Howard Scott Warshaw

United States · Born 1957 · Atari, Inc. · Game Designer, Programmer

The Atari programmer behind Yars' Revenge, Raiders of the Lost Ark and E.T. — the last made in five weeks and later blamed for the 1983 crash — who became a psychotherapist.

Howard Scott Warshaw was born in Colorado on 30 July 1957 and graduated from Tulane University in mathematics and economics. After working as a systems engineer at Hewlett-Packard he joined Atari in 1981. His first game, Yars' Revenge (1982), began as an assignment to port the arcade game Star Castle; Warshaw reworked it into an original game, and it became one of the best-regarded games on the Atari 2600 and the first to credit its programmer publicly. Raiders of the Lost Ark (1982) was a critical and commercial success. His third game, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982), had to go from concept to finished cartridge in five weeks to reach shops for Christmas; it was poorly received, Atari lost heavily on it, and it became a symbol of the video game crash. Warshaw left Atari before finishing Saboteur. He later made documentaries, including Once Upon Atari, and in 2012 became a licensed psychotherapist in California. In 2013 the Museum of Modern Art added Yars' Revenge to its video game collection.