In 1982 Atari’s own club magazine printed a checklist of every new cartridge the company had released that year. Three of them were the work of one programmer, Howard Scott Warshaw: Yars’ Revenge in May, Raiders of the Lost Ark in November and E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial in December. The first became one of the best-selling games on the Atari 2600. The last, written in about five weeks, became the best-known symbol of the 1983 video game crash. Warshaw has spent the decades since making films about Atari, writing about game design and, since 2012, working as a psychotherapist.
Fast facts
- Born: 30 July 1957; grew up in New Jersey.
- Education: economics at Tulane University in New Orleans, then a master’s degree in computer engineering.
- At Atari: January 1981 to 1984.
- Games: Yars’ Revenge (1982), Raiders of the Lost Ark (1982), E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982); Saboteur, unfinished when he left.
- Later: the documentary series Once Upon Atari; 3DO in the late 1990s; licensed marriage and family therapist in California from 2012; the memoir Once Upon Atari: How I Made History by Killing an Industry.
From Hewlett-Packard to Atari
Warshaw told Retro Gamer that he avoided computers at school in New Jersey and took his first computer class reluctantly, as part of an economics degree, then finished the whole semester’s work in days. He went on to a master’s in computer engineering and a programming job at Hewlett-Packard, which bored him. “I was really bored at HP,” he told ClassicGamer Magazine in 2000. A colleague’s wife worked at Atari and thought he would fit in there.
Atari at first turned him down. He recalled that they thought him “too straight” for the place, and he took a pay cut to get in. Edge dates his start to January 1981. What he found was, in his words to ClassicGamer, “the most fun place I ever worked”: programmers who played bocce with lemons in the corridors, total creative freedom, “as long as we kept the games coming out”.
Yars’ Revenge
His first assignment was a 2600 version of the arcade game Star Castle. Warshaw decided that a straight conversion “would really not translate well to the VCS at all”, so he took Star Castle apart, kept the parts that worked, and built a different game around them. The player’s Yar, an insect, eats away at a shield to expose the Qotile, then calls up the Zorlon Cannon from the left edge of the screen to fire at it. He wanted a game with movement on both axes at once, and a full-screen explosion “because I wanted there to be a big pay-off”.
The working title was Time Freeze. Warshaw disliked it and wrote his own story, packed with the cartridge as a comic book. He named the insects Yars after Atari’s chief executive, Ray Kassar: “Yar” is “Ray” backwards, and the game’s full title, “The Yarian Revenge of the Razak Solar System”, hides “Kassar” backwards too.
Electronic Games reviewed it in October 1982 as “a potential blockbuster that misses greatness by an eyelash”. The sound was excellent and the comic book gave the action a story, but the game had only one objective, repeated indefinitely, and “in this regard, Yar is far too static”. It sold well all the same: Edge and Retro Gamer have both described it as the best-selling original game for the VCS, as opposed to an arcade conversion or a licence.
It also carried Warshaw’s initials. Atari did not credit its programmers on its boxes, and in its September–October 1982 issue Atari Age, Atari’s club magazine, told readers that “HSW” were “the initials of the programmer who invented and designed the game”, and that the key to finding them was in the instruction book. That month a reader wrote to Electronic Games that “six letters — HSWWSH — appear on the scoring screen when it’s found”: his initials forwards and backwards. The British magazine TV Gamer later reported initials in his Raiders and E.T. as well.
Raiders of the Lost Ark
For his second game Warshaw wanted “to make the biggest adventure game possible for the VCS. Not just the most screens, but the most different scenarios and the most immersive environment”. He respected Warren Robinett’s Adventure but did not want simply to repeat it. His Raiders of the Lost Ark sends Indiana Jones in search of the Ark of the Covenant through 13 locations, with snakes, black-market sheiks and hidden areas, and it uses both joysticks at once: one to move Indy, the other to work his inventory.
He flew to Los Angeles to show the game to Steven Spielberg, who had directed the film. To get into character he carried a ten-foot bullwhip around Atari’s offices and cracked it behind people’s backs. “People hated it,” he said. The game took him eight months, he said in 2000. It came out in November 1982, and both ClassicGamer and Edge call it his second million-seller.
E.T.
The meeting with Spielberg led to E.T. After Atari’s licence deal for the film was done at the end of July 1982, the game had to be finished by 1 September to be made in time for Christmas. “That left you with five weeks to do the whole game,” Warshaw said. No one else would take the job. He had a development system moved into his house and worked almost continuously. The E.T. entry tells the story of the game, its reviews and the landfill.
He looked back on it in 2012 with some humour: “I submitted a complete, non-trivial game on time, so in that sense it was a success. Many didn’t enjoy playing it; so on that level it was a failure. It sold well over a million — a success! It needed to sell seven million to make money — a failure!”
His last Atari game, Saboteur, was an original shooter that he told Retro Gamer was 95 per cent complete when Atari bought the licence for the television series The A-Team and asked him to rework it. Then, in his words, “Atari imploded”. He left in 1984. Saboteur was eventually released decades later on one of the Atari Flashback plug-and-play consoles.
After Atari
Over the next fifteen years Warshaw worked in real estate, industrial robotics, writing, teaching and photography. By the late 1990s he was making videos. Once Upon Atari was a four-part documentary in which he interviewed the programmers he had worked with; he made the last episode, “The Agony and the Ecstasy”, first, and Digital Press reviewed it in 1997. By 2000 he was back in games at 3DO, which he later described to Retro Gamer as “a reality crash”: the company closed and left him and others owed wages.
In 2000 he told ClassicGamer that he had no personal knowledge of the story about Atari burying E.T. cartridges in the desert: “I’ve never seen any pictures. I’ve never been there myself.” In April 2014 he was at the Alamogordo landfill in New Mexico when a documentary crew for the film Atari: Game Over and a team of archaeologists dug the site. He described the day in Wireframe, signing the fans’ E.T. memorabilia and meeting the novelist Ernest Cline, who arrived in a DeLorean.
He had meanwhile trained as a psychotherapist, and on 14 November 2012 he became a licensed marriage and family therapist in California, with a practice in Los Altos. He calls himself “the Silicon Valley Therapist” and works with engineers and people in high-pressure technology jobs. In the first issue of Wireframe, in 2018, where he began a long-running column on game design, he wrote that becoming a psychotherapist was “the first thing I’ve found since Atari that’s given me the depth of joy and satisfaction I first experienced making video games”. His memoir, Once Upon Atari: How I Made History by Killing an Industry, appeared in 2020, with a second book, Inspired Therapist.
He has long treated the charge that he caused the crash as a joke. “To think I single-handedly toppled a billion dollar industry just cracks me up,” he told Retro Gamer.
Sources
- Atari Age vol. 1 no. 3, September–October 1982: letters page (“HSW” as the programmer’s initials, clue in the instruction book).
- Atari Age vol. 1 no. 4, November–December 1982: checklist of Atari’s 1982 cartridges (Yars’ Revenge May, Raiders of the Lost Ark November, E.T. December).
- Electronic Games vol. 1 no. 8, October 1982: review of Yars’ Revenge, p. 62; readers’ letters (“HSWWSH”).
- Electronic Games 1983 Software Encyclopedia: Yars’ Revenge and its comic book.
- Video Games vol. 1 no. 5, February 1983, p. 34: Warshaw on meeting Spielberg to show him Raiders.
- Video Games Player vol. 1 no. 1, September 1982: Atari designers’ names kept off its boxes.
- TV Gamer, December 1983: hidden initials in Yars’ Revenge, Raiders and E.T.
- Digital Press issue 33, September 1997: review of Once Upon Atari, “The Agony and the Ecstasy”.
- ClassicGamer Magazine vol. 1 no. 2, Winter 2000, pp. 35–37, Darrin Powell, “Howard’s Revenge”: New Jersey and New Orleans, Hewlett-Packard, life at Atari, Star Castle, Time Freeze, Ray Kassar, Raiders and the bullwhip, eight months, second million-seller, five weeks, leaving in 1984, later jobs, Once Upon Atari, 3DO, the burial story; p. 7 (Once Upon Atari).
- Hyper issue 127, May 2004: master’s degree in computer engineering, Hewlett-Packard, pay cut.
- Edge issue 160, March 2006, “The making of ET”: joining Atari in January 1981; Yars’ Revenge as the best-selling original VCS game; Raiders as his second million-seller; the licence finalised in late July 1982.
- Retro Gamer, The Atari Book (2012), pp. 96–98: date of birth; schooling in New Jersey and the economics degree; “too straight”; Raiders’ 13 locations and two joysticks; Yars’ Revenge as the biggest-selling original VCS title and the hidden HSW; E.T.’s sales; Saboteur and The A-Team; 3DO; “single-handedly toppled”.
- Howard Scott Warshaw, “The principles of game design”, Wireframe issue 1, November 2018: his games and becoming a psychotherapist.
- Howard Scott Warshaw, “The principles of game design”, Wireframe issue 43, September 2020, pp. 46–47: the April 2014 Alamogordo dig and Atari: Game Over.
- Wireframe issue 48, February 2021: author note (“His new book, Once Upon Atari: How I Made History by Killing an Industry, is out now”).
- Howard Scott Warshaw, MA, ME, LMFT, hswarshaw.com (web, secondary): licensed marriage and family therapist, CA licence 52529, “The Silicon Valley Therapist”. http://hswarshaw.com/wordpress/
- Jack Yarwood, “Why Atari Legend Howard Scott Warshaw Swapped A Career In Video Games For Psychotherapy”, Time Extension, 30 August 2023 (web, secondary): training from 2008, private practice from 2012, work with engineers. https://www.timeextension.com/features/why-atari-legend-howard-scott-warshaw-swapped-a-career-in-video-games-for-psychotherapy
- “Howard Scott Warshaw”, Wikipedia (web, secondary): date of birth, Tulane University, licensed on 14 November 2012, Los Altos practice, Inspired Therapist and Once Upon Atari (2020). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_Scott_Warshaw