During Spout’s coverage of Comic-Con last week, my ears perked up during the Entertainment Weekly: Visionaries panel when Watchmen director Zack Snyder started railing about the disconnect between video games and Hollywood. It’s nice to know that the director of next year’s mega-tentpole hopeful doesn’t want the marketing department at Warner Bros. to rush something craptacular to the waiting masses. Just like Steven Spielberg did in 1983.

Snyder’s best quote to the gaming world was this: “A dialogue needs to be established between filmmakers and game producers. It’s not marketing; it can’t be an afterthought.” It’s doubtful he was remembering the E.T. / Atari debacle of 1983, but he definitely lived through it, as did I. In fact, I still remember Christmas morning that year, tearing open the paper on a brand new E.T. video game and slapping the cartridge into the 2600. It might be 25 years later, but I can still recall how bad it was.

Quick to jump on the huge success of E.T. at the theater, Atari (who was owned by Warner Communications) offered Spielberg and Universal Pictures between 20 and 25 million dollars to license the video game rights. That’s about 50 million bucks when adjusted for inflation. So much time was wasted negotiating this deal, however, that once the developers started working they had six weeks to put a game together. Six weeks! I think I had longer to work on my science project in 5th grade.

As you’d expect, the game came out and to use the word “sucked” would be an understatement. 5 million game cartridges were rushed into stores for the holiday season in 1983, and according to Atari’s CEO and president at the time, Ray Kassar, “nearly all of them came back.” Hardly surprising. What is surprising though, is that this game, along with Atari’s lackluster Pac-Man game cart for the 2600, caused the downfall of Atari, and started what some people call the “video game crash of 1983.”

One of the strangest side effects of the E.T. game disaster was the rise of the urban legend that most of these returned games were shipped to the desert and buried in the sand. Not to give future generations something to puzzle over, but so that people wouldn’t “loot them.” You think people are going to loot the five million games that wouldn’t sell? It turned out that this story was actually true, and the “digital Roswell” of buried Atari cartridges actually exists. The video at the top of this post by the Wintergreen is the most musically succinct way of summing up what happened with the E.T. game.

Unfortunately, this hasn’t made Hollywood any smarter when developing games, although it also hasn’t kept Spielberg away from the toybox –– the Boom Blox casual game the he developed for the Wii at Electronic Arts was just released a couple of months ago. So why is there still such an enormous gap between these two worlds? I’m not here to answer the question, because if I could, I’d be working in game development and raking in the dough from my Sex and the City game for the Wii. Rather, I’m just trying to point out some of the many misses and the few hits of these attempts.

It’s heartening that Zack Snyder sees this canyon and is interested in traversing it, especially since he saw the script for the Watchmen game that Warner Bros. was proposing and said “They sent me a script for it. This was the dorkiest thing I’d ever seen in my life, and it’s not cool at all. And it had nothing to do with Watchmen. We tried to rewrite it.” So clearly, marketing departments and studios wanting to have a nice shiny “Watchmen: The Video Game” shrink-wrapped package on store shelves when the movie comes out still haven’t been paying attention.

At least one person can illustrate the gap between games and movies fairly well: Howard Scott Warshaw, who designed both the Raiders of the Lost Ark (which, hey –– I loved playing) and E.T. video games:

“While at Atari I did a lot of work, had a lot of fun, met some fascinating people, made a lot of money, did a pretty fair amount of drugs, got to fly on private jets, negotiate behind closed doors, dabble in corporate adventures, eat in executive dining rooms (although no time was spent in their washrooms) and I even got to work with Steven Spielberg (who is a very cool guy that thinks like a director and sees like a child).”

Clearly, he felt like a little kid getting to play with the adults. But now that gaming is pulling in almost double the money of Hollywood, it’s time for things to start changing.

Kevin Kelly, a contributor to Joystiq, io9, Cinematical, Film School Rejects and countless other weblogs, will be weighing in on the intersection between film and video games every Thursday here on SpoutBlog. Please ask him personal questions, shower him with flattery and/or rip apart his argument in the comments. Game on.