While he was having the time of his life, a lot of his colleagues seemed to believe there was a cultural transformation taking place. And it's all about trying to get there in an interesting or innovative way, as opposed to being all about structure, which is the way a lot of environments operate.”īut over time, Warshaw says, he noticed something wasn’t quite right. “The environment was so free, and so creatively focused, and so accepting that you could be anything, you could do anything, and people only looked at it in terms of, ‘Well, does this inspire something cool to do?’ It was about looking for creative opportunity, which, to me, is the ultimate creative environment, right? Where you don't have a lot of restrictions, you just have goals. Not only could he test his mettle on much more complex, sophisticated programming challenges than at Hewlett Packard, but Atari also gave him the opportunity to blend his technical, analytical capabilities with the wacky creativity that had made him stand out at his previous job. Upon his arrival in 1981, Warshaw immediately found himself fulfilled in a way he had never experienced before. He pushed back, and eventually was hired on probation at a much lower salary than initially discussed. But Warshaw wouldn’t take no for an answer. And one of my coworkers came up to me one day and said, ‘The kind of things you do - they happen all the time where my wife works.’ I said, ‘Oh, where's that?’ And he said, ‘Atari.’ And that was an interesting moment because it never occurred to me to look at Atari as a place to work.”Īfter this fateful conversation with his friend, Warshaw called up Atari and maneuvered his way into a series of job interviews – and was rejected. “I used to do some wacky stuff, especially, by HP standards. “I was in love with computers in my graduate work in college, and I fell out of love with computers at Hewlett Packard where I was drowning in a sea of computational mediocrity, and it was very unsatisfying, and so I used to act out,” Warshaw says. It’s a cautionary tale of the perils of crunch, the advent of new game design ideas, an industry-shaking crash, and the necessary, inevitable movement of game creation from its formative Wild West years to the much larger, collaborative efforts we see today. IGN spoke to E.T.’s primary developer and sole designer Howard Scott Warshaw ahead of the release of his latest book, Once Upon Atari. But the real story of ET, its creator, and their relationship with Atari is far deeper than the hole that was dug to house hundreds of copies of the critically-panned game in a New Mexico landfill. has been told over the years as a cautionary tale against crunch, having only been made in five weeks.
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