Video Games: The Movie Page #5

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Only from Atari, made especially

for systems from Atari,

the video game that lets you

help E.T. get home.

Just in time for Christmas.

Happy Holidays.

With only 5 weeks to make the game,

Atari scrambled

to put out a subpar product.

Overconfident and high

on their previous success,

in the fall of 1982,

Atari shipped millions

of E.T. cartridges,

despite its poor quality.

The backlash was legendary.

It caused a ripple effect

throughout the entire

games industry

and by the summer of 1983,

consumer confidence

in video games had reached

an all time low and Atari,

along with many other

rising game companies,

went down like the Titanic.

So, there came a lot of conflict and

the whole management style blew up

and Warner basically took over.

They put their man in, Ray Kassar,

who was from the east coast,

no experience in entertainment,

in games, technology,

or Silicon Valley.

And he just didn't

really understand

or play games.

So, when you're that way,

it's really hard

as a president to really assess

the quality of what's going on.

It was that kind of attitude

and creating terrible product

that was driven

by advertising and marketing

and not by any content

and guess what?

It didn't sell.

The one story

about E.T.'s cartridges

being buried in the desert

is actually a true one.

The fact that Atari

rushed this game

just to have it out with the movie

to use the license of E.T,

'cause E.T. was huge in the '80s.

Both the E.T.

and the Pac-Man games,

those were two of the games

that didn't do well,

they were trying to cram something

into the Atari 2600

that it did not want to do.

The big crash happened in '83

and toy stores

were unloading consoles

for next to nothing.

Everybody just thought

they could schlock

any sort of games onto the system

and it was the first lesson

that the industry learned

in the fact that

the consumers are smart,

especially gamers, and you can't

just put shuffleware

out there and fool them.

They will not buy it.

But, after the crash,

they realized that, you know,

for a lot of people,

it'd been a fad,

but for a core group of people,

they still wanted to play games.

For a couple of years

after the crash,

many people thought

that American video games

would be relegated

to the "popular fads" section

of 21st century encyclopedias

and forgotten.

Enter Nintendo,

a Japanese toy company

who understood that the popularity

of classic games like Pac-Man,

Donkey Kong, and Pitfall proved

that people liked to play

as a character,

not just a spaceship

or nameless block of pixels.

Even with the crudity

of the early 8-bit graphics,

the concept of "immersion"

and "being" a character

was still very appealing

to the public.

And little did the world know,

their favorite videogame character

was just around the corner.

This is Nintendo,

a flashy little computer

that lets you play video games

on your TV set.

This is called Game Boy

and industry analysts

say that there may be a run on this

as the holiday demand

exceeds the supply.

This is Super Mario 3,

it's been a long-awaited game.

Super Mario, of course,

was very, very popular,

Super Mario 2

was extremely popular,

now Super Mario 3 is coming out.

It's been the best selling toy

in this country

for three years running.

Twenty million of these things

now inhabit American living rooms.

"Inhabit" is a very good word.

Because of the crash,

no retailer wanted

to touch a, quote-unquote,

"video game system."

And so, a lot of what we did

was to try to come up with something

that was uniquely different,

it wasn't just a game system,

it had other features to it.

And, eventually,

we came up with R.O.B.,

the Robotic Operating Buddy

and the Zapper Gun

and two cartridges,

and we sold it

as an entertainment system.

Even with that, it was a hard sell

to get the retailers to take it,

but it was fairly successful.

And during

that first initial phase,

Super Mario came out

and that sold like hot cakes.

It was an extremely

successful title.

Nintendo Entertainment System

was, I think,

you know, a big landmark system,

you know, because before that

there was a real question mark

about whether or not

video games were gonna

be able to stay popular.

You know, there's

the big video game crash

and then Nintendo showed us

how we can bring them back

and make them really popular again.

I remember seeing Super Mario Brothers

for the first time and just being

completely blown away, it was like,

"Wow, there's an arcade

in my house!

This is the coolest thing ever!"

And Mario Brothers was great

and Zelda was great and so,

I put a lot of hours, as a player,

into those early Nintendo games,

I love those early Nintendo games.

I saw the Nintendo

Entertainment System

and said, "Wow, this is new,

unique, different,

bringing new experiences

to the consumer.

I saw the original

Mario Brothers and said,

"Wow, this is new,

this is different."

The same for the original

Legend of Zelda.

So, after the video game crash,

I kinda fell out of love with games

for a while and just ignored them.

And then, one day,

a neighbor kid down the street,

I go over to his house

and he has this gray box

with this R.O.B. the Robot

and he has the Zapper Gun

and we're playing

this Duck Hunt game

and then he fires up

the Super Mario game

and I was like, "Okay,

this is some next-level stuff."

And I remember

the first time that I jumped

and I hit a block that was there

that I didn't know was there,

one of the secret blocks

with an extra life in it,

my mind just... exploded

'cause, like,

here are secrets in games now.

With the rebirth

of the U.S. games industry,

a new breed of gamers was rising.

The appetite for simple

maze-based games was waning.

Gamers were ready for more.

Becoming a character,

living out a virtual story

and being absorbed

in something otherworldly

was not just

technically possible now,

but the expectations for deeper,

more immersive experiences

was growing.

As the game business evolved,

um, people were making larger

and more complicated games,

requiring 30-page manuals

and 80 hours of gameplay

to get into.

You never really cared about

the characters

in Gauntlet, you know?

It was just that Gauntlet

was an addictive game.

But now, we not only spend

more money on games,

but we see them

as entertainment mediums

where we want

to be invested in the story,

we want to be invested

in the world.

The huge difference

is that the older games,

I think, were a lot tougher.

Like, if you did not

get your jump exactly right

to land on a platform, you were not

getting through that level.

Timing was everything,

now you have a lot more freedom.

You can... you can kill a boss

many different ways.

It used to be before that

the whole point of a game

was, literally,

shooting pixelated aliens

that were falling

out of the sky, but we didn't know

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