This is a movie that attempts to explain why video games are so successful. I watched it after the far superior Atari Game over (which you can watch for free if you are on xbox live(at the current time)). Really what irked me about this was that the guy was not there at the time so had no idea what caused the video game crash. Being a huge Atari 2600 fan I can say ET is a good game. The only people who say it is the worst game in history have not played the game.
Atari lost a court case to activision. This meant that they could produce games for the 2600 without any interaction with Atari. Yeah Atari had put out loads of poor games but most of them had been withdrawn as programmers understood how to make games for the 2600. So probably the worst game of all time was Starship (you play for about 3 minutes then it is game over (a poor man's star raiders). Though companies like Bomb, Xonox and Data age released games which were for the most part poor. Then other companies like US games came to the fore. They produced games of such poor quality but they were released for the same price as Atari games. This is what contributed to the crash. This and everyone putting out substandard computers in a way of getting some market footprint into a steadily shrinking market. I think of (in the UK) Memotek, Dragon 32, Oric Atmos as being the main culprits. Substandard pcs that did nothing to advance the games market. In America you had junk like the Coleco Adam (it came with a daisy wheel printer!) and fitted into your cbs colecovision (a very good console). Also the Mattel Aquarius which was junk and the Texas TA. I could go on but you get the picture.
For the film maker to single out one games and attribute that as causing the crash shows this person knows nothing about video games and just relied on a few old myths.
Perhaps he was too broad in his subject view and should just have concentrated on video games from the PS1. Then he would have been okay. For old gamers like me this movie is an insult. It is available on netflix.
Atari lost a court case to activision. This meant that they could produce games for the 2600 without any interaction with Atari. Yeah Atari had put out loads of poor games but most of them had been withdrawn as programmers understood how to make games for the 2600. So probably the worst game of all time was Starship (you play for about 3 minutes then it is game over (a poor man's star raiders). Though companies like Bomb, Xonox and Data age released games which were for the most part poor. Then other companies like US games came to the fore. They produced games of such poor quality but they were released for the same price as Atari games. This is what contributed to the crash. This and everyone putting out substandard computers in a way of getting some market footprint into a steadily shrinking market. I think of (in the UK) Memotek, Dragon 32, Oric Atmos as being the main culprits. Substandard pcs that did nothing to advance the games market. In America you had junk like the Coleco Adam (it came with a daisy wheel printer!) and fitted into your cbs colecovision (a very good console). Also the Mattel Aquarius which was junk and the Texas TA. I could go on but you get the picture.
For the film maker to single out one games and attribute that as causing the crash shows this person knows nothing about video games and just relied on a few old myths.
Perhaps he was too broad in his subject view and should just have concentrated on video games from the PS1. Then he would have been okay. For old gamers like me this movie is an insult. It is available on netflix.