Interview with ATARI Legend Howard Scott Warshaw

From Yars’ Revenge to Modern Innovations in Game Development

Welcome to a new Episode of our Rock the Prototype podcast, where today we have the privilege of hosting none other than Howard Scott Warshaw, a name synonymous with the golden age of video gaming.

Howard is not just any figure in the gaming industry; he’s a legend. Known for his groundbreaking work at Atari, including the development of iconic games like Yars’ Revenge and his famous contributions to the very fabric of early video game history.

In our episode today, we’ll dive into the fascinating world of software development and prototyping of Atari games, reflecting on the challenges, innovations, and lessons from that pioneering era.

Howard will share his personal perspective, offering insights that promise to enrich our understanding of video game development’s past, present, and future. And of course, we’ll also talk about his book, where he delves deeper into his experiences and learnings.

Whether you’re a retro gaming enthusiast, a developer, or simply curious about the evolution of video games, this conversation is bound to captivate. So, grab your headset, find a quiet spot, and join us for an unforgettable journey into the heart of video gaming history with Howard Scott Warshaw.

Welcome to the golden age of video gaming with ATARI game developer Howard Scott Warshaw

Sascha Block:  Welcome Howard, a real Atari legend and a hero in our hearts. Thank you.  You are a synonym, not only for us Atari fans, you represent the pioneering spirit and creativity that defined the early days of the video game industry.

Howard Scott Warshaw: Oh, thank you Sascha, it’s great to be here. I really appreciate the opportunity.

Sascha Block: Please give us a short introduction about yourself. You’re an Atari legend, joining us on our ROXO prototype podcast, approximately 9,000 kilometers away from Hamburg in Southern California.

Howard Scott Warshaw: Thank you. Yes, like you said, I’m Howard Scott Warshow. I made some of Atari’s most famous and infamous titles. I created the Yars Revenge property and did the original game for that. I did the first video game conversion of a movie, Raiders of the Lost Ark, working with Steven Spielberg. I did the infamous E.T. video game and I also did a game that was the slowest development of all time, given that it took 20 years to release in Saboteur.

I summarized all my experiences at Atari, both the game making and the incredible shenanigans and behind the scenes…

As you mentioned, I summarized all my experiences at Atari, both the game making and the incredible shenanigans and behind the scenes intrigue that took place at Atari in my book, Once Upon Atari, How I Made History by Killing an Industry. I also read the audiobook for it, if people are interested in audiobooks these days.

Now I’m actually a psychotherapist, so Atari has impacted my life to such a degree and it has reverberated throughout my life over the years in a way that can only really be summarized by trying to give back to others how I got so much from the whole experience. Interesting. Tell us more, please. And so I used to be a game maker in trying to make people’s lives more entertaining. Now I’m a psychotherapist trying to make those same people’s lives actually better.

Sascha Block: How did you get into game development and what inspired you to work for Atari?

Howard Scott Warshaw: It’s an interesting question because it wasn’t… I didn’t go to Atari to make games. I was happy to make games. I love games. I enjoy games. But the reason I went to Atari was because I was a very traditionally trained computer engineer in the late 70s, which was an unusual thing and very formally trained, I should say, because there wasn’t much tradition back then, because it was still very early in the field.

Being bored at Hewlett Packard…

Howard Scott Warshaw: What did happen was that where I was working at Hewlett Packard, I was bored. I was uninterested in the work they were doing. I felt was really dull and not challenging.

Taming the Wild Child: Embracing Challenges at ATARI

And I needed a challenge. Plus, I was a little bit of a wild child in an environment of very state and formal people. So I really didn’t fit in.

And one of my coworkers said to me, “Hey, I was telling her some stories about the things you do because there were a lot of Howard stories at Hewlett Packard.” She said, “Oh, that’s a lot like what happens where I work.” And I said, “Oh, well, where’s that?” And he said, “Well, she works at Atari.”

That was the first time I’d ever heard of Atari as a place to work. So I went and I interviewed and because I had a unique background for them, I was specializing in what’s called real-time control programming. Very few people did that back then. And the only real applications for this were video games and missile guidance technology and military applications. And I wasn’t very interested in military applications.

A unique fit for ATARI but being rejected

But I was a unique fit for Atari and I knew exactly the kind of work they did programming-wise. I was perfectly prepared for it. So I was interviewed with a bunch of people there. I interviewed several times and then they rejected me. Atari actually rejected me.

I didn’t take no for an answer.

And then I didn’t take no for an answer. I begged my way in because I knew Atari once I got to see what was going on there. I knew that was the place for me. But I didn’t go there to make games. Making games was a plus. I went to Atari for the environment and for the technical challenges that were posed by trying to program a video game. That’s how I found up at Atari.

GAFAM today and in former times that influence software development

Sascha Block: Interesting. Today, five U.S. giants rule all of us. I’m talking about GAFAM, a variation and a neologism which stands for Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft. In your opinion, who are the giants, your heroes, who have had the impact on software development for many days? 

Howard Scott Warshaw: Who my heroes who have had impact on software development?

Sascha Block: Yes, in these former days.

Influencer of time beside Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak and Bill Gates

Howard Scott Warshaw: Well, in those days, the people who really influenced my sense of computer programming were none of the people who were involved in any of the companies you just named.

Steve Jobs, worked at Atari before he started Apple

Actually, some of the companies you just named barely existed when I was doing this work at Atari. We were right next to one of the early Apple buildings. In fact, we stole their sign. One of the pranks we pulled was that the Atari people stole the Apple sign from next door. And there was some trouble around that. And Steve Jobs, as you know, actually worked at Atari before he started Apple.

Being inspired by data organization in terms of coding by a guy named Alan Russ

So did Wozniak. Wozniak was a super engineer, but the people who really influenced me was a guy named Alan Russ. He was a guy who taught classes in my graduate school. He was the one who really taught me about data organization and what that means in terms of coding. That’s where I learned to do assembly code, machine language coding. Those were the things that really hooked me for this kind of programming. So I fell in love with it in college. I lost that love. I couldn’t find that satisfaction at Hewlett Packard.

Reunited with my technical love at Atari

And I was reunited with my technical love at Atari. And that was a brilliant rematch. Amazing. What influence do you think Atari software development has had on computer science as a whole? Oh, it’s huge.

I mean, on computer science or the computer industry?

Sascha Block: Yeah, on computer science.

Howard Scott Warshaw:  Okay. On computer science, I don’t know that Atari actually had that much influence on computer science. On the computer industry, Atari’s fingerprints are all over it. Because if you think about it, Atari’s employment went from like three or four people in the early 70s to over 10,000 people by like 1980.

Influenced by the ATARI DNA…

And then by and all of these people had what I would call the Atari DNA. And what the Atari DNA was, was the idea that any one single product, you can make a single product, a person can make incredible product that can take over the world. That can be huge. That’s such a powerful statement to date. That kind of feeling, that kind of thinking, that kind of inspiration led to the dot com explosion, I believe. And it was that was founded at Atari.

Atari’s Meteoric Rise: A Culture of World-Changing Innovation

Atari was the place where because of Atari’s meteoric rise, everyone at Atari had that sense that we can blow the world away in their DNA. Now, Atari was like I said, was 10 to 12,000 people in early 1980.

By 1983, that was reduced to like 200 people. So there is over 10,000 people who had Atari DNA, who then were disseminated all over the industry and went into all these other companies. And every company they went to, they infused this kind of excitement and enthusiasm and potential in all these other companies.

The ATARI virus that spread throughout Silicon Valley

So Atari launched, Atari was like the zero vector of a virus that spread throughout Silicon Valley and throughout the technical world and launched the kinds of feelings and thinking that led to things like the dot com explosion, like a Google, you know, like a Facebook.

Game Development than and now

Sascha Block: That’s the thing people should know and reflect even if they belong to generations set or if they are millennials, which did not grew up with Atari like I did. So let’s reflect on the prototyping and development process within the gaming industry. When we compare today’s game developments with multi-million budgets, it’s probably totally different than in these golden ages, which might be understood as retro gaming for millennials or generations. Can you describe the development process of an Atari game?

128 bytes of RAM. That’s all we had to work with!

Howard Scott Warshaw: It was very different than development today, both in the process and in the workflow and tools. All of these things are incredibly different. First of all, an Atari game, when I first got to Atari was only four K of code in RAM. And there were only 128 bytes of RAM, 128 bytes of RAM. That’s all we had to work with. The entire game had to do that. Games today are conservatively one to 10 million times that size and it’s all RAM.

Sascha Block: And they are wasting resources en mass. No question about it.

Are games today a million times better?

Howard Scott Warshaw: Well, I wouldn’t say they’re wasting resources. They’re utilizing a great deal more resources, but they have more resources to use. One question I would pose is, are games today a million times better than the games we made?

What we did for a game was we had to think up a game. And thinking up a game then wasn’t just making up a game play and some graphics. Because today you start off with a design team that comes up with a design document, right?

That thoroughly details everything you’re going to do in the game and virtually everything they just think of to do in a game can be done in the game. You’re not limited very much by the technology. There aren’t many things you can’t manage with a controller, things that you can’t execute on a screen, things you can’t devote thousands or tens of thousands of polys to to make it look pretty good on the screen.

When all you have is 8 bits…

When all you have is eight bits and like a two or three bit color matrix, your options are much more limited. And so the first thing, so nowadays where you do a whole design doc where your only limitation is your imagination for by and large, what we had to do was we had to think up some sort of a new gameplay.

First thing we had to do was come up with a new gameplay

There weren’t many games you could do sequels of because everything was new. There wasn’t any real history at that point. So first you got to make up a gameplay.

“Then you’ve got to say to yourself, can I do this gameplay on the 2600?”

Can I figure out a way to fool or trick the hardware into making it try to do more than it was designed to do to try and achieve some new aspect either graphically or play wise.

So then once you came up with that concept, now you would just sit down on a development system and start banging out code trying to make it happen. And it was very much an iterative trial and error march towards the game as opposed to a full blown game design that you then just execute with a team of over a hundred people. So that experience, those experiences are extremely different. I had that experience at Atari.

Working in the new gaming environment

I also came back 15 years later to work at 3DO and BlueShift. And so I did a lot. I took some time off and then I came back and did some work in the new gaming environment. And that was a very interesting contrast to see the difference between a one person, one game world, which I loved, and the multi person collaborative huge effort that is modern console gaming now learned a lot of very interesting things from that contrast. Right.

Sascha Block: And today games are available everywhere. And in the former days, I had to ride my bike more than 15 miles one way to grab a game. That’s also a very different aspect from the consumer side.

Howard Scott Warshaw: Very different. I’ll tell you another difference that’s huge is that today, like you say, games are available everywhere. And you can just download. Sure. Right. You can tell your computer, hey, I want to play this game and you get it.

Games and Updates everywhere

You not only get the game, you get the updates, right? Because now, when a game drops, it’s out there. You within days, you can collect feedback. You can respond to the feedback. You can make changes and tweaks in the game and re put the game out.

“People can get updates and the game is alive, right? The game can keep moving. You can fix bugs.”

You can add features along the way and people can can pick it up.

At Atari, you had one chance one shot.

When we were making games at Atari, you had one chance one shot. You make your game. It gets printed in a cartridge. It gets put out and it’s never going to be updated. Right. You’re never going to get a chance to do anything else.

So you have one shot, one time to get it all right. And that’s the most it’s ever going to be. So that’s different. Physical things where software are digital assets today, more or less.

Sascha Block:  What challenges were there in prototyping and developing games on the hardware of that time?

Howard Scott Warshaw: Yes. Oh, oh, right. Yeah. I mean, the idea that you can prototype games now that you can take a big, pretty complex graphical user interface, do a mock up and simulate a gameplay and check it out now.

And you can do that in a few minutes. That’s that’s astonishing.

When we were at Atari, that was science fiction.

That was totally science fiction. That was the dream. Everybody people would say, oh man, you know what?

I’m just going to go whip up something and we’ll check it out and play it. And we’d all laugh because we knew it was going to be like, you know, weeks or a month’s work before somebody could really put something on a screen to do it.

There were rapid prototyping attempts…

There were rapid prototyping attempts. People wanted to create prototyping systems for the 2600 back then and they failed. They spent months and a lot of budget trying to put something together and they couldn’t really come up with something that actually saved any time because the 26, the thing about programming the Atari VCS, the 2600 system was that your code was so intimately integrated with the hardware that you couldn’t really prototype something because to do anything to get anywhere, you had to work around the hardware in a very particular way or you had to create a new way that a prototyping system would never have accommodated.

Now the hardware and the software are divorced

So now the hardware and the software are divorced.

They’re completely separated and there’s enough layers in between so that the programming you do to create a game functionally does not have to worry at all about underlying hardware and what’s going on.

At the 2600, it was just the opposite. We couldn’t do anything without being married to the hardware. So the idea of prototyping just didn’t make sense. It wasn’t really feasible. It would take longer to prototype something than it would to actually just implement it.

Sascha Block: Do you think that the limitation of technical possibilities limited creativity or how do you even think the opposite is true?

I think it’s a really good question. I think it’s a really good question and I think the best answer actually is what you’re talking about is apples and oranges. Okay.

And what I mean by that is creativity is always necessary in video games.

That’s one of the things I love about video games. The great, what’s so challenging about video games is that in technology, in any kind of just software endeavor, usually there’s a spec, right?

There’s a technical spec of what the software needs to do and the truth is meeting that spec is usually, it may take a while, but it’s usually not that difficult. When you have a clearly defined spec, meeting a spec is not that hard to do in software. That’s what software is designed to do.

The thing about video games is that to do a video game, you have a full technical spec, but there’s one other requirement that shows up in a video game spec that never shows up in any other technical spec.

The fun requirement in game development

And that requirement is it has to be fun, right? Right.

So you can make a beautiful video game that is perfectly coated, zero bugs does exactly what the design was. But if it isn’t fun to play, the game is a total failure.

Okay.

Whereas a game that’s super buggy has a lot of problems, but people dig it, it’s fun to play and they engage it. That’s a great success, right?

Creativity in game development

How you measure success in video games is fundamentally different from how you measure success in any other software endeavor. So now you look at the question of creativity.

What does creativity mean?

In modern game development, creativity typically means coming up with innovative game ideas that, of course, you can implement, right?

It’s not going to be that hard to implement it once you have the idea and you know the pieces you have to work with.

Creativity now is different than it has been in game development for the ATARI 2600

So creativity now is different because at Atari and the 2600, creativity meant finding a new way of sort of taking advantage of or abusing the hardware with the software to create unintended consequences that then could somehow show up in the middle of a game and then finding what you could do to integrate that into a gameplay, right?

So the creativity, I wouldn’t say it’s more or less, but it has way shifted, right?

The challenge of finding a new gameplay is tougher today because there’s more gameplays that have been out there.

For the ATARI 2600, every game needed to be a new play

It’s also not as demanding because innovation now, in a lot of cases, is just doing a next generation of an existing concept. And the 2600, every game needed to be a new play. It needed to be a new fresh concept. And that was easier because there weren’t as many games done already. So there was more possibilities, but you couldn’t do as much. So trying to find something new that you could do on that system, that was the challenge.

So I wouldn’t say it’s more or less creativity.

I would say the focus of the creativity has changed drastically and dramatically from where it was then to where it is now. I hope that answers your question.

E.T. – the extraterrestrial the infamous game

Sascha Block: Thank you. That was a fantastic reflection. That leads us to E.T. – the extraterrestrial. Could you discuss the experiences and challenges you faced during the development of E.T. – the extraterrestrial?

Howard Scott Warshaw: Absolutely, I can discuss that. And I’m happy to do that. So in fact, my book, Once Upon Atari, How I Made History by Killing an Industry, is a very elaborate discussion of everything that went on in my mind on my dev system and all around me at Atari, in addition to covering my other games and how Atari impacted my life.

I was only given five weeks to do it.

But the E.T. game was an extraordinary experience because whereas most games that were done back then on the 2600 would take at least, you know, six to eight months to do, I was given just five weeks to do the E.T. game. Because of the way negotiations had gone and the secrecy that was involved around it, I was only given five weeks to do it.

In fact, they called me directly because my boss’s boss, the head of VCS Development, the CEO of the company, Ray Cazar, had called him to say, hey, we need an E.T. and we only have five weeks. He just laughed at him and said, no, you can’t do it.

We can’t do a game in five weeks. We just can’t do it.

And after that, the CEO actually called me directly to ask me, could I do the game in five weeks? And I told him, absolutely I can, as long as we reach the right agreement. And which meant I wanted a big bonus for it. But I believed I could do it. Incredible. And that was an amazing experience. For sure. Because I like a challenge, right? One of the reasons I went to Atari because I wasn’t feeling sufficiently challenged at Hewlett Packard.

And E.T. was to try to do a full finished and hopefully enjoyable video game in five weeks. That was like a mountain to climb. Definitely. That was a challenge I couldn’t resist. And so I had to accept that challenge and I had to meet it. So for me, it was just so important to make this happen.

A Learjet waiting for you to take you to Steven Spielberg in LA

So I started, I set about designing it because I, I mean, this was a Tuesday afternoon when I got this call from the CEO to do it. And on Tuesday afternoon, what he said was, okay, if you’re going to do the game, you need to be at San Jose airport at 8 a.m. on the following Thursday.

So that’s just a day and a half later. There’ll be a Learjet waiting for you to take you to Spielberg, Steven Spielberg in LA. To present the design.

So I had 36 hours to design a game that had to be done in five weeks. Incredible. And so I had to think very quickly, which is something I do. And the challenge, it’s interesting, the idea of doing a game in five weeks, the challenge isn’t to take a regular game that you would do in six months and just jam it into five weeks, because that’s impossible. I believe so. That’s never going to happen.

Because it’s, what doing a game that fast isn’t, it’s not a programming challenge, right?

It’s a design challenge. Instead of just doing a long game in a short period of time, what I had to do was design a game that could be done that quickly.

I needed to figure out a design for a game that might be playable, but could actually be accomplished in a short period of time. And that was my focus. And the most brilliant moment of it all.

You see, I was doing video games. I was one of the premier video game makers of my era. I think so. But what I really wanted was to be a movie director. Okay. I love film, I love movies. I used a lot of movie concepts in my games, but I wanted to be a director. And when I got the chance to work for Steve Spielberg on Raiders, that was an amazing thing in my life to meet Steven Spielberg.

But to do ET and present him with a game for that, that was an amazing, also a nerve-wracking opportunity I will never forget. I can imagine. Unbelievable.

Past and present – What would you do differently today? Or would you do it the same way?

Sascha Block:  What would you do differently today? Or would you do it the same way?

Howard Scott Warshaw: Oh, that’s a great question.

I mean, there’s a whole chapter in my book devoted to what I would do differently if I had more time. I even broke it down in terms of, what if I, you know, how much more time did I have?

If I had one more day…

There are things I would change if I had one more day. If I would have had one more day, there are some significant changes I would have made. I would have changed some of the way the collision goes with falling into the wells.

I would have changed it so when you’re coming out of the wells, it wouldn’t be so hard to reestablish yourself. People think there’s a collision-detect problem with the wells and there isn’t.

There’s perfect collision-detect with the wells because it’s a hardware collision-detect. It can’t make a mistake.

But what’s interesting about E.T. was also, I did some work in E.T. to make the graphics really good. I mean, by 2600 standards, they make the graphics really good. And that kind of bit me in the butt. That created a problem.

And let me explain what I mean, because there were some interesting perceptual things that I discovered and uncovered with ET that I never would have suspected.

Because I went into the game of E.T. thinking, I’m just making a game.

And in games, you have rules and things don’t have to make sense physically, right? When two things touch, they touch, and there’s a consequence and that’s it.

So I had player objects and the object is to avoid the wells and have to navigate. That was the skill part of the game, to move quickly and navigate through some tight spots. And if any part of you touches a well, you fall in.

So, okay, that’s a fine video game rule. But here’s the thing that happened with E.T. that I don’t think has ever happened with another video game.

People looked at the characters and they really bought into the characters

People looked at the characters and they really bought into the characters. They believed the characters because I think the characters were, I mean, they look better than what people are used to seeing on the 2600.

Since they believed in the characters, they believed they were actual characters walking around in a world, not objects on a screen. So when you touch a well with your head, if you’re walking by a well and your shadow touches it, you’re not gonna fall in the well.

But in a video game, when any part of you touches the well, you fall in. Well, people said, that doesn’t make sense. My feet didn’t hit the well, I shouldn’t fall in the well. Well, well, well, you know what I mean?

I did not see this coming…

That was an interesting discovery. This was the first time in my opinion that in a video game, people actually achieved such a suspension of disbelief that they believed what they were dealing with was real, that they expected real world physics to apply in a video game. And that was something I did not see coming.

So if I had one extra day, I would tweak that.

Sascha Block: Wow!

If I had an extra week…

Howard Scott Warshaw: If I had an extra week, I would have cleaned up some of the transitions. I would have made a few things more apparent.

And because I’ll tell you what the biggest problem with E.T. was, okay?

The fundamental rule of video game

The biggest problem with ET was that I violated what I consider to be the fundamental rule of video games. And the fundamental rule of video games goes like this.

It is okay to frustrate a player. It is not okay to disorient a player.

Frustration and disorientation in a video game

And there’s a big difference between frustration and disorientation, right?

Frustration is like, I can see the cookie jar, but I can’t reach it.

I know what I’m trying to do. I just, I can’t seem to figure out how to get there.

That’s frustrating.

Disorientation is I go into the kitchen. I think I’m stepping into the kitchen to get a cookie and I turn out, turns out I’m in the garage and I have no idea how I got there.

And for people who are unfamiliar with the game, if you just pick it up and start playing it, there are too many opportunities for someone to become disoriented, to not understand how they got here from where I was.

When you understand the game, you always get exactly what happened. But for a new player, there’s too much disorientation. And if I had about a week extra, I would have done a few things that would have eliminated the disorientation.

I might also have added some actual, which would have been another first, some verbal instructions. I could have added some extra graphics and put in some text and said, you know, what the objective is or what’s happening now. I could have had some instruction in the game. That would have been really helpful.

If I would have had an extra month or more…

If I would have had an extra month or more, now keep in mind that adding a week, if I would have added a week, that would have been a 20% increase in the schedule.

That’s how short the schedule was. If I would have had an extra month or more, then I would have redesigned the entire game.

I would have done just a different game if I had that much time. Because this game was specifically focused for just something I was able to achieve in five weeks, which I did. And to this day, I’m still very proud of E.T. Even though people consider it to be the worst video game of all time, I still consider it a tremendous achievement.

Sascha Block: You know that all fans of Atari love you and that no one blames you for this games. And if we reflect the time scales of software project nowadays, you did more than an amazing job. There’s so much behind it. This is unbelievable. And people who are able to write binary code, they are that rare, they are simply genius. 

Howard Scott Warshaw: Well, thank you. That’s very kind of you to say.

Sascha Block: It’s simply true because it’s my day-to-day work and I would not leave the game topic right now, but I want clearly to say that software projects nowadays take much more time. And many problems are related to communication, not to innovation or something. I think communication is a big pain point. But let’s move to innovations. Are there any innovations from the Atari area that you still consider relevant today? 

Howard Scott Warshaw: Let’s see. Innovations from the Atari era that are still relevant today. So I am a psychotherapist now. Okay, in fact, how I went from being a programmer to a psychotherapist has covered very clearly in my book, “Once Upon Atari.” But as a psych, the reason I bring this up now is because in psychotherapy, you know, there’s Zygman Freud who was considered the father of psychotherapy.

It all about gaming culture

He was the first person to suggest there’s such a thing as a talking cure. The idea that talking and having a conversation with someone can actually influence their physical health and well-being. And so there are almost no techniques or things that Freud developed that are still in use today, right? But everything that is going on today in psychotherapy is derived from Freud’s original work and from the work of his immediate disciples, okay?

So Atari to the video games industry, although there isn’t Atari today, we’re talking about the original Atari, you know, the Atari of the ’70s and early ’80s.

There aren’t many things that we did at Atari that are still in use today. There’s a few, but everything that’s done today is a direct descendant.

You can trace its lineage back to Atari. I’ll tell you a few things that are still in use today.

The idea of three lives invented at Atari

The idea of three lives, I think that was invented at Atari, right? The idea of a backstory, I did Yar’s Revenge. That was my first game and Yar’s Revenge did set a number of standards that became industry standards that still exist today.

You wouldn’t do a game without a backstory…

Because a backstory, now you wouldn’t do a game without a backstory. In fact, the story is a major element of a game today. I invented the backstory. I was the first person to actually create a whole elaborate backstory motivating the action of the game.

I was the first person to do a full screen explosion. The idea of a big payoff when you really achieve something. I was the first person to have done that. I think I was one of the first people to have a death sequence of any consequence.

Separating score from on-screen action

And I was also one of the first people to separate score from on-screen action, okay?

Which is another thing. A lot of games now, you don’t see score on the screen, right? You see your status, but score takes on a different meaning. Because games, the pseudo adventure games and things like that, how are you measuring it?

Well, you wanna complete the game, but what does score mean? The idea of divorcing score from play and not making it a main feature on the screen. I think I was the first to do that also.

Adventures have been invented as fundamentally different and creative game

Nice. Except for adventure.

There was a lot of things. Adventure was a fundamentally different and creative game because it introduced the whole concept of graphic interaction with things with a different goal other than high score. So some of these, there are game concepts, there are game constructs that are used, still in use today that absolutely were developed at Atari.

But the vast majority of stuff that was created at Atari, you don’t see that anymore in games, but you see the elaboration of them that make, the thing, everything that makes a 2600 game today look so primitive is a legacy of Atari, right?

You know, if people hadn’t kept pushing forward, Atari made video gaming omnipresent in the world, right? There were video game systems before Atari, but video games did not become a phenomenon in the world until Atari. So the idea that video games exist is not Atari.

The idea that video games are an integral part of our culture that is now just a part of life that everyone acknowledges, understands, and you don’t have to play, but you’re aware of them.

Everybody knows what a Pac-Man is!

Everybody knows what a Pac-Man is. For sure. Right? And that was Atari.

Sascha Block: Yeah, unforgettable.

How do you deal with criticism and what can today’s developers learn from the failures of the past?

Sascha Block: How do you deal with criticism and what can today’s developers learn from the failures of the past?

Howard Scott Warshaw: That’s a great question for a game developer who has become a therapist. How do I deal with criticism? For me, it’s humor. That’s the best way to deal with criticism. That and to remember that everyone is entitled to their opinion. And opinions are not facts, okay? And I think that’s a very important lesson that people could learn today, is that there’s a difference between opinion and fact. When someone shows me a bug in a game, that’s a fact. And I accept that. And if I can fix it, I fix it, or I just acknowledge it. When someone tells me that.

Sascha Block: That’s a great point of view. It’s amazing. 

Howard Scott Warshaw: It is. It’s a very important point of my opinion today. Yeah, definitely. So facts are facts.

But when someone tells me they like or don’t like my game, well, that’s an opinion. And I can respect that opinion. I don’t have to agree with the opinion, but I can respect the opinion because that’s their experience they’re reporting to me.

Sascha Block: That’s smart.

Howard Scott Warshaw: Now, what’s interesting about for me, in my experience with E.T. in particular, is a lot of people love to come up to me and tell me how much they hate E.T. ’cause E.T. is such a horrible game.

Have you ever played the game?

And the one thing I always ask, I never argue with people about that, but I do ask them this question. I do say, have you ever played the game? And you’d be amazed how many people wanna tell me it’s a horrible game, but have never played it. So those opinions I just get rid of. I ignore it. I do ignore those opinions because those aren’t opinions. That’s just gossip, right? These are people who don’t understand. Their opinion is not based on any experience because I respect opinions that are based on personal experience.

Sascha Block: Well-founded opinions based on real experience. That makes sense.

Howard Scott Warshaw: Now, the idea that E.T. is the worst game of all time, people have debated that for decades. My personal opinion is that I prefer it is. I prefer when people do identify E.T. as the worst game of all time, right?

Because I also did YARS Revenge, which is frequently cited as one of the best games of all time.

So as long as E.T. is the worst game of all time, that makes me have, I have the greatest range of any game designer in history. And I’m very proud of that. You can rightly be. And that’s how you deal with criticism.

Sascha Block: Excellent. It’s a great point of view, really. How do you see the future of game development? Are there any trends or technologies that are particularly exciting from your point of view?

Howard Scott Warshaw: So those are two separate questions. One is what are game development trends and what is technology that’s gonna be exciting to me? ‘Cause to me, those are two different things.

One of the thing, another thing I go into in my once upon Atari book is how Atari, the legacy of technology that Atari has brought to our entire planet, right, to the world.

Because, you know, innovation that you see in CGI and computer generated imagery and movies, sourced originally in video games. VR and AR, you know, virtual reality and augmented reality.

Both things that were sourced from video games, that we were, some of which we were actually working on at Atari originally.

You do see technologies that are based from video games that go on to make huge contributions in other areas. And that’s because simulation is one of the, is the essence of video games, right?

A video game is a simulation of an environment

A video game is a simulation of an environment that you can then play with it. But to do that, first you have to simulate an environment. And as the capacity for simulation has advanced, it’s taken on real world applications, right?

The kinds of technologies that have been developed in video games are used in training.

They’re used in education. They’re used in achievement, in production, in service provision. There’s so many things you can do.

And VR, virtual reality is a video game technology that a lot of people are really excited about because it looks sexy and you go into a different world and here’s all this stuff happening.

But I think that augmented reality, AR, is a game technology that will be the, I think this is the technology that’s going to have the biggest impact on the world.

And I say that because when you can put on a pair of glasses and you can open up the hood of your car and you can look at the engine and it will show you each piece. And what it is.

And if you want to make a change, it’ll tell you, pick up this tool, use it this way in this place and it’ll show you. You can show you graphically exactly what to do. It can make people reasonable car mechanics. It can make people expert chefs, right?

There’s a lot of things that you could do. You could fly an airplane, right? Imagine someone, a plane, the pilot goes sick and now what are we going to do? Somebody needs to fly the plane.

If someone had augmented reality glasses, they could put them on. And if it was programmed for this plane, you could look around the board and it would tell you what to do to pull the stick back, to push this thing forward, to hit this button, to watch these gauges, all of that stuff.

The mixture of augmented reality and AI is this ongoing revolution and we arrive in the middle of it

When you mix AR and AI, what you’re doing is you’re taking, you’re making more people more capable to do more things in the world. That’s an amazing contribution to humanity.

Sascha Block: Yeah, I agree. The mixture of augmented reality and AI is this ongoing revolution and we arrive in the middle of it.

Howard Scott Warshaw: Cause we’ve got a number of things going on today that are not exactly contributions to humanity.

In fact, they might be threats to humanity, but on the other side of it, there are amazing contributions to reality going on in our world right now. So whether we’re going to advance or crumble is a real question these days, but you could see it going either way.

And one of the reasons there’s an upside in the world today is all sourced from technology that was developed in video games. How’s that?

Sascha Block: Yeah, but take it for sure. Your games are timeless and they have branded more than generations till today. And even upon this, your games are even part of the virtual reality and who speaks about metaverse right now? Absolutely no one at the moment. But what advice would you give to aspiring game developers?

My advice for aspiring game developers

Howard Scott Warshaw:  Well, my advice for aspiring game developers is take heart and have heart because it’s a brutal industry.

Video game, the video game industry is first and foremost an entertainment industry.

And the hallmark of any entertainment industry is the idea that you’re gonna have to pay your dues and you’re gonna have to give everything to the pursuit of this career before the career is likely to mature and develop.

And so you’re gonna face failure, you’re gonna have face tremendous adversity, you’re gonna have to give up your life on some levels because people will demand it of you because you want, there’s so many people lining up at the door to get in, they just demand more and more and more of people and the people who can’t stand it fall away and there’s five more people to come in and take their place.

So you’ve gotta be prepared to stay the course, to really give everything and hang in there and keep going and start to cultivate and develop the experience.

If you have some talent and you have the perseverance to ride out the storm, you can make it in video games. And when you put out a video game, when there’s a game that’s huge, that sells 100 million copies and your name is in the credits for it, that’s a pretty cool feeling. And that’s the thing that a lot of people are chasing. And also there’s the knowing that the work and the sweat that you put in is actually improving the lives of people.

Game development is making millions and millions of people happy and they’re enjoying the experience of playing your game

It is making millions and millions of people happy and they’re enjoying the experience of playing your game. That’s a wonderful feeling to be able to carry with you. So I encourage anyone who really wants to seek that to go ahead and pursue it, but know that you’re really going to have to pay some dues to get in there. So don’t be surprised when that happens.

Before we wrap up, I want to remind our listeners about Howard’s book, Once Upon Atari, How I Made History by Killing an Industry. It’s a fascinating read that provides us an in-depth look at the golden age of Atari and Howard’s role in shaping the video game industry. Make sure to check it out.

Sascha Block: Thank you so much, Howard, for joining us today and sharing your incredible journey and insight. It was an honor to have you on my Rock the Prototype podcast. It is a really great interview with lots of insights and ideas of importance for more than decades. So thanks again, Howard. 

Howard Scott Warshaw: Well, Sascha, the honor was mine to be on the Rock the Prototype podcast. That’s just huge for me. So I’m really, I’m honored to be here and good questions. It was a good time. I really enjoyed talking with you.

Sascha Block: Thank you. Thanks again, Howard. And farewell. We look forward to seeing what you do next. 

Howard Scott Warshaw: Excellent. Well, one thing you can be looking for is there may be a actual New Yars Revenge sequel coming up from Atari within the next year or two that I will design. I will design.

Sascha Block: Wow. That’s amazing. Did you make the announcement elsewhere?

Howard Scott Warshaw: No, I’m just teasing it right here. I just wanted to give you a shout out. This is not a guaranteed for sure thing, but it looks very promising. So I’m excited about that. I thought your listeners might want to hear about that.

Sascha Block: I’m pretty, pretty proud. And I am absolutely sure that there will be lots of fans that will grab this game for sure. Cool. You’re quite welcome. Thank you. Thank you, Howard.

This was a really cool interview. Thanks a lot. As we wrap up this Atari special episode, I’d like to highlight one really important takeaway from our conversation with Howard Scott Warshaw. The critical role of excellent requirements in both game development and software development. Whether it’s creating an iconic game like Yar’s Revenge or developing cutting edge software, having clear and well-defined requirements is essential for success.

Thank you for joining us today.

We hope you found this episode as inspiring and insightful as we did. Make sure to stay tuned for our next episode where we continue exploring the fascinating world of innovation and development.

And don’t forget to keep an eye out for Howard’s announced sequel to Yars Revenge.

Until then, keep dreaming, keep developing, and we’ll meet you in the next episode of our Rock the Protocol podcast.

Take care and don’t miss our next  Rock the Prototype podcast episode, your Sascha Block.