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.
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.
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.