:24
  Speaker 2: Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of Iheartradioy.
• 0:34
  Speaker 1: And welcome to the podcast. I'm josh and there's Chuck
• 0:38
  Speaker 1: and there's Jerry, and it's like the holiday season. I
• 0:41
  Speaker 1: feel great.
• 0:43
  Speaker 3: It is Holidays with a Z, and we're gonna do
• 0:47
  Speaker 3: what we almost did for a short stuff.
• 0:49
  Speaker 1: Oh yes, Chuck, you're commended for that call.
• 0:53
  Speaker 3: Well, I was just like I kind of wanted to
• 0:55
  Speaker 3: do this one. Always is a long stuff. We don't
• 0:58
  Speaker 3: have a show called mediums stuff yet.
• 1:00
  Speaker 1: No, we have a so so stuffed called Stuff you
• 1:04
  Speaker 1: Should Know.
• 1:05
  Speaker 3: Yeah, but yeah, I saw that documentary Atari game over
• 1:11
  Speaker 3: a few years ago.
• 1:12
  Speaker 1: It's a good one.
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  Speaker 3: And I also guested on tech Stuff and did a
• 1:17
  Speaker 3: two part episode on the history of Atari.
• 1:19
  Speaker 4: It's a good one with Strickland.
• 1:21
  Speaker 3: He's great too, and we could probably do Atari on
• 1:25
  Speaker 3: its own at some point too.
• 1:26
  Speaker 1: I agree, I think we definitely should.
• 1:28
  Speaker 3: But this is I mean, I was about to say
• 1:29
  Speaker 3: if Strickland and I could get two episodes out of it,
• 1:31
  Speaker 3: but you know how that guy goes on.
• 1:33
  Speaker 1: Oh my god, he's the hardest working man in podcast business.
• 1:37
  Speaker 1: I'll tell you that.
• 1:39
  Speaker 4: Just ask.
• 1:41
  Speaker 1: So we're talking today about what is widely believed to
• 1:45
  Speaker 1: be the worst video game of all time, except that
• 1:49
  Speaker 1: it's not. Except that it's not. Yes, it's true. I
• 1:52
  Speaker 1: love stories like this where it's like everything you thought
• 1:55
  Speaker 1: you knew was wrong, and really stop and ask yourself,
• 1:58
  Speaker 1: how did you even know that this truth that you
• 2:01
  Speaker 1: knew before. I love that man.
• 2:03
  Speaker 3: Yeah, E t the Atari video game a lot of people.
• 2:08
  Speaker 4: It's that whole.
• 2:09
  Speaker 3: Internet bandwagon thing. I think, Yes, worst game of all time.
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  Speaker 3: They tried to bury it in the desert. It was
• 2:14
  Speaker 3: so bad.
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  Speaker 4: Killed Atari, killed the whole stinking industry.
• 2:18
  Speaker 1: Right, But it was just that bad of a game.
• 2:20
  Speaker 1: But you've played it.
• 2:21
  Speaker 4: No, Yeah, I will say this, it may be one
• 2:26
  Speaker 4: of the one of the most disappointing games of all time.
• 2:29
  Speaker 4: It could be, Yes, because if you were a kid
• 2:32
  Speaker 4: back then like me, and you and you played Atari
• 2:35
  Speaker 4: like I did. It was it was a disappointment.
• 2:40
  Speaker 1: It was greatly anticipated. I'm sure a lot.
• 2:43
  Speaker 3: Of anticipation that was part, you know, that was that
• 2:45
  Speaker 3: was probably the biggest reason why it gets all the
• 2:47
  Speaker 3: attention because it was e t It wasn't what said,
• 2:52
  Speaker 3: dumb game sorcerer, yeah, or fast food. There were so
• 2:56
  Speaker 3: many bad video games for Atari.
• 2:58
  Speaker 1: Yeah, there were a lot.
• 3:00
  Speaker 4: It was awful.
• 3:01
  Speaker 1: So will this come out and say, no, ET is
• 3:04
  Speaker 1: not the worst video game of all time. There were
• 3:06
  Speaker 1: a lot of worst, far far worst video games. Yes
• 3:11
  Speaker 1: than ET, But like you were saying, as far as
• 3:15
  Speaker 1: the anticipation went, as far as the letdown went, as
• 3:17
  Speaker 1: far as the loss of money went, you can understand
• 3:20
  Speaker 1: how people would say this is the worst of all time.
• 3:23
  Speaker 1: But also the timing of its failure was so utterly,
• 3:29
  Speaker 1: amazingly perfect that it just took it from worst video
• 3:33
  Speaker 1: game of all time to worst video game of all time.
• 3:38
  Speaker 3: Yeah, it's like here Atari in video home console game industry,
• 3:43
  Speaker 3: you're not doing well, and I notice you're sinking. Let
• 3:47
  Speaker 3: me tie this anvil around your ankle that's shaped like ET.
• 3:50
  Speaker 1: Yep, that's right.
• 3:51
  Speaker 4: It's just really bad timing.
• 3:53
  Speaker 1: So let's get into the story because it's one of
• 3:55
  Speaker 1: the more interesting ones, and it features a great guy
• 3:58
  Speaker 1: named Howard Scott wore Shaw, who if you've seen the
• 4:02
  Speaker 1: movie Game Over, you have probably come to really like
• 4:06
  Speaker 1: and admire good dude.
• 4:07
  Speaker 4: Good dude, brilliant designer.
• 4:09
  Speaker 1: Huh and like a just a genuinely great guy. He
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  Speaker 1: The story begins back in nineteen eighty two, I believe, Yeah,
• 4:19
  Speaker 1: it was nineteen eighty two. He was a designer at Atari.
• 4:23
  Speaker 1: He'd apparently started out writing Coda Hewlett Packard and was
• 4:26
  Speaker 1: very unhappy, so he made the move over to Atari,
• 4:29
  Speaker 1: even though he had zero experience with game design, but
• 4:33
  Speaker 1: he was really an exciting game designer because he came
• 4:36
  Speaker 1: up with some really innovative ideas.
• 4:38
  Speaker 3: Yes, he Yars Revenge is one of the best Atari
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  Speaker 3: twenty six hundred games of all time.
• 4:45
  Speaker 1: Did you have that one?
• 4:46
  Speaker 4: Oh?
• 4:46
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I never played it.
• 4:48
  Speaker 4: It's great. It's great.
• 4:49
  Speaker 1: It's kind of space invaderies or something. It's like a
• 4:51
  Speaker 1: shooter thing, kind of yeah, single screen shooter.
• 4:54
  Speaker 4: Well, you're a I guess you were a Yar, and
• 4:58
  Speaker 4: you're this sort of bug like Reacher and instead of
• 5:02
  Speaker 4: shooting at something to chip away at it. You do
• 5:05
  Speaker 4: it so with your body, so you just fly into this.
• 5:09
  Speaker 1: Oh I think I had that went You.
• 5:12
  Speaker 4: Would fly into this. I mean, of course all this
• 5:14
  Speaker 4: stuff was supposed to represent like a spaceship or a planet,
• 5:18
  Speaker 4: but it was made up of you know, blocks and cubes,
• 5:20
  Speaker 4: so I don't even know what it was. But your
• 5:23
  Speaker 4: whole point was to make it.
• 5:24
  Speaker 1: Smaller, gotcha, and you would fly into I know.
• 5:26
  Speaker 4: You instead of yeah, shooting, you would fly into it.
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  Speaker 1: For my money, that kind of game the best of
• 5:30
  Speaker 1: all time with Centipede.
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  Speaker 4: Cinipede is great.
• 5:33
  Speaker 1: It was great.
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  Speaker 3: I mean a lot of those games I played today
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  Speaker 3: when I happened upon an arcade, Galagha and Frogger and
• 5:40
  Speaker 3: Centipede and Defender, like those are still really good challenging
• 5:45
  Speaker 3: jus sure, miss fun games, yeah, miss bac man, they
• 5:48
  Speaker 3: just stand up still. It's not like you go to
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  Speaker 3: Galagha or Jousts now and you're like, this is easy.
• 5:54
  Speaker 1: What was I thinking? I was such a kid.
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  Speaker 4: There are still hard challenging games, and I think that's
• 5:59
  Speaker 4: sort of they to a good video game is it's
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  Speaker 4: got to be winnable, but it's got to be hard
• 6:06
  Speaker 4: because a kid didn't want to you know, a pushover, right,
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  Speaker 4: but a kid also wants to win.
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  Speaker 1: So Howard Scott Warshaw knew this like he was a
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  Speaker 1: game designer. He wasn't like a code monkey or anything
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  Speaker 1: like that. He was a game designer, an artist. I'm
• 6:21
  Speaker 1: sure he considered himself, especially at the time, and he
• 6:23
  Speaker 1: should have. One of the other things he was known
• 6:26
  Speaker 1: for was he was the guy who realized that you
• 6:30
  Speaker 1: could make a game way more enjoyable if you created
• 6:33
  Speaker 1: a backstory for it. So rather than like, drive this
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  Speaker 1: car there, you're actually running away from this gang of
• 6:40
  Speaker 1: you know, international mafia guys who are trying to kidnap
• 6:43
  Speaker 1: your girlfriend or whatever. Yeah, you make up a backstory
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  Speaker 1: for it. The player reads this backstory and then plays,
• 6:51
  Speaker 1: they care that much more about the person because their
• 6:53
  Speaker 1: imagination is now kicked in. They're not just doing a
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  Speaker 1: mindless task. They're imagining what's going on in computer world.
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  Speaker 1: And he did that for games, and he was one
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  Speaker 1: of the first, if not the first designer to create
• 7:05
  Speaker 1: backstories and biographies for his characters and games.
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  Speaker 3: Yeah, and you know what just now is sort of
• 7:10
  Speaker 3: hitting me that part of the appeal was the imagination
• 7:15
  Speaker 3: of the kid. So like when you got the game
• 7:18
  Speaker 3: Adventure or Asteroids and Asteroids, you were a pencil drawn
• 7:24
  Speaker 3: triangle shooting at pencil drawn shapes.
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  Speaker 1: Shooting pencils at pencil drawn shapes.
• 7:30
  Speaker 3: Shooting dots at pencil drawn shapes. An Adventure, you are
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  Speaker 3: a cube that flew around with an arrow attached to
• 7:39
  Speaker 3: you that was supposed to be your sword. But when
• 7:41
  Speaker 3: you look at the actual cartridge or the box that
• 7:43
  Speaker 3: it came in, they had this great artwork of this
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  Speaker 3: night on a horse with his sword drawn in asteroids,
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  Speaker 3: this han solo like pilot like cruising through a you know,
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  Speaker 3: an asteroid field, and that would kickstarts. That starts the
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  Speaker 3: imagination of a ten year old, right, and then they
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  Speaker 3: forget they're a cube, right or an arrow?
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  Speaker 1: Yeah, it makes it that much more real.
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  Speaker 4: Yeah, it was really really cool.
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  Speaker 1: Because the imagination can do some pretty amazing stuff with
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  Speaker 1: eight bytes of graphic.
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  Speaker 4: Yeah, you know for sure.
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  Speaker 1: So Warshaw figured.
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  Speaker 4: This out, Yeah, designing worlds.
• 8:19
  Speaker 1: He would design easter eggs into his games too. Yeah
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  Speaker 1: he wasn't the first, but yes, no, but he was
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  Speaker 1: an early person to do that.
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  Speaker 4: Yeah, Adventure was the first, I think.
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  Speaker 1: And in addition to Yours Revenge, he also already had
• 8:31
  Speaker 1: a hit in the Raiders of the Lost Art game.
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  Speaker 1: He had designed that and it's still laid so much.
• 8:36
  Speaker 1: I read you did. Oh yeah, so from what I
• 8:39
  Speaker 1: never played that one. From what I understand you, it
• 8:41
  Speaker 1: was extremely difficult. You it required both joy sticks. Yeah,
• 8:45
  Speaker 1: there was. I think I read somewhere that there were
• 8:47
  Speaker 1: thirty three screens, which is unheard of.
• 8:51
  Speaker 4: I could buy that.
• 8:53
  Speaker 1: And that like people still have trouble beating it today.
• 8:56
  Speaker 3: Well, it's it was really hard. I remember very specifically.
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  Speaker 3: There was one part where you were to parachute parachute
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  Speaker 3: from one screen and it would all of a sudden,
• 9:09
  Speaker 3: you went to the bottom and it would pop up
• 9:11
  Speaker 3: and you're on the next screen going down and there's
• 9:14
  Speaker 3: a tree on the left, and you had to start
• 9:16
  Speaker 3: that jump early, going hard left and hook onto that
• 9:20
  Speaker 3: tree with your parachute. If you hit at the wrong angle,
• 9:23
  Speaker 3: it burst your parachute and you would die, and if
• 9:26
  Speaker 3: you didn't, you would hook onto it and slide perfectly.
• 9:29
  Speaker 3: And it was probably one of the hardest things I've
• 9:32
  Speaker 3: ever had to do in a video game.
• 9:34
  Speaker 1: I know, you get to this day life.
• 9:36
  Speaker 4: No, as far as video gameplay though.
• 9:37
  Speaker 3: Really it was very, very challenging, but it was possible.
• 9:42
  Speaker 3: So when you tried it twenty seven times and you
• 9:44
  Speaker 3: nail it on that twenty eight, like you would run
• 9:47
  Speaker 3: around the neighborhood telling all your friends that you nailed
• 9:50
  Speaker 3: the parachute jump really really hard.
• 9:54
  Speaker 1: But it was so hard that it was like you
• 9:57
  Speaker 1: would get frustrated or it kept you sucking.
• 9:59
  Speaker 4: No, no, no, no, You're like, I know I can get it.
• 10:01
  Speaker 1: There's the key and that's.
• 10:02
  Speaker 4: Where ET messed up. But we'll get to that, okay.
• 10:05
  Speaker 1: So on June, it's funny, he remembers us the date
• 10:10
  Speaker 1: on June twenty seventh, nineteen eighty two, Howard s Gott
• 10:12
  Speaker 1: Warshaw's hanging around Atari and he gets a phone call.
• 10:17
  Speaker 1: He gets a phone call from the CEO, Ray Casar himself.
• 10:21
  Speaker 1: That was a big deal back then. Oh sure, and
• 10:23
  Speaker 1: Ray Casar says, hey, kid, we know you, we love you.
• 10:27
  Speaker 1: We've got something going on with Steven Spielberg. He remembers
• 10:32
  Speaker 1: that you made the Raiders of the Lost Art game
• 10:34
  Speaker 1: for him. He thinks, you're a certifiable genius, but we
• 10:37
  Speaker 1: have a special assignment for you. We want you to
• 10:39
  Speaker 1: make the et video game. Can you do it? Wait,
• 10:42
  Speaker 1: don't answer yet. Can you do it in five weeks?
• 10:47
  Speaker 1: Then he went sure, yeah, he said yeah, which I
• 10:51
  Speaker 1: mean even today, you're like five weeks. That doesn't sounding
• 10:53
  Speaker 1: very long. That was less than a tenth of the
• 10:57
  Speaker 1: time that it would normally take.
• 11:00
  Speaker 3: And he had the little secret is that he had
• 11:03
  Speaker 3: already called some other people in the company and said,
• 11:06
  Speaker 3: the CEO has this, like is this even possible? Or
• 11:09
  Speaker 3: am I just crazy for asking this guy to do
• 11:12
  Speaker 3: this in five weeks because it takes five or six months.
• 11:14
  Speaker 3: And they all said, no, it's not possible. And he said, well,
• 11:18
  Speaker 3: I'm going to ask him.
• 11:18
  Speaker 1: Anyway, right, And Howard Scott Warshaw didn't realize that they'd
• 11:23
  Speaker 1: already told him like, no, this can't be done when
• 11:26
  Speaker 1: he said yes, but he was locked in the punch
• 11:28
  Speaker 1: and he was twenty four years old and sure, full
• 11:31
  Speaker 1: of full of exuberants and hubris and all sorts of stuff,
• 11:34
  Speaker 1: and said I can do this. So he did. And
• 11:37
  Speaker 1: the reason we should say, the reason why this this
• 11:39
  Speaker 1: schedule was so short and usually took five to six
• 11:42
  Speaker 1: months for a game to be developed, and he had
• 11:46
  Speaker 1: five weeks to do it, and The reason why is
• 11:48
  Speaker 1: because the haggling the deal to get the rights for
• 11:53
  Speaker 1: the et game for Atari to purchase them, which they
• 11:56
  Speaker 1: bought for twenty one million dollars, took way longer than expected,
• 12:01
  Speaker 1: and they really wanted this game out for in time
• 12:04
  Speaker 1: for Christmas.
• 12:05
  Speaker 4: That was the whole deal.
• 12:07
  Speaker 1: So because of the because the deal had worked all
• 12:10
  Speaker 1: the way up into the summer and Christmas was on
• 12:12
  Speaker 1: the other edge, they needed also several weeks to manufacture
• 12:15
  Speaker 1: the actual cartridges and get them into stores. Yeah, if
• 12:18
  Speaker 1: you lay it all this timeline out, they left five
• 12:21
  Speaker 1: weeks to develop a game from scratch. So they they
• 12:26
  Speaker 1: knew just the guy to do it, and it was
• 12:27
  Speaker 1: Howard's got Warshaw and Howard said I'll give it a shot.
• 12:30
  Speaker 1: I'm going to do it.
• 12:31
  Speaker 4: Yeah.
• 12:31
  Speaker 3: And I should point out that when you say five
• 12:34
  Speaker 3: or six months is the usual time, five or six
• 12:37
  Speaker 3: months was fast.
• 12:38
  Speaker 4: The usual time was more than that.
• 12:40
  Speaker 1: Well, you also probably had a team working on it.
• 12:42
  Speaker 4: Like five or six months was the Rush version?
• 12:44
  Speaker 1: Right?
• 12:45
  Speaker 4: Anyway? Yeah, I mean I think I think.
• 12:50
  Speaker 1: That the pretty delightful prog Rock version.
• 12:53
  Speaker 4: Did that have a they should add their own video game.
• 12:55
  Speaker 1: I'm surprised they didn't. They were like, right there, they
• 12:57
  Speaker 1: did in that wheelhouse.
• 12:59
  Speaker 4: We would like the twenty one to twelve game or something.
• 13:02
  Speaker 1: We would know. Yeah, there's no way we wouldn't know
• 13:05
  Speaker 1: about the Rush twenty one to twelve Atari game.
• 13:08
  Speaker 3: So Warshaw gets to meet with Steven Spielberg in la
• 13:14
  Speaker 3: and was not given direction or a brief. He meets
• 13:18
  Speaker 3: with Spielberg says, here's what I proposed, this adventure game
• 13:22
  Speaker 3: that follows a plot of the film somewhat where the
• 13:25
  Speaker 3: kid is et playing the game. You are et, right,
• 13:28
  Speaker 3: and you got to go around and collect all these
• 13:30
  Speaker 3: pieces to build a phone so you can phone home,
• 13:33
  Speaker 3: and the government's after you and these bad doctors are
• 13:35
  Speaker 3: after you. It's just like your movie, right, And Spielberg
• 13:38
  Speaker 3: was like, well, can't you just have him like running
• 13:41
  Speaker 3: around eating Reese's pieces like pac Man?
• 13:43
  Speaker 4: Yeah, and he went, oh.
• 13:45
  Speaker 1: There's this great there's this great quote where he's like, here,
• 13:48
  Speaker 1: here's one of my idols, Steven Spielberg asking me to
• 13:52
  Speaker 1: knock off pac Man for the ET game. And I thought, well, gee, Stephen,
• 13:56
  Speaker 1: couldn't you make something more like The Day of the earthstud?
• 13:59
  Speaker 4: Yeah?
• 14:00
  Speaker 1: Burn right, burn? So he apparently had to do a
• 14:04
  Speaker 1: little fancy footwork to talk Spielberg into going with his
• 14:07
  Speaker 1: vision rather than a pac Man knockoff of ET, which
• 14:11
  Speaker 1: who knows, may have sold a lot better, but it
• 14:14
  Speaker 1: was he got him to agree to his vision for
• 14:18
  Speaker 1: this game. He said, no, this is a groundbreaking movie.
• 14:20
  Speaker 1: We need to make a groundbreaking game. And so Spielberg
• 14:23
  Speaker 1: agreed to it, and Warshaw started to get to work.
• 14:26
  Speaker 1: So we should probably take a break before Scott, Howard
• 14:30
  Speaker 1: Scott really jumps in it, all right, Chuck. So it's
• 14:53
  Speaker 1: basically the beginning of July nineteen eighty two, and Howard
• 14:57
  Speaker 1: Scott Warshaw is the sole programmer for an ET video game.
• 15:02
  Speaker 1: Atari's biggest bet. That they spent twenty one million dollars
• 15:05
  Speaker 1: on the rights too, that they're going to spend an
• 15:08
  Speaker 1: additional five million dollars on the advertising budget, for the
• 15:12
  Speaker 1: most anyone's ever spent on a video game up to
• 15:15
  Speaker 1: that point. He's the only programmer who's going to make
• 15:18
  Speaker 1: this game, and he has five weeks to do it,
• 15:20
  Speaker 1: which from what I understand, no one had ever done before.
• 15:24
  Speaker 3: Yeah, and this was Atari was a giant at the time.
• 15:28
  Speaker 3: If video If the video game industry was beginning to slip.
• 15:32
  Speaker 3: It wasn't like the public didn't really realize that yet.
• 15:36
  Speaker 3: The industry may have, but Atari held about eighty percent
• 15:41
  Speaker 3: of the market. They were at about two billion in
• 15:44
  Speaker 3: annual sales and about three quarters of billion in profit,
• 15:48
  Speaker 3: which is just unheard of.
• 15:50
  Speaker 1: About two billion in profit in today's money.
• 15:53
  Speaker 4: Yeah, so a ton of money. But they saw the
• 15:56
  Speaker 4: writing on the wall.
• 15:57
  Speaker 3: They knew that the personal computer like the Common or
• 16:00
  Speaker 3: sixty four that could play games but also do a
• 16:03
  Speaker 3: lot more, was a real genuine threat to the home console.
• 16:07
  Speaker 1: So I read a contemporary article in the New York
• 16:10
  Speaker 1: Times from nineteen eighty three talking about this, and Atari
• 16:14
  Speaker 1: said they did not see the writing on the wall.
• 16:17
  Speaker 4: Well, one of.
• 16:18
  Speaker 1: Them said, the first six months of nineteen eighty three
• 16:22
  Speaker 1: was one way. The second six months it was like
• 16:24
  Speaker 1: we were in a totally different business.
• 16:26
  Speaker 3: Yeah, but if you read interviews with him now, I
• 16:28
  Speaker 3: think that might have.
• 16:29
  Speaker 1: Been, Oh, the guy covering is well, yeah.
• 16:32
  Speaker 3: I don't think you want to go out in the
• 16:33
  Speaker 3: press in the moment and say, hey, everyone, we're super
• 16:35
  Speaker 3: scared investors.
• 16:37
  Speaker 1: Don't freak out, don't panic, You're right, Chuck. I feel
• 16:41
  Speaker 1: a little foolish.
• 16:42
  Speaker 3: So they what they did was they set Warshaw up
• 16:46
  Speaker 3: with everything he would have at work. They set him
• 16:49
  Speaker 3: up at home. So the only time he could not
• 16:53
  Speaker 3: be working on this game was his very short drive
• 16:55
  Speaker 3: over to the office. And he worked on it almost
• 16:58
  Speaker 3: NonStop for five weeks.
• 17:00
  Speaker 1: He had a manager that was assigned to him to
• 17:02
  Speaker 1: make sure that he ate. That was I'm sure not
• 17:05
  Speaker 1: the manager's only duty, but it was. One of the
• 17:07
  Speaker 1: manager's new jobs was to make sure that Warshaw ate
• 17:10
  Speaker 1: every day.
• 17:11
  Speaker 4: How about a waffle?
• 17:13
  Speaker 1: Sure, whatever, Stop bothering me.
• 17:16
  Speaker 4: ET's in the pit again.
• 17:18
  Speaker 1: So for five weeks he worked almost like you said,
• 17:22
  Speaker 1: twenty four hours a day. He said, it's the hardest
• 17:24
  Speaker 1: he's ever worked in his entire life.
• 17:27
  Speaker 4: Yeah.
• 17:27
  Speaker 1: And when five weeks came and went, he handed off
• 17:30
  Speaker 1: his He handed off the game. He finished it. He
• 17:34
  Speaker 1: completed it in time. And it wasn't done in his opinion,
• 17:38
  Speaker 1: or it would turn out in anybody's opinion, but it
• 17:40
  Speaker 1: was done. It was a complete game that he had
• 17:43
  Speaker 1: finished in five weeks, the et video game. And it
• 17:46
  Speaker 1: wasn't just something like a pac Man knockoff. He'd given
• 17:50
  Speaker 1: real thought to it and created a world that was
• 17:53
  Speaker 1: much different from a lot of the other games at
• 17:55
  Speaker 1: the time. At the time, it was a world like
• 17:59
  Speaker 1: it was a cube shape told with six screens, and
• 18:02
  Speaker 1: so if you walk to the left, you knew you
• 18:04
  Speaker 1: were going to end up on this other screen. If
• 18:06
  Speaker 1: you walked up, you wouldn't end up on the other screen.
• 18:08
  Speaker 1: It was a world that you were navigating, rather than
• 18:11
  Speaker 1: say like Yars Revenge, which is just one screen and
• 18:13
  Speaker 1: everything's happening on the one screen and it may imply
• 18:16
  Speaker 1: motion or something like this. With the Et game, you
• 18:19
  Speaker 1: were moving from one area of this world to the next. Yeah,
• 18:23
  Speaker 1: which is it was new. It wasn't new, but it was.
• 18:26
  Speaker 1: It wasn't. It wasn't standard to have six screens, especially
• 18:31
  Speaker 1: if you have five weeks to do it. Give a
• 18:32
  Speaker 1: guy a break.
• 18:33
  Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, No, I'm not saying it should. What I'm
• 18:35
  Speaker 4: saying is that.
• 18:38
  Speaker 3: It wasn't like some big revolutionary thing like the Raiders
• 18:41
  Speaker 3: game was pre this and it had thirty something screened. Okay,
• 18:44
  Speaker 3: all right, fine, and adventure like kids were used to
• 18:46
  Speaker 3: this by this point. Okay, So it wasn't like, oh
• 18:49
  Speaker 3: wait till they get a load of six screens, like
• 18:52
  Speaker 3: leaving the screen.
• 18:53
  Speaker 1: I see, but I think Howard Scott Warshaw should have
• 18:57
  Speaker 1: gone to everybody's house and been like, here's your copy
• 19:00
  Speaker 1: of et game as well. You know I made this
• 19:02
  Speaker 1: in five weeks.
• 19:04
  Speaker 3: Well he designed Easter eggs in there too, and I
• 19:06
  Speaker 3: kind of wondered, like, how much time did he spend
• 19:08
  Speaker 3: doing that with his own initials and like the little
• 19:11
  Speaker 3: Yards Revenge Flower.
• 19:13
  Speaker 1: I hadn't really thought about that.
• 19:14
  Speaker 3: I don't know, so he says time was of the essence,
• 19:17
  Speaker 3: though I just maybe put that last on the list.
• 19:20
  Speaker 1: He says today that had he had one more week
• 19:23
  Speaker 1: to just troubleshoot, he could have worked out all the kinks.
• 19:26
  Speaker 4: He could have worked out the kinks and one more
• 19:28
  Speaker 4: Easter egg.
• 19:28
  Speaker 1: But he handed it out. He handed it off to Atari,
• 19:31
  Speaker 1: and Atari said genius. They gave it to Steven Spielberg
• 19:35
  Speaker 1: to play. Spielberg apparently liked it. And in the game
• 19:40
  Speaker 1: it wasn't it wasn't just some dumb clunky game. It
• 19:44
  Speaker 1: was a mediocre game, but it was a game, and
• 19:47
  Speaker 1: it was done, and it was out the door, and
• 19:49
  Speaker 1: they got it out in time for Christmas. The cartridges shipped.
• 19:53
  Speaker 1: If you go back onto YouTube and search ET game
• 19:57
  Speaker 1: ad or commercial of some extraordinarily nostalgic ads of ET
• 20:04
  Speaker 1: dressed to Santa Claus playing his own video game of
• 20:07
  Speaker 1: a kid like receiving the ET video game from ET
• 20:10
  Speaker 1: out in the shed. Amazing stuff. So not only is
• 20:14
  Speaker 1: it like Christmas time feeling, but like Christmas time nineteen
• 20:17
  Speaker 1: eighty two.
• 20:17
  Speaker 4: Feeling Christmas plus ET who over the top.
• 20:20
  Speaker 1: It's nice. It's just like the the taste of ice
• 20:24
  Speaker 1: sugar cookies swells from the inside of your mouth. You
• 20:27
  Speaker 1: almost gag on it. It's so overpowering.
• 20:29
  Speaker 3: So they produce, well, we don't know for sure how many,
• 20:35
  Speaker 3: maybe as many as twelve million copies of this, at
• 20:38
  Speaker 3: least four million.
• 20:39
  Speaker 1: That's part of the urban legend.
• 20:41
  Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, I don't think there's an exact exact number,
• 20:44
  Speaker 3: but millions of copies of these were produced. Twenty one
• 20:48
  Speaker 3: million dollars invested in the licensing, plus five five million
• 20:52
  Speaker 3: dollars in advertising and marketing, not just I mean, who
• 20:55
  Speaker 3: knows what they paid Warshaw or for the actual production.
• 21:00
  Speaker 3: I mean, I doubt if it was millions of dollars.
• 21:02
  Speaker 1: But he was probably salaried.
• 21:04
  Speaker 4: They sunk a.
• 21:04
  Speaker 3: Whole lot of money into this thing and sold. Okay,
• 21:08
  Speaker 3: at first they sold about a half a million copies.
• 21:10
  Speaker 3: And then and I remember, oh you do oh yeah,
• 21:14
  Speaker 3: oh nice. Word got around And this was obviously long
• 21:18
  Speaker 3: before the internet, uh huh, like you could still sell
• 21:21
  Speaker 3: some stuff back then, before everyone realized it stunk. But
• 21:25
  Speaker 3: and that's what was going on. But literally, kid to
• 21:28
  Speaker 3: kid to kid in cul de sacs and classrooms got
• 21:33
  Speaker 3: the word that the ET game stunk and it killed it.
• 21:37
  Speaker 4: It did it is little kids killed it.
• 21:39
  Speaker 1: They sold like a half a million copies right out
• 21:41
  Speaker 1: of the gate, almost and then it peaked right there
• 21:44
  Speaker 1: very quickly, right around the Christmas season, right yeah, I.
• 21:46
  Speaker 4: Mean, just think about that. Though. It was children led
• 21:49
  Speaker 4: to the demise.
• 21:50
  Speaker 3: It's not like kids read an article in the newspaper,
• 21:53
  Speaker 3: even a review on the ET game.
• 21:55
  Speaker 4: It was kids going, man, that game stinks. Yeah what
• 21:59
  Speaker 4: you bought that? Oh, don't buy it. It stinks.
• 22:01
  Speaker 1: Yeah, it's terrible.
• 22:02
  Speaker 4: And that happened like a game of telephone all around
• 22:05
  Speaker 4: the country.
• 22:05
  Speaker 1: That's really cool.
• 22:06
  Speaker 4: Simultaneously, kids get things done, they do, man.
• 22:10
  Speaker 1: So, like you said, it happened pretty fast. They peaked
• 22:13
  Speaker 1: at a half a million copies, and over time it
• 22:16
  Speaker 1: managed to sell another million on top of that, So
• 22:18
  Speaker 1: a million and a half copies success. I think it's
• 22:21
  Speaker 1: like actually inn Atari's top ten of best sellers. But
• 22:25
  Speaker 1: the problem is, if this story is a story of
• 22:29
  Speaker 1: everything or anything, it's not the story of a over
• 22:34
  Speaker 1: over confident game designer making a terrible game. It's a
• 22:40
  Speaker 1: very confident game designer making a middling game. If it's
• 22:44
  Speaker 1: a story of anything, it is of executives being drunk
• 22:50
  Speaker 1: with confidence in Hubris. Yes that no matter what they
• 22:53
  Speaker 1: put out, if it's tied to a hot property of
• 22:57
  Speaker 1: like a movie or something, it's gonna sell. Doesn't matter
• 23:00
  Speaker 1: what the game is, it's gonna sell. Problem one. Problem
• 23:03
  Speaker 1: two was they forecasted based on that Hubris too. So
• 23:08
  Speaker 1: not only did they say it's gonna sell no matter
• 23:11
  Speaker 1: what we put out, it's gonna sell bigger than anything
• 23:14
  Speaker 1: we've ever put out before, and they ordered four million cartridges.
• 23:18
  Speaker 1: Well again, it sold a million and a half and
• 23:20
  Speaker 1: two and a half million cartridges were sitting in warehouses.
• 23:23
  Speaker 1: Not to mention ones that we're starting to be taken back,
• 23:27
  Speaker 1: because not only did did kids go I don't want
• 23:30
  Speaker 1: this game, I want to take it back, and took
• 23:33
  Speaker 1: it to the stores. The stores started taking their games
• 23:36
  Speaker 1: back to Atari. So Atari's like, wait, wait a minute, everybody,
• 23:40
  Speaker 1: this is et the game. What are you doing? Put
• 23:44
  Speaker 1: this in your twenty six hundred and shut up and
• 23:47
  Speaker 1: people then listen.
• 23:48
  Speaker 3: Yeah, And you can hardly blame the executives. I mean
• 23:52
  Speaker 3: they were like, Warshaw plus Spielberg is going to be
• 23:57
  Speaker 3: another hit because we had it in Raiders, so sort
• 24:00
  Speaker 3: of get it. But it was it was just it
• 24:01
  Speaker 3: was that timeline, right, like that was that was the
• 24:05
  Speaker 3: big problem. It was all the timeline. He could have
• 24:07
  Speaker 3: created a game as good as Raiders.
• 24:10
  Speaker 1: Right, Yeah, given five six months, I'm sure. Yeah, even
• 24:13
  Speaker 1: given two months, he probably probably could have made an
• 24:15
  Speaker 1: even better game. But it was It was kind of
• 24:18
  Speaker 1: a boring game. It wasn't that fun. There's a very
• 24:22
  Speaker 1: famous quote from a New York Times article in nineteen
• 24:26
  Speaker 1: eighty two where a little ten year old said, it
• 24:29
  Speaker 1: wasn't that fun.
• 24:30
  Speaker 4: Yeah, that was kind of it.
• 24:32
  Speaker 1: Yeah, that's all you need to say.
• 24:34
  Speaker 3: And it wasn't. And not only was it not fun,
• 24:36
  Speaker 3: but and I don't know, I guess you could call
• 24:40
  Speaker 3: it a bug.
• 24:40
  Speaker 1: It was a bug.
• 24:43
  Speaker 3: It seems more like bad design than just a mistake.
• 24:47
  Speaker 3: But what would happen as Et would fall into these
• 24:51
  Speaker 3: pits and then he could levitate back out. But depending
• 24:55
  Speaker 3: on which way you were or even how you were
• 24:58
  Speaker 3: holding the joystick, the slightest little move would cause Et
• 25:02
  Speaker 3: to fall back into that pit.
• 25:04
  Speaker 1: No matter what direction you went. Sometimes.
• 25:07
  Speaker 3: Yeah, but it wasn't like all the time it was.
• 25:11
  Speaker 3: It happened enough though to where as a kid, Remember
• 25:15
  Speaker 3: you asked me earlier if it was frustrating trying to
• 25:17
  Speaker 3: parachute as Indy. Yeah, it was not, because you knew
• 25:20
  Speaker 3: you could do it. This was frustrating. Kids got frustrated
• 25:24
  Speaker 3: because Et was falling in the pit and he would
• 25:27
  Speaker 3: get out and he would fall in the pit.
• 25:29
  Speaker 4: And then you do that enough times and.
• 25:31
  Speaker 3: You're like, I'm going to play Yards Revenge or any
• 25:34
  Speaker 3: of my other games.
• 25:35
  Speaker 1: Do you have fast food?
• 25:36
  Speaker 3: And kids put it down? Yeah, you know they put down. Well,
• 25:40
  Speaker 3: they didn't put down the joystick and go outside and play.
• 25:43
  Speaker 3: That would be like the movie ending.
• 25:45
  Speaker 4: They just popped it out and put in the game
• 25:47
  Speaker 4: that they liked exactly.
• 25:49
  Speaker 1: So this was a big deal for Atari because it
• 25:56
  Speaker 1: came at the worst possible time. And speaking of the
• 26:01
  Speaker 1: worst possible time, let's take a break and do an
• 26:04
  Speaker 1: ad breaking. We'll come right back, all right, Chuck. So,
• 26:27
  Speaker 1: like I was saying, this came at a really terrible
• 26:29
  Speaker 1: time for Atari. You kind of talked about how the
• 26:31
  Speaker 1: personal computer industry was starting to eat into their profits
• 26:34
  Speaker 1: big time and they really needed this ET bet to
• 26:38
  Speaker 1: pay off. And not only did it not pay off,
• 26:41
  Speaker 1: they lost tens of millions of dollars on this. It
• 26:44
  Speaker 1: was a huge catastrophic bet for Atari. And the numbers
• 26:51
  Speaker 1: are just stunning. In like you said, in nineteen eighty two,
• 26:56
  Speaker 1: Atari's profits were two billion dollars.
• 27:00
  Speaker 4: Well in today's money.
• 27:03
  Speaker 1: No, that was yeah, the profits, I'm sorry, in today's money. Yeah,
• 27:06
  Speaker 1: their gross was two billion. Yeah. In the second quarter
• 27:10
  Speaker 1: of nineteen eighty three, they posted a loss of three
• 27:14
  Speaker 1: hundred and ten million dollars five hundred and thirty six
• 27:17
  Speaker 1: million dollar loss for the whole year. By nineteen eighty four,
• 27:20
  Speaker 1: the company had been sold. So it went from two
• 27:23
  Speaker 1: billion dollars in profits to a loss of five hundred
• 27:27
  Speaker 1: and thirty six million dollars over the course of a year.
• 27:31
  Speaker 4: Yes, and it was not because of ET.
• 27:33
  Speaker 1: But this is the thing, Okay, So it gets even
• 27:35
  Speaker 1: worse hold on, We're not there yet. I'm getting excited.
• 27:40
  Speaker 1: The whole video game industry actually went down. Oh yeah,
• 27:43
  Speaker 1: So there's something called the North American video Game Crash
• 27:46
  Speaker 1: of nineteen eighty three, where not only did the did
• 27:49
  Speaker 1: Atari go under, basically the industry did so the whole.
• 27:54
  Speaker 1: The whole industry in nineteen eighty three had a three
• 27:56
  Speaker 1: point two billion dollars in sales. By nineteen eighty five,
• 28:00
  Speaker 1: two years later, they had one hundred million dollars in sales.
• 28:05
  Speaker 1: It was a crash, like that is a catastrophic crash.
• 28:08
  Speaker 1: And like you're saying, no, it wasn't because of ET,
• 28:11
  Speaker 1: but imagine this. Think about this. All of that has
• 28:16
  Speaker 1: been laid ever since then at the feet of ET
• 28:19
  Speaker 1: the video game and Howard Scott Warshaw. People look at
• 28:23
  Speaker 1: him and say, you ruined the video game industry single handedly.
• 28:27
  Speaker 1: That's how he's thought of.
• 28:29
  Speaker 4: I think that was the case.
• 28:30
  Speaker 1: Up until like twenty fourteen or fifteen, right.
• 28:33
  Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean I think people in the know knew
• 28:36
  Speaker 3: that that was not the case, but.
• 28:37
  Speaker 1: The popular pop culture opinion of him.
• 28:40
  Speaker 4: Yeah maybe.
• 28:41
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 28:41
  Speaker 4: But let's say ET was a big hit. It would
• 28:45
  Speaker 4: not have saved Atari.
• 28:46
  Speaker 1: No, it might have like staved the bleeding a little bit.
• 28:50
  Speaker 1: Maybe it would have been a drop in the bucket basically.
• 28:52
  Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, I certainly feel bad for Warshaw, but
• 29:00
  Speaker 3: he's a good inning, so stick around for that.
• 29:03
  Speaker 1: Don't go anywhere.
• 29:04
  Speaker 3: After ET, he took some time off. He said that
• 29:09
  Speaker 3: he just needed to sort of recover. I believe was
• 29:12
  Speaker 3: the words he used. He went into real estate and
• 29:15
  Speaker 3: did not enjoy that at all, and eventually he became
• 29:19
  Speaker 3: a psychotherapist and that's what he does today. He's labeled
• 29:22
  Speaker 3: the Silicon Valley psychotherapist and sort of specializes in talking.
• 29:27
  Speaker 3: He jokes that he's fluent in English and NERD, so
• 29:31
  Speaker 3: I think kind of specializes in talking to Silicon Valley types.
• 29:35
  Speaker 4: About their work problems. Certainly a man.
• 29:38
  Speaker 3: That can identify Yeah, yeah, I bet he's a great psychotherapist.
• 29:43
  Speaker 1: It seems like he definitely would be.
• 29:45
  Speaker 4: Yeah, so he.
• 29:46
  Speaker 1: Definitely made peace with the whole thing. And I think
• 29:48
  Speaker 1: he very frequently jokes. I've seen it in more than
• 29:51
  Speaker 1: one article that he says he kind of enjoys it
• 29:54
  Speaker 1: when people say that ET's the worst video game of
• 29:57
  Speaker 1: all time, because people also say that Yours Revenge is
• 30:01
  Speaker 1: one of the best video games of all time. So
• 30:03
  Speaker 1: he has the greatest range of any video designer ever.
• 30:06
  Speaker 1: So he definitely has like a I think it took
• 30:08
  Speaker 1: him a little while, that's the impression, I have to
• 30:11
  Speaker 1: make peace with it. But he made peace with it.
• 30:12
  Speaker 1: And I think one of the reasons he was able
• 30:15
  Speaker 1: to make peace with it, and I'm just armchair psychologizing here,
• 30:19
  Speaker 1: but he came to realize, yeah, I've used it before
• 30:23
  Speaker 1: and you said the exact same thing. I think too. Yeah,
• 30:27
  Speaker 1: he realized that it wasn't the worst video game of
• 30:29
  Speaker 1: all time, and that a lot of the people who
• 30:31
  Speaker 1: were saying it was the worst video game of all
• 30:33
  Speaker 1: time didn't know what they were talking about, which has
• 30:35
  Speaker 1: to be super liberating. Sure, and the whole world's like
• 30:38
  Speaker 1: you ruined everything. And then you realize, like they don't
• 30:40
  Speaker 1: even know what they're saying, you can just kind of
• 30:42
  Speaker 1: lay roll off your back a little more easily.
• 30:45
  Speaker 3: So the cherry on top of this story, we mentioned
• 30:49
  Speaker 3: this documentary Atari game Over. It is about the legend
• 30:53
  Speaker 3: of the story of the et game, which continued after
• 30:56
  Speaker 3: its demise, with this urban legend that Atari was so
• 31:02
  Speaker 3: distraught and embarrassed by this game that they had all
• 31:05
  Speaker 3: the remaining boxes shipped out and buried in the desert
• 31:09
  Speaker 3: under cement. Initially, You're like, that doesn't make any sense.
• 31:14
  Speaker 3: Why would Atari spend all this money to do this
• 31:18
  Speaker 3: when they could just burn them, sell them in the
• 31:21
  Speaker 3: dollar bin, do anything other than this weird plan to
• 31:26
  Speaker 3: bury them out in the desert of New Mexico.
• 31:28
  Speaker 1: Yeah, And a lot of people took it when it
• 31:30
  Speaker 1: was kind of an initial rumor that like, Atari was
• 31:33
  Speaker 1: trying to bury their shame. That's all right, It just
• 31:35
  Speaker 1: went that much further to point out how bad the
• 31:38
  Speaker 1: video game was. Atari was trying to bury it and
• 31:41
  Speaker 1: forget about it.
• 31:42
  Speaker 4: Right.
• 31:43
  Speaker 3: So in twenty eleven, there was a party where there
• 31:47
  Speaker 3: was an Atari former Atari person there and a guy
• 31:52
  Speaker 3: named Mike Burns was talking to him and said something about, yeah,
• 31:56
  Speaker 3: the urban legend that you guys did this, and apparently
• 31:59
  Speaker 3: the answer was just sheepish enough to where he was like,
• 32:03
  Speaker 3: wait a minute, is that true?
• 32:05
  Speaker 4: Right? So did he did he fund this documentary? Is
• 32:10
  Speaker 4: that how that worked?
• 32:12
  Speaker 1: I think he's a guy who makes things happen, he
• 32:15
  Speaker 1: brings people together. Okay, I think yes, he definitely puts
• 32:18
  Speaker 1: some of his own money into it. But I think
• 32:20
  Speaker 1: he also got others to put money into it as well.
• 32:23
  Speaker 3: Okay, I didn't know if he was involved in the
• 32:24
  Speaker 3: dock itself. Yes, yes he was, or just financing the
• 32:28
  Speaker 3: dig both. But Zach Penn made this documentary. Zack Penn,
• 32:32
  Speaker 3: a great, great writer, ironically wrote the movie Ready Player
• 32:37
  Speaker 3: one which talks about adventure and Easter eggs and all
• 32:41
  Speaker 3: that fun stuff. So he's written a bunch of movies,
• 32:44
  Speaker 3: a bunch of the Marvel movies and stuff, and it was.
• 32:47
  Speaker 4: Clearly a labor of love.
• 32:48
  Speaker 3: This this documentary, if you've seen it, you know Zach
• 32:51
  Speaker 3: Penn is like super excited about all this stuff.
• 32:54
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 32:54
  Speaker 3: So the old Alamagordo landfill in New Mexico has three
• 33:00
  Speaker 3: it's three hundred acres and then one hundred cells, which
• 33:03
  Speaker 3: are these it says holes, but they're just these big square,
• 33:08
  Speaker 3: deep pits where you you know, if you listen to
• 33:10
  Speaker 3: Our Landfills episode, then you know what goes on there.
• 33:13
  Speaker 4: They just dump stuff in there and cover it up.
• 33:16
  Speaker 3: And the legend was that the ET is in one
• 33:18
  Speaker 3: of these cells, and these days they chart it and
• 33:22
  Speaker 3: it's mapped out, so they know what's where generally sure,
• 33:25
  Speaker 3: and if a cop comes and says, hey, there's some
• 33:28
  Speaker 3: evidence from four years ago. They could say, oh, well
• 33:31
  Speaker 3: that's going to be in this cell because it was
• 33:34
  Speaker 3: from this area of town where it was picked up
• 33:36
  Speaker 3: and we buried it here. Back then, they didn't have
• 33:39
  Speaker 3: anything like that.
• 33:39
  Speaker 1: No, it was like they just dug a hole, put
• 33:42
  Speaker 1: garbage in it, covered it up, and went home. According
• 33:44
  Speaker 1: to a guy named joe Leewandowski, and Mike Burns lucked
• 33:49
  Speaker 1: out that a guy named joe Leewandowski worked at the
• 33:53
  Speaker 1: Alamagordo City Waste department because he is basically the institutional
• 33:59
  Speaker 1: memory of Alamagordo's waist, and he worked at the dump
• 34:04
  Speaker 1: for so long that he had a pretty good chance
• 34:06
  Speaker 1: of remembering where the stuff was put. But he was
• 34:10
  Speaker 1: kind of like, no, we didn't document it. I have
• 34:13
  Speaker 1: no idea, leave me alone. And apparently Mike Burns is
• 34:16
  Speaker 1: not the type to just be like, oh, okay, thanks,
• 34:18
  Speaker 1: didn't mean to bother you. He'll keep pestering you until
• 34:21
  Speaker 1: you do what he wants from what I understand, and
• 34:24
  Speaker 1: so he finally got joe Leewandowski on board, and in
• 34:27
  Speaker 1: just an astounding turn of good luck, joe Leewandowski's wife
• 34:33
  Speaker 1: had made a scrap book of Joe's time working for
• 34:37
  Speaker 1: Alamagordo's waste department that included pictures of the dump from
• 34:42
  Speaker 1: around this time. So they were able to narrow down
• 34:46
  Speaker 1: these hundred cells over three hundred acres to two to
• 34:49
  Speaker 1: just two, which narrowed the search enough that they could
• 34:52
  Speaker 1: actually start taking samples to try.
• 34:54
  Speaker 4: To fgd that. That was a very big breakthrough.
• 34:56
  Speaker 3: And if you watch this documentary when when they're taking
• 34:59
  Speaker 3: these samples and they come across like newspaper clippings from
• 35:02
  Speaker 3: that year and that month where these cartridges were supposedly buried,
• 35:06
  Speaker 3: it's really exciting.
• 35:07
  Speaker 1: It is.
• 35:08
  Speaker 3: I gotta admit, it's like, oh my gosh, it's like
• 35:11
  Speaker 3: finding buried treasure. So they narrowed it down. All of
• 35:17
  Speaker 3: these people showed up, fans the what's his name, Ernest Klein,
• 35:22
  Speaker 3: who wrote the book Ready Player one, he showed up
• 35:25
  Speaker 3: in his Back to the Future DeLorean, and.
• 35:29
  Speaker 4: It was a very big deal.
• 35:30
  Speaker 3: They Howard Warshaw came in and he was there and
• 35:34
  Speaker 3: people were just like embracing this guy instead of like
• 35:38
  Speaker 3: it's not like he showed up and people are.
• 35:40
  Speaker 4: Like, there he is, get him.
• 35:43
  Speaker 3: He's like this beloved cherished, dude, And I get the
• 35:46
  Speaker 3: sense that this was a very big deal for his closure,
• 35:51
  Speaker 3: which is interesting because burying something is usually the closure.
• 35:55
  Speaker 3: In this case, digging it up was the closure.
• 35:56
  Speaker 1: Yeah, good point.
• 35:58
  Speaker 3: And they did find uh thirteen hundred game cartridges. Yeah,
• 36:05
  Speaker 3: which it makes you wonder like how this how they
• 36:08
  Speaker 3: got there, how the rumor got started to begin with?
• 36:11
  Speaker 4: Well, then the fact that there is some truth to it.
• 36:13
  Speaker 1: Yeah, they feel like it definitely confirms that urban legend,
• 36:16
  Speaker 1: like Atari definitely did cover up. They did dump these
• 36:19
  Speaker 1: these cartridges, but it wasn't just et cartridges, and it
• 36:23
  Speaker 1: wasn't like the millions that they supposedly dumped, but they
• 36:26
  Speaker 1: probably buried some elsewhere in either California or Texas or both.
• 36:31
  Speaker 1: But it confirmed that, yes, this actually did happen. The
• 36:34
  Speaker 1: urban legend was real, and at the very least, it
• 36:37
  Speaker 1: gave Howard Scott Warshaw that closure year he got to see,
• 36:42
  Speaker 1: you know, thirty something years on, people were still vibing
• 36:47
  Speaker 1: out on his creation, although in ways he could not
• 36:50
  Speaker 1: have possibly predicted when he was spending that five weeks
• 36:53
  Speaker 1: programming this game.
• 36:54
  Speaker 4: Yeah, he said, he was full of gratitude.
• 36:56
  Speaker 1: That's really cool.
• 36:57
  Speaker 4: That's a very cool way to go through life.
• 37:00
  Speaker 1: My friends. Oh man, you know, if you can remember
• 37:03
  Speaker 1: to have gratitude, it truly does make you happy. Yeah,
• 37:06
  Speaker 1: it's insane. It's just remembering to be grateful is the trick.
• 37:09
  Speaker 3: So they ended up a lot of these went on
• 37:11
  Speaker 3: eBay auctioned off. I think they sold about one hundred
• 37:15
  Speaker 3: thousand dollars worth of these things that went to the
• 37:19
  Speaker 3: city of Alamagordo. Of course they owned them. It's not
• 37:21
  Speaker 3: like they just gave them out to everyone that.
• 37:23
  Speaker 1: Was there as a party gift.
• 37:25
  Speaker 4: They should have. Sure, they should have given everyone one copy.
• 37:28
  Speaker 1: I think some of the like Mike Burns and some
• 37:30
  Speaker 1: of his crew got some, and Almagordo kept some. But
• 37:33
  Speaker 1: I think the ones that were auctioned were auctioned by
• 37:35
  Speaker 1: Alamgordo to go to a fund of museum.
• 37:38
  Speaker 4: I would love a copy assigned cartridge for moreshaw.
• 37:42
  Speaker 1: I mean, the most I think one went for was
• 37:44
  Speaker 1: fifteen hundred bucks, So.
• 37:46
  Speaker 4: We don't want it that bad.
• 37:47
  Speaker 1: But no that I'm saying like that's the most. That's
• 37:49
  Speaker 1: the highest any of them went for. So you could
• 37:51
  Speaker 1: probably give them for a couple hundred bucks if you tried.
• 37:54
  Speaker 4: I wonder if he listens to the show.
• 37:56
  Speaker 1: I hope so you never know. I hope so. I
• 37:58
  Speaker 1: hope we cleared it up for you. Warshaw, your legend, sir, Yes,
• 38:02
  Speaker 1: hets off to you.
• 38:03
  Speaker 3: Send me a signed cartridge, Josh needs one.
• 38:06
  Speaker 1: Thank you, buddy. You got anything else?
• 38:09
  Speaker 3: No, it did. ET was not the worst game there were.
• 38:13
  Speaker 3: There were games that were so bad that you don't
• 38:16
  Speaker 3: they were just in the dustbin of history.
• 38:18
  Speaker 4: They were so bad.
• 38:19
  Speaker 1: Yeah, like Sorcer, like you said, Manjo's apparently pretty bad.
• 38:22
  Speaker 3: Yeah, they were terrible, like all these not knockoff companies.
• 38:26
  Speaker 3: But you know, ari Atari opened it up to where
• 38:29
  Speaker 3: anyone could could design a game that fit their console.
• 38:33
  Speaker 1: And some people say that that was one of the
• 38:34
  Speaker 1: reasons why Atari lost market shares, because there's so much
• 38:37
  Speaker 1: crudd on the shelves, right, people were tired of buying
• 38:40
  Speaker 1: Creddy games for twenty five bucks. Yeah, and that they
• 38:44
  Speaker 1: just oversaturated the market themselves. But they oversaturated with terrible
• 38:48
  Speaker 1: stuff oversatched well at any rate, that's ET the game
• 38:53
  Speaker 1: not the worst video game of all time, but a
• 38:57
  Speaker 1: heck of a story. I'll tell you what good one
• 38:59
  Speaker 1: and gave you a little bit of nostalgia this holiday season. Yeah, great,
• 39:03
  Speaker 1: feel that warm tingling. It's either a bladder infection or
• 39:06
  Speaker 1: a nostalgia. Let's see. Since I said bladder infection, everybody,
• 39:11
  Speaker 1: it's time for listener man, this.
• 39:15
  Speaker 4: Is about bird poop.
• 39:17
  Speaker 3: Hey, guys, listen to the Olive Oil podcast and loved
• 39:20
  Speaker 3: it very much. Living in Italy, they use it every day.
• 39:25
  Speaker 3: That's my wonderful complexion and youthful looks. I want to
• 39:28
  Speaker 3: tell you about a problem though, that we have it
• 39:29
  Speaker 3: in Rome every year and directly caused by olives. Every winter,
• 39:32
  Speaker 3: the city center is home to millions of migrating starlings
• 39:36
  Speaker 3: who spend their days out in the local countryside, eating
• 39:38
  Speaker 3: olives and having a great time. In the evening, they
• 39:41
  Speaker 3: come back to our warmer city center and sleep in
• 39:44
  Speaker 3: the city center trees for the night. Great news for
• 39:48
  Speaker 3: bird watchers, but bad news if you'd like to avoid
• 39:50
  Speaker 3: being pooed on. The city gets covered in the stuff.
• 39:54
  Speaker 3: And he sent me a video and of these cars
• 39:57
  Speaker 3: parked on the street and it's literally looks like it
• 40:01
  Speaker 3: was painted with bird poop growth, completely solid every square inch.
• 40:06
  Speaker 1: That's gotta be bad for the paint.
• 40:08
  Speaker 3: And yes, it's really bad, he said, What has this
• 40:12
  Speaker 3: got to do with olive oil? While the olive stones
• 40:14
  Speaker 3: may not come out of the starling bird's bottoms, but
• 40:17
  Speaker 3: the olive oil infused greasy pooh does, and it makes
• 40:20
  Speaker 3: driving along the roads almost impossible.
• 40:23
  Speaker 4: I've fallen off my scooter.
• 40:24
  Speaker 3: Twice in the past few years, Oh my god, because
• 40:26
  Speaker 3: of this, So I guess it's it's slippery oily poop.
• 40:29
  Speaker 1: Oh my god.
• 40:31
  Speaker 4: And that is from James in Rome.
• 40:33
  Speaker 1: Well thanks James. That email's kind of petered out at
• 40:36
  Speaker 1: the end there. Yeah, I was expecting a big finish,
• 40:39
  Speaker 1: just oily poop. All right. Well, thanks regardless, and stay
• 40:42
  Speaker 1: stay safe on your scooter.
• 40:44
  Speaker 4: There, James, he said, people use umbrellas.
• 40:46
  Speaker 1: And hats off to you living in Rome. Have you
• 40:48
  Speaker 1: been around?
• 40:49
  Speaker 4: Sure?
• 40:49
  Speaker 1: When I went, I was like I could live here.
• 40:52
  Speaker 1: Pretty great, I told Jumie.
• 40:53
  Speaker 3: She's like, maybe it's lovely city. It really is old
• 40:58
  Speaker 3: world charm cats. What's what else?
• 41:00
  Speaker 4: Wine food, beautiful people.
• 41:02
  Speaker 3: Yeah, and I've never seen men and women at every
• 41:06
  Speaker 3: turn that looked like runway models.
• 41:08
  Speaker 4: Sure, and they were just regular newspaper boys.
• 41:11
  Speaker 1: Well, the fact that they do like a little twirl
• 41:14
  Speaker 1: every once in a while as they were walking. Really
• 41:15
  Speaker 1: kind of sold it.
• 41:16
  Speaker 4: To Yeah and go Chell, Chell Bell Chow Bed.
• 41:20
  Speaker 1: Wow, Let's turned out weird. If you want to get
• 41:23
  Speaker 1: in touch with us, you can go on to stuff
• 41:26
  Speaker 1: youshould Know dot com and hit us up through our
• 41:28
  Speaker 1: social links, or you can just send us a good
• 41:30
  Speaker 1: old fashioned email to stuff podcast HowStuffWorks dot com.
• 41:38
  Speaker 2: Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
• 41:41
  Speaker 2: more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
• 41:45
  Speaker 2: or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.