t’s one of the most hallowed tales in video game history: A game so bad that hundreds of thousands of copies ended up buried in a desert somewhere in New Mexico. So goes the legend of Atari’s E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, but that’s only half the tale. After the box office success of Steven Spielberg’s film, Atari spent more than $20 million to purchase the rights to make an E.T. video game. Unfortunately, after all the financial haggling, the company had less than six weeks to develop the game to meet its Christmas deadline. The fact that one man – Yar’s Revenge creator Howard Scott Warshaw – developed the game so quickly casts this story in a slightly different light. Good intentions don’t always result in good games, and sometimes the deck is stacked against developers. But why is that? Why is it so difficult to make a good game? We polled experts from across the industry to talk about why good games sometimes go bad.

Time

"The problem isn’t with limited time, it’s with trying to do too much in too little time, or not properly accounting for problems that will arise and eat up your time unexpectedly.
If anything, having to give too many demos, regardless of whether it’s to people inside or outside the organization, has a bigger negative impact on game development than most other single events. You’d think they could be anticipated, known, and scheduled properly, but they never are, and they can drop out of the sky and lay waste to a week of productivity here and there throughout the whole development cycle."

Eric Lindstrom
Creative Director, Eidos

"The easy and by-the-book answer is that extreme crunch time comes from not following the plan you made for the time constraints you have, or not making a proper plan for your game with the time constraints you have. Reality is a million times more complicated than a book."

Kim Krogh
Game Director, IO Interactive

"You would prefer to work on a game until it’s done, but more often than not you’re going to have a scope and a budget that’s one tenth of what you’d like to have. The business reality is that time and budget are driving against you. The most successful people in the industry are those who can understand the business and still remain creative."

Mike Mika
Studio Head, Backbone Entertainment