Death and Rebirth to an Era

Beetle juice, Voldemort, and ET for the Atari 2600 are just a few names you should never say out loud. Inside of gaming culture, the game that shall not be named is one that took the industry by storm, by crashing the home console market for around 2 years in the west, until the NES took storm with its home console.

With a payment of $20 million USD on getting the licensing fees, it set itself up to be a ridiculously expensive game, as such, ambition and a large scope for the game was needed, which entirely contradicts the less than 6-week deadline (Stilphen, n.d.). Calling ET a warning sign for several reasons is an understatement, with numerous issues regarding it.

The home console crash was devastating for publishers, consumers, and a small landfill near Alamogordo (New Mexico) (Dvorak, 1985) alike. Spending in the industry also dropped from approximately $3 Billion down to $100 million (Dvorchak, 1989) within 3 years. Thankfully Nintendo managed to make the dead cat bounce and get right back up to where it was. Nintendo also brought over innovations like the D-pad, their simple control scheme for 2D and 3D platforming and quality control requirements (Kratz, 2014), which would not have occurred without the crash. Although some argue that the quality of digital storefronts has slipped, we would not be here today if it weren’t for the locked down nature of Nintendo's platform.

One thing that didn’t occur from the crash was the decline of home PCs in gaming. This is often contributed to the fact that they can do more than just play video games, something that nowadays games consoles have consistently done, with Sony’s PlayStation 2 contained a DVD player. This is was also why the Nintendo Entertainment System was not called or marketed as a games machine and included the ROB robot (Staff, 2003).

An important thing to note, is that at the time, PC gaming was not what it was, it was not until the release of Commander Keen in 1991 where real-time background scrolling in 2D games would become possible (Gamerang, 2015), something that was commonplace on the NES, released 6 years prior to Commander Keens debut. The reason this is important to remember is that it shows that at the time, the public saw innovation and more hardware demanding games were being released on console, as opposed to on PC. This did soon change with the jump from Commander Keen to Doom in just 2 years (Totilo, 2013).

To the game's credit, it was created in just short of 6 weeks, this period of intensive crunch is something that we have only recently begun getting around to fixing from the stories of Red Dead Redemption 2’s development (Conditt, 2018).

In conclusion, ET is like a mole you have on your back that you left for too long, and finally, visit a doctor who said the operation would take a week. It’s not nice, everybody that saw it hated it, put us all out of action and discredited us for a while, but now that it’s gone, all of us in gaming can move forward and grow to be better than our prior selves.

Works Cited

Conditt, J., 2018. engadget. [Online] Available at: https://www.engadget.com/2018/10/25/red-dead-redemption-2-review-crunch-rockstar/?guccounter=1 [Accessed 2019 1 28].

Kratz, J., 2014. Get Done Done. [Online] Available at: https://www.getdonedone.com/nintendos-qa-process-rebuilt-gaming-industry/ [Accessed 28 01 2019].

Moldrich, C., 2014. Telegraph. [Online] Available at: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/video-games/11230730/Assassins-Creed-Unity-released-complete-with-bugs.html [Accessed 28 01 2019].

Staff, G., 2003. Gamespy. [Online] Available at: https://web.archive.org/web/20070612194348/http://archive.gamespy.com/articles/july03/25smartest/index22.shtml [Accessed 28 01 2019].

Stilphen, S., n.d. Digit Press. [Online] Available at: http://www.digitpress.com/library/interviews/interview_howard_scott_warshaw.html [Accessed 2019 01 28].