Hitting the Books: Why we haven't made the 'Citizen Kane' of gaming
Steven Spielberg's wholesome sci-fi classic, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, became a cultural touchstone following its release in 1982. The film's hastily-developed (as in, "you have five weeks to get this to market") Atari 2600 tie-in game became a cultural touchstone for entirely different reasons.
In his new book, The Stuff Games Are Made Of, experimental game maker and assistant professor in design and computation arts at Concordia University in Montreal, Pippin Barr deconstructs the game design process using an octet of his own previous projects to shed light on specific aspects of how games could better be put together. In the excerpt below, Dr. Barr muses in what makes good cinema versus games and why the storytelling goals of those two mediums may not necessarily align.
Excerpted from The Stuff Games Are Made Ofby Pippin Barr. Reprinted with permission from The MIT Press. Copyright 2023.
In the Atari 2600 video game version of the film E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (Spielberg 1982), also called E. T. the Extra-Terrestrial (Atari 1982), the defining experience is falling into a pit. It’s cruelly fitting, then, that hundreds of thousands of the game’s physical cartridges were buried in a landfill in 1983. Why? It was one of the most spectacular failures in video game history. Why? It’s often put front and center as the worst game of all time. Why? Well, when you play it, you keep falling into a pit, among other things ...
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But was the video game E.T. so terrible? In many ways it
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