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Hello Howard Scott Warshaw! Alright then? TT here again, back on the interview hamster wheel. This month, I made a call to the good old US of A; land of oil wells and Hershey’s, to have a chat with a nice chap called Howard Scott Warshaw. Howard worked for Atari during the height of their success, and produced games for the 2600 console. His game Yar’s Revenge, received critical acclaim from all quarters, which is all the more odd when you consider the other game he wrote for the 2600; the infamous E.T. This game is shrouded in so much controversy, mystery and legend, we decided to get the real story from the man himself. So pull up a chair, light a cigar, and read Howard’s tale of money, alien film producers and BDSM.Howard! Welcome - and thanks for talking to little old us! It’s a real pleasure to talk to you guys. Thank you for asking. Let’s start at the top Howard. You took a job at Atari in the early days writing for their earliest console. From what I can see, it was something of a Taiwanese Nike sweatshop environment for you as a programmer. True or not? Initially, you could describe it as that, yes. Although the difference being, we absolutely wanted to work! Although I have to say that the relationship between management and the developers was odd. They were thinking "how can we get these guys to produce more stuff?". And we’d be sitting there thinking "how can we do more of this?". They created a "them vs. us" thing, but in reality, it was so rewarding and exciting to us anyway, their failure to nurture and develop us didn’t really matter. What about the enormous amounts of money coming in from retail? Did you see any of it? We enjoyed writing the games so much that it didn’t really matter. But then we became aware of the huge amounts of money that was coming in to Atari, that could be directly attributable to the work of a handful of coders. We started to say, "you know, maybe you should share some of that with us!". There were some hard feelings and difficult conversations had, but after a few company formations (Activision, Imagic) the management changed their policy and things got very cool indeed.
Wasn’t that a distraction from making the games themselves? Not really. Atari existed on two levels. Making great games, and creating passion for doing that. The money was for the most part a separate thing. You sat at your desk, and you thought about the entertainment product that was going to make people sit up and get excited; whilst trying to outdo the games that were written by your colleagues. There was plenty of money to go around, so there was no ill-feeling between the engineers. How much money are we talking about? Well, we’re talking about a very nice car for everyone for starters. A nice house for some people. No real financial worries for anyone. This allowed you to concentrate on your work. What the money did do, was push the coders and management apart. What do you mean? Well, Atari Marketing became more demanding of not so much good games, but titles that could be sold easily in the marketplace. And that’s a problem. A game that seems to have a good IP in advance, doesn’t necessarily turn out to be a good game in itself. The two things are totally independent. And of course, with sellable titles, came greater pressure on deadlines, to maximise revenue opportunities. There was a huge conflict between release schedules and game quality. It sounds like the process is the wrong way round (as it still is I guess). You make a good point. It was about shoehorning games into titles, rather than writing the games first and then matching them to relevant titles.
You walked right into this one Howard: So is there any truth in the age old rumour that 4 million "ET" cartridges (the game you wrote) were buried in the Californian desert? You know what, it’s a wonderful folk-lore story, but I don’t think its true, and I’ll tell you why: No one has ever found a burial place. That’s a lot of inventory to make disappear. Also, logistically it’s crazy - why ship all that stuff by truck to the desert, when you could cannibalise the carts for EPROM’s, packaging and plastic and re-use it? Why hire contractors, truckers and contractors to do that? Remember, Atari was in dire straights at that time; it would have been completely irrational to have buried all that crap in the desert. What’s more, I knew everyone at Atari. Someone, somewhere would have told me “hey, they’re burying your game! If that had happened, I would have had to fly out there with a photographer, and picture me standing on top of the mound! I smell a Photoshopping opportunity there... Hahahaha! Yeah absolutely! But you know what, despite everything it still sold a million copies even after returns. I remain very proud of what was achieved there in terms of development. I single-handedly got a completed game out there in a matter of 5 weeks. No one else had managed to produce a game in 5 months up to that point! I had a dev system set up in my house, and I worked in the office during the day, and continued working when I got home, right through the night. But of course, consumers aren’t interested in what went into a title, only what comes out! What’s ironic Howard is that you are also credited with writing one of the best games of all time - Yar’s Revenge. Yes. I have the greatest range of any games designer in history. ET at one end, and Yar’s Revenge at the other! I like the idea that I have "breadth". I can hit any part of the spectrum - I just don’t know where... But more importantly, back then making a game was a work of authorship, whereas now its more of a collaborative work. I’m very very happy to have been a part of that period when authorship dominated the scene.
But its not all bad, you got to meet Steven Spielberg because of your work on ET and Raiders Of The Lost Ark on the 2600 didn’t you? Yes I did. I told him he was a member of an alien race. Pardon me? Yeah. I was asked to go meet him to discuss the game of his movie. He is a very cool guy. He had a line of arcade cabs in his office. Anyway, we were talking and at one point I said that I thought he was part of an advance party of Aliens sent to check us out, you know? Riiiight... That’s what he said. Anyway, think about it. Spielberg was the first and only Director to put aliens in a friendly positive light. Think of ET and Close Encounters Of The Third Kind. Remember, the whole world saw those movies. I believe he was an alien and it was his job to produce these movies, and then it was down to other members of the advance team to go and market these movies to spread the positive news about aliens. And back then I was very proud to be a part of that whole machine, in producing the videogame of the movie. !!!!!!!!! Hello? Hi! Sorry Howard. I’m still here. Are you absolutely certain that’s what you said to him? Well, yeah. And you’ve not spoken to him since? No I haven’t. Good. That’s good. Oooooookay. So what happened after Atari? Well I needed to "come down" from the whole experience. Atari was all about defining a new medium. Literally, that’s what we were doing every single day. To see it all come crashing down in 83 and 84 was very depressing. It was a very intense period of my life and I just needed to get away from it all. So I sold commercial real estate for a while, which was pretty miserable. But it was a change of pace, which is what I needed. You went on to work for Trip Hawkins at 3DO for a while Howard. We interviewed Trip a few months back. I thought he came across as a very shrewd but ruthless businessman? Indeed he is. He left a lot of people feeling like they’d been screwed over by him, including just about every employee at 3DO. I think he started 3DO out of vindictiveness for being driven out of Electronic Arts. It was all about getting back at EA. But of course that never happened.
So how was it working at 3DO? When I was there, I worked with some of the best talent in the world all under one roof. But the environment was such that it never evolved into a product which reflected that level of input. In the end, they closed the door on about 200 employees at 3DO and didn’t pay them. And I’m talking thousands of dollars. So you know, he has that ability. But don’t forget, he is a very smart guy. He’s creative, visionary and very able. His new venture appears to be built on those foundations rather than the vindictiveness of 3DO. So that’s a good thing. So what’s occupying your time these days? Well, I own Scott West Productions, a small movie production company here in the US. I’ve made two films so far, one about the old days of Atari called "Once Upon Atari" and the other about BDSM. OK I’m listening! (sits up) Well, it isn’t going to meet your expectations! The movie is regarded by people in the BDSM scene as the best representation of BDSM in media. You, like everyone else, has an expectation and a fantasy about what BDSM actually is. Er... no I don’t. Not me Sir. Oh no. Ahem. The reality for the people involved is massively different, and that’s what the movie is about. I was going to make it rather more graphic, but I ran into a lot of pornography laws, about what could and couldn’t be shown. Besides I didn’t want it to be regarded as a piece of pornography. My next project is going to be a million miles away from that subject. Well its good to see you’re still involved with the creative side of things Howard. Thanks very much for your time! Thank you. It’s been fun! To find out more about Howard’s time at Atari and to buy the DVD series, check out his website, Once Upon Atari. September 2006
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