Once Upon Atari by Warshaw Howard Scott & Warshaw Howard Scott

Author:Warshaw, Howard Scott & Warshaw, Howard Scott
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: SCOTT WEST Productions
Published: 2020-12-10T16:00:00+00:00

One key feature of a Treasure Hunt game is that players can actually win it. With the notable exception of Warren Robinett’s Adventure, most video games of the era had no “win” condition. Players keep going until they run out of lives, trying to set new high scores. It’s the How-High-Is-Up model of gaming. This is because most thinking about home game creation was based on the arcade paradigm. Having a win condition makes no sense in an arcade game because you need people to keep pumping quarters into the machine. But home gaming? Not so much.

So, how do you keep a “winnable” game fresh? Where are the legs? If the basic mechanics of the game are enjoyable enough (i.e. collecting and utilizing treasure), the player will want to do it again. I can randomly redistribute the treasure for another round, and as long as there are enough hiding places the challenge level should be maintained. Ideally, this results in an action puzzle that’s fun to solve over and over again. I really wanted the game to have legs. In retrospect, it looks like I gave it enough legs to walk a short distance and fall into a pit.

Next question: How does all this fit with the movie? After all, at some point the video game will have to relate to the movie...

E.T. is a tricky movie for a video game adaptation. It’s primarily an emotional tone movie, and the VCS is not exactly a facile canvas for emoting. And how will this movie set expectations for a gaming experience? Raiders of the Lost Ark is a profound action movie with a clear through line to translate, that’s the stuff of which video games are made. But E.T. is all about feelings and wonderment. What does that video game look like?

When Steven Spielberg suggested a Pac-Man style game, I suspect he was thinking about the action sequence near the end of the movie. Elliott is biking around town (the maze) and people are chasing him (the ghosts), his friends are helping him along the way and E.T.’s in the basket as a wild card for special powers. This is a reasonable concept for a video game. I’d considered it initially but getting something like this programmed and playable at an acceptable level is unlikely to happen in 5 weeks.

Now let’s think about the Treasure Hunt model in the context of the ET movie. It goes like this: ET assembles a phone from a variety of junk. Once assembled, he uses it to call home. Then he must evade interfering humans to meet and board the returning ship.

It’s a beautiful multi-layered structure of quests. #1: Find all the phone pieces hidden in various places (pits). #2: Find the place to call home among all the “locations” in the world. #3: Find the designated landing zone in the forest (while avoiding the humans) in time to meet the ship. Three successive treasure hunts, each building on the last. As long as I

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