Robert Smith

Beautiful movie.

Yeah.

was not distributed by Warner Brothers.

It's not distributed by Warner, the company that owns Atari, right?

And Ross, the guy running Warner Brothers, really wants to work with Spielberg.

Of course you want to work with Spielberg.

You're running a movie studio.

You want to work with Spielberg.

And so he thinks that turning E.T.

into a hit game would help entice Spielberg to come work at Warner Brothers.

So he makes this deal with Spielberg in the summer of 82.

First of all, he pays a ton of money to license the game.

And he tells Spielberg, we will have a great version of E.T.

for the Atari 2600 out in time for the Christmas season.

The problem with this is it takes like five or six months to make a new video game.

But to have the game in stores in time to sell it for the Christmas season, this is the summer already.

And they have to, you know, produce the games.

They're going to have to write this game in like five or six weeks instead of five or six months.

And people at Atari are like, no, we can't do it.

You can't make a good game that fast.