Q&A with Howard Scott Warshaw

Revered for making one of the Atari VCS’ best games (Yars’ Revenge) and unjustly reviled for making a hurried adaptation of E.T. The Extraterrestrial, Howard Scott Warshaw is one of gaming’s prodigious pioneers. We spoke with Warshaw about his early works, life at Atari, as well as an unconventional pitch with Steven Spielberg for the Raiders of the Lost Ark game in our exclusive two-part interview.

Tech-Gaming: Yar’s Revenge was built around the same David and Goliath showdowns as Cinematronics’ Star Castle. I understand you thought a direct Atari VCS adaptation wasn’t viable, so you changed some of the game’s mechanics. Can you walk us through the conceptualization?

Howard Scott Warshaw: Yars’ Revenge was originally assigned as a coin-op conversion of the game. No way was going to work. I mean Star Castle was a vector graphics-based game. There are a lot of things that the Atari VCS can’t do. But what it really can’t do is vector graphic representation. It would have been a disaster- from the organization, the screen layout, and the way everything works. I just felt it would have just been a very unplayable and uninteresting game, especially when you only have 128 bytes of RAM to work with, which is what we had on the VCS.

So, I decided to reorganize the game. I made a proposal to my manager and told him this game was going to suck on the 2600. And I can’t afford to have my first game suck, so I proposed an alternate screen organization, changed some mechanics, and basically redesigned some things that might be more appropriate to the hardware, I was fortunate enough to have him let me run with it, and that’s the game that ultimately went on to become Yars’ Revenge, which kind of left Star Castle in the dust.

T-G: I want to get your opinion on D. Scott Williamson’s version of Star Castle for the Atari VCS.

HSW: I have seen it, and I’ve played it some. Now they have modified versions of cartridges that can support a tremendous amount of memory. You can take graphic techniques that we had used back then only for score kernels and treat them like bitmaps for the screen. And I think there was a lot of that going on in what they presented. So, on that level. It’s not a bad representation of Star Castle, and I would leave it up to players to decide which game they prefer between the two. But they’re very different games at this point and I will still take Yars’ Revenge. The VCS was an extremely challenging platform.

T-G: How so?

HSW: Well, there was no bitmap on the 2600. You were literally controlling the electron gun as it was scanning across the screen. We spent 75% of our processing time updating the electron gun. So, you have to be micro-second accurate with your code, which is all 6502 (the Atari VCS processor) assembly, and then you only have 25% of your time to do things like game logic, collision detection, strategy, and scorekeeping.

You could be very technically astute and still not produce a fun game. That’s the thing about making video games that are different from others sorts of technology. Nobody says, “Boy, this C compiler, it’s so much more fun than my word processor.” You have to add fun to it. You need someone who puts showmanship into it to create something artistic. You have to be an entertainer. You have to be both a technologist and an artist, and [gaming] was the first time I’d encountered that kind of blend, and it spoke to me because I think very much an entertainer in addition to being the technologist. Atari really lit that flame and showed me what could be.

T-G: In your book, you lay down a three-part process: make a splash, create a sensory experience, and break new ground. Is this the template developers should be following?

HSH: Absolutely! Emphasis on the word “should”, of course. But yes, I mean that is important. My first game wasn’t just about making a game. It was about establishing myself as a game maker, which is a different thing to do. There were all kinds of people in the business already. Everyone had to be solid technically, for sure. You had to be able to at least operate the machine and put something on a screen. But beyond that, the people who were successful at Atari always had other things going on. They all had extra skills and different interests. There were carpenters, boat builders, musicians, and artists; everybody had something else that they did.

Some people were straight-down-the-line tech people, and they would tend to do coin-up conversions. Doing a coin-op conversion is a technical challenge, but it’s not as much of a creative challenge.

There are tech-first people and creative-first people. I think I was more of a creative, my approach to working on games wasn’t as just as a programmer. My approach to making games was more like a movie maker, which makes sense because I love movies. But sometimes there are tradeoffs in filmmaking. Sometimes you might not have the budget to actually film a major scene. So, you gather people standing in a room with a fan blowing on them, add some nice lighting, and then you play the sound of a foghorn. And now you have these people who look like they are standing on a pier waving goodbye to a cruise ship. But you don’t have to have a cruise ship, which is a very expensive thing to film.

The same kind of principle goes on in video games. There are ways you can signal things and establish ideas with sound. And that’s what we had to do because we didn’t have much graphic capability on the Atari VCS. You had to come up with really clever ways of enhancing the experience without the powerful visuals and that was that was one of the great challenges. That’s literally how I approached making video games- as a filmmaker as an entertainer. My goals were to make a real big splash and do something that demanded attention. I wanted people to walk by a screen where my game is playing, stop, and ask, “what is that?”, “what is going on?”. I wanted to grab eyeballs and minds.

T-G: There were a lot of unique and very interesting people at Atari. You came in after Warner Communications had purchased Atari and I had always thought the work climate was something along the lines of Warhol’s Factory, where there was a collaborative vibe. And a hot tub….

HSW: Well, the hot tub was very collaborative (laughs). Atari was collegial in a very positive and wacky, weird way. It was an ideal inventive environment because it had the two essential parts that you need in any kind of creative environment. One of those is freedom. We were free to run off and do whatever we wanted in any direction, as long as we delivered the product. The other thing it had was wacky, creative people who are innovators, true innovators.

And those are people with boundary issues, right? They’re not necessarily the people you want to hang out with to have a good time unless your idea of a good time is about breaking conventions and doing weird stuff. Fortunately, that worked for me and Atari was a wonderful place for wacky, offbeat, and creative people, where there was total freedom to exercise and explore and do what we wanted. Now, when you put those two things together, it is like lightning in a bottle. Things will happen spontaneously and the result is all this weird, crazy stuff and that made for fun moments.

T-G: So, it wasn’t competitive? 

HSW: We were constantly making up games, playing games, doing things like that, and it was competitive in the sense that we all liked to win but it was also very collegial in that we were trying to beat each other at something. People would develop clever techniques or very slick approaches to specific issues or problems that we all had, and we’d share that. The group knowledge was constantly growing, and there was a spirit of moving the group forward. Yes, we are all individually responsible for our games. It was a work of authorship and that was a very valuable thing.

T-G: Let’s talk about Raiders of the Lost Ark. How did that become your project?

HSW: You know, when you’re going to make a game for a Steven Spielberg film, you have to get approved by Spielberg; there’s are no two ways around that. So I had finished Yars’ Revenge, and Warner had purchased the rights to Raiders of the Lost Ark. Someone was going to have to do Raiders and several programmers and I were available at the time.

So, they said, “Okay, Howard, you’re gonna have to go fly down to Los Angeles.” I’m in San Jose and I had to fly to LA to interview with Steven Spielberg at Warner Studios to see if I can do a game which was a new experience. I’d never encountered anything like that before, and I had a 9:30AM meeting, so I had to get up at 5:00 in the morning to get on a commercial flight and go through LA rush hour traffic in a cab to get to Warner studios. I made it and I arrived at 9:25AM to find out my meeting was rescheduled to 3:30PM. I spent six hours wandering around Warner Studios unescorted, which for me, was like a dream come true. And then after, I get to meet my idol; I loved his movies.

But meeting your idol isn’t the same as interviewing for a job with them. Especially when the job is an interpretation in another medium. That’s very intimidating. So, I showed him Yars’ Revenge, and he liked the game, and we were having a pleasant talk. And at one point I said to him, “Steven, I just have to say I have their personal theory that you are actually an alien yourself” and asked if he wanted to hear it.

He said, “yes” and I laid the whole thing out about how he’s part of an advanced team. You see, the aliens aren’t going to suddenly show up. They’re going to send in an advance team who will acculturate us. He’s part of the production arm making movies like Close Encounters of the Third Kind, which are seen all over the world. I told him that he was doing a great job and gave him a thumbs up before I left and went back to Atari. The next day I found out that Spielberg approved the project.

Howard Scott Warshaw’s latest book, Once Upon Atari: How I Made History by Killing an Industry is available here. The accompanying documentary, Once Upon Atari, can be purchased here. All black and white photograph was taken by Dave Staugas.