It’s a good game! It’s misunderstood!
Or so I remembered reading many years ago (almost ten, as it happens).
When trying to find this article, I couldn’t do it because search is incredibly broken now, but with a little help I found it. So here it is.
Still have 3 copies ha, who doesn’t
It was a good game. You just needed to know how to play it. I would beat it routinely as a kid.
The E.T. game being “the worst game” thing is all myth. It was a tremendous flop, but it had nothing to do with game quality. I’d say that 90% of Atari 2600 games were objectively bad and E.T. was amongst the 10% of good ones. They over estimated demand, overhyped it, and sold it during the holidays, which means extended and relaxed return policies. That resulted in too many units manufactured and too many units returned. Thus the landfill full of cartridges.
Source: I was one of the kids that got it for Christmas. It was fine, but wenty minutes later, I was back to Yar’s Revenge.
Well, the landfill isn’t just ET carts. The lack of quality was very much the problem, and yeah it extended across the entire ecosystem for Atari because they let shovelware run rampant when there wasn’t sufficient review platforms/magazines (at least in tbe US where the crash occurred).
This is partly how Nintendo was able to rise so quickly: The Nintendo Seal of Approval and how to get licenced to make games for their system was a huge deal to QA at the time.
I disagree. It was not fine, it was crappy game that was probably most kids first licensed home video game for the biggest movie of the year. Everyone hated it. There is a reason that I somehow ended up with multiple copies of the games. Friends actually left them at my house and no one would admit to the extra game being theirs!
That being said, I don’t think it is the worst game of all time. At most, it is the worst game on the 2600 and even that is a stretch. I’d argue Superman 64 for the N64 is a worse game by all measures.
I’d argue Superman 64 for the N64 is a worse game by all measures.
I’ve spent some unfortunate time with both, and can confirm. Superman 64 is worse by a pretty large margin.
E.T. is genuinely playable, after a needlessly awful learning curve. Superman 64 still continues to suck even for (shudder) players who have put in the necessary time to learn to play it.
Edit: As others have said before: E.T. is a decent game, it’s just a lousy choice for an E.T. tie-in.
Fans of a beloved highly polished film masterpiece about gentle communication and wide eyed exploration discovered the Atari game was a nearly unfinished punishing high stress race against a merciless clock - which frequently abruptly ended any aspiration a player had of discovering anything beyond the same pit they fell into many times before.
I still disagree that it was a decent game, it perhaps could have been if given more time (it was famously made in less than 6 weeks), but building this frustratiing POS on the biggest movie of the day made it a kick in the balls to every excited kid, myself included.
Reminds me of this attempt at fixing some of the issues with ET
http://www.neocomputer.org/projects/et/
I think the most interesting fix is the perspective issue/collision detection problem with the pits.
The article is really well written, if you haven’t enjoyed it yet you should. Maybe in ten years you’ll be thinking about it and trying to find it again.
ET was only slightly different in game play from what is argued to be the BEST game on the Atari 2600, Indiana Jones. It had some annoying things (the pits mostly) but was otherwise the same exact game as something people actually liked. It’s failure is actually kinda weird.
No sane person thinks that Indiana Jones is the best game on the Atari 2600. It was a confusing mess of a game that no one understood. Funny enough, I still have both E.T. and Indiana Jones carts and they still work. You can’t kill pure evil.
It wasn’t so bad if you were a young kid in the 80s. Least my experience. Like what, I supposed to kill the shield of yars revenge again? Well that was more fun but still, needed variety.
That said would I play it again? Fuck no. Course I wouldn’t frost my hair tips again either, or willingly wear neon either.
I think I made it clear I was a kid in the 80s and yes it was very bad. It was the worst game I owned on the Atari and that was the opinion of all of my friends. Of course, I didn’t expect it to be famously bad, and didn’t hear about all of that until the mid 90s with people talking about it on the internet which has blown it out of proportion. It was almost certainly not even the truly worst game on the Atari, but it was the worst and most frustrating game that I played. I’d play Yars Revenge over it any day and I don’t even particularly care for Yars Revenge as it did get very old after a while (2600 games were generally not known for their depth).
As a side note, everyone always focuses on the worst games for Atari, usually E.T., but I mostly try not to think about those. Late in the Atari life, it got some surprisingly decent games that based on the early stuff, you would think impossible on the system. It got very decent ports of Mario Bros and Commando. It got an excellent (for the time) pinball game Midnight Magic, it had a decent wrestling game Title Match Pro Wrestling. These are the games we should be talking about, fuck E.T. forever.
Except for not. E.T. had very bad bugs - the pits were so unmanageable. You would fall in without being near them. You spent half the game floating your way out of them only to fall in again. Biggest trash heap ever made.
I had fun playing it in the mid 80s but I didn’t have a ton of games at the time either. Have a fond memory of it overall (maybe because I liked the movie), and still enjoying video games these days. Don’t think I played the Indiana Jones one to compare though.
I played E.T. relatively recently to remind myself what the fuss was about.
The game plays fine (with average Atari bugginess).
It just stands out as an early huge miss for a movie tie in. Almost nothing about the game feels like the movie, or is particularly anything a fan of the movie would seem likely to enjoy.
I say “almost” because the exploring kind of fits. The same exploring that is constantly frustratingly interrupted by pit falls.
It’s really not that bad of a game, though.
I do see what you’re saying but how I see it, and thinking of all the awful movie tie in games from NES era, ET felt better than average in theme. He had to find the phone pieces and avoid the government agents while wandering in the woods. Not too too different from the movie theme in overall thinking.
Now I’m not saying gameplay was good or anything but think of all the cheesy tie in movie games of the NES era, they’re all some random platformer which sometimes alluded to they had a movie name. Of course there were good ones but best ones I can think of were Duck Tales and Rescue Rangers, not tied to a specific movie or episode. Then you get your Back to the Future has little to do with the actual movie.
they’re all some random platformer which sometimes alluded to they had a movie name.
That’s a good point. E.T. was not alone in this, and had more to do with it’s movie that many games that followed.
