There is not much more to say. Iron Man directly entered the chart-topping mode, dominating all movie charts for almost the entire month of August. Media discussions about Iron Man were no longer about whether it could reach $200 million in box office revenue, but whether its global box office could break $600 million.
Many media outlets engaged in heated discussions about this, seemingly forgetting that just two or three weeks prior, their main concern was whether Jiangnan Group had stolen US mobile phone technology.
Oh, and there was also the news about Atari's revival.
Atari's revival had been big news a few weeks ago, but it soon seemed to fall into silence. It was as if Atari's revival was just a piece of news, with no other developments. Currently, the main focus of all news media was still the movie Iron Man, which seemed destined to be recorded in US film history.
Some even found an interesting Easter egg in the movie, which made headlines in the news media.
This Easter egg appeared in the early part of the movie, when Iron Man Stark was trapped in the base of an armed organization. There was a scene where Stark was playing a game on his phone while simultaneously building armor.
The scene itself was not problematic; it was meant to showcase Stark's superb scientific research capabilities and optimistic mindset.
However, some viewers who had watched the movie multiple times discovered a humorous detail: the phone Stark was playing with was none other than the very popular Tianxing 5 phone.
And the game running on that phone screen was "E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial," the very game that had led to Atari's downfall.
In a sense, this was also a game that had entered history, at least among the many games Atari released, no game surpassed the fame of "E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial."
To understand this, we need to go back to 1983.
In 1982, the movie "E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial" was a huge success, achieving unbelievable box office results at the time. The "ugly yet cute" alien E.T. was the most popular character back then and remains one of the most famous alien images to this day.
In short, no American in that era did not know about E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial.
Atari saw this business opportunity and reported to its parent company, Warner Communications, stating that a video game related to E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial would surely be a bestseller.
Warner was also very confident about this. They began negotiations with Universal Pictures to obtain the exclusive game adaptation rights for the movie "E.T."
Originally, the negotiation for the adaptation rights was completed in July. Universal Pictures even stated in its quarterly financial report that the game rights had been sold.
However, the actual situation was that problems arose during the copyright negotiations. Both parties had agreed on a purchase price of $10 million, but Warner Communications underwent a change in management. The new executives believed that $10 million was too low and that the game rights could be sold for a higher price.
The problem was that a contract had already been signed. Atari had begun promoting content related to the E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial game in July, even informing all users that the game would be released before the Christmas holidays in December.
Christmas was the period of peak consumer spending for Americans, and also a time when people bought Christmas gifts for their children. Atari's promotion suggested that giving children a game based on E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial would be the best Christmas gift, eliminating the need to rack one's brain for other ideas.
As a result, Universal Pictures suddenly tore up the contract that had not yet been signed and demanded that negotiations restart. Atari naturally could not accept this situation, and the two parties began to engage in various disputes and quibbles.
However, from the very beginning of this dispute, Warner Communications was at a significant disadvantage. This was because their promotion had already been rolled out. Children all over America knew that a game based on E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial would be released for Christmas, and everyone was looking forward to it.
Now, if they were told that the game was canceled, Atari would likely be severely criticized.
Finally, in early October, Atari compromised and purchased the game adaptation rights for E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial for $25 million.
However, a very important issue was placed before Atari's senior management: there were only six weeks left until the Christmas holiday. This was far from a normal game development cycle.
Why six weeks?
From October 1st to December 24th, there are actually nearly 11 weeks.
This is because after the game is developed, it needs to be burned onto cartridges, which also takes time.
At the same time, Atari's ambition was immense. They planned to produce 4 million game cartridges for the first batch of sales.
The burning of 4 million cartridges would take a very long time. In addition, there was also distribution, marketing, and other aspects that required time. Therefore, the game development time was compressed to just six weeks.
So, they either had to choose to postpone the game's release date or rush the product in six weeks.
A normal person would likely choose the former, but a competent capitalist would choose the latter.
After all, if they postponed the release now, they would offend the eager customers. Second, they would lose the most important consumption period, the Christmas season. Most importantly, if they broke their promise after purchasing the rights, why would they have spent $25 million?
Wouldn't it be better to just break the promise and not spend the money?
Therefore, Atari made a decision that appeared very foolish but was actually the only correct answer from their perspective: to create a game in six weeks.
If there was anything worse than this, it was that during these six weeks, there was only one actual developer.
Atari had always been very resistant to third-party game developers, with all games being developed in-house. However, Atari's ambitions were huge, and they developed many games, but the benefits shared with employees were very small.
As a result, many Atari programmers gradually resigned.
In 1979, an incident occurred where four Atari employees resigned and founded a company called Activision.
This company later developed famous games like "Call of Duty" and "Prototype" and later merged with Sierra and Blizzard to become the well-known Activision Blizzard.
In 1979, these four former Atari employees did not have any dreams; they chose to clone their old employer's games to start their business and obtain substantial profits by selling pirated copies.
Atari was very angry about this and sued Activision. However, because there were no detailed laws at the time to regulate third-party copyright issues, Atari's lawsuit ended in a draw, and they were forced to settle with the other party.
Then it was over. A large number of Atari employees saw that this approach did not have any consequences, so they discovered a way to make money. They all left the company in droves, emulating them, developing their own games, selling pirated copies, and keeping all the profits. Wasn't this much better than receiving a meager fixed salary at Atari?
The result was that Atari lost over 60% of its employees throughout 1983. The new employees, on the other hand, could not quickly master game development skills. Even Atari itself was somewhat reluctant to recruit new employees, fearing that these new employees would become those damn third-party pirates after mastering the technology.
This directly led to an extreme shortage of employees at Atari. Almost everyone had two to three games to work on, so allowing a programmer to work alone for six weeks to produce a game was considered top-tier treatment at Atari.
In summary, when so many factors converged, it was inevitable that E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial would turn out to be so bad.
Of course, many players in later generations would still defend the game, saying that it was actually quite fun and an early example of open-world games because all the terrain in the game was randomly generated, and no two maps were identical.
This sounds very good, but the entire game content was simply controlling a pixelated monster, dodging the pursuit of two NPCs, and searching for three parts in hundreds of ever-changing maps.
Once all three parts were found, one could summon a spaceship, escape Earth, and complete the game.
If this were just an ordinary game, there would be no problem; it would be normal game quality.
But if this was a game for which $25 million in copyright fees were paid, over $5 million was spent on advertising, and it carried the Christmas dreams of tens of millions of children.
Yet, this game contained absolutely no elements related to the movie "E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial." The only connection was that the protagonist was E.T. However, the problem was that this alien in the game not only didn't look like E.T. but also looked like a piece of dog feces, which was very awkward.
Well, "dog feces" meant literally, it really looked like dog feces.
Although E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial sold 2.6 million cartridges, the return rate was as high as 800,000. Out of the 4 million cartridges produced, 2.8 million remained unsold, becoming inventory.
This caused Atari's financial statements to show a loss for the first time. Subsequently, its reputation plummeted to the bottom, followed by years of losses, and it eventually died out in the early 1990s.
Of course, in the eyes of economists in later generations, no single game could truly destroy Atari. The fundamental reason for its demise was the rampant piracy in the gaming environment at the time, with all sorts of reskinned garbage games appearing endlessly, greatly disappointing passionate gamers.
If Atari had pulled itself together and ensured the quality of games sold through its official channels, this would have been an opportunity to dominate the market.
However, Atari itself began to slack off, only pursuing various marketing strategies, and paying no attention to game quality. They believed that as long as the advertising was good, even garbage could sell at exorbitant prices, and they were ultimately voted with their feet by users who could no longer tolerate it.
And E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial was merely the tipping point that destroyed user trust, as users could not imagine that a game for which Atari had paid $25 million in copyright fees could be so poorly made. This meant that Atari had nothing left to rely on.