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.