Atari VCS Mini: ET - The worst game ever?

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Published on February 17, 2023 10:15:00 PM ● Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=72dlLIRtT9Y

Game:

E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982)

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E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial is a 1982 adventure video game developed and published by Atari, Inc. for the Atari 2600 and based on the film of the same name. The game's objective is to guide the eponymous character through various screens to collect three pieces of an interplanetary telephone that will allow him to contact his home planet.

The game was designed by Howard Scott Warshaw, who intended it to be an innovative adaptation, and Atari held unrealistic expectations for sales based on the international box-office success of the film. Negotiations for the game rights ended in late July 1982, giving Warshaw just over five weeks to develop the game in time for the 1982 Christmas season. The final release received negative reviews. The game is often cited as one of the worst of all time and one of the biggest commercial failures in video game history. It is cited as a major contributing factor to the video game crash of 1983, and has been frequently referenced and mocked in popular culture as a cautionary tale about the dangers of rushed game development and studio interference.

In what was once deemed only an urban legend, reports from 1983 stated that as a result of overproduction and returns, unsold cartridges were secretly buried in a landfill in Alamogordo, New Mexico, and covered with a layer of concrete. In April 2014, diggers hired to investigate the claim confirmed that the landfill contained several E.T. cartridges, among other games. James Heller, the former Atari manager who was in charge of the burial, was at the excavation and admitted to the Associated Press that 728,000 cartridges of various games (not just E.T.) were buried. Marty Goldberg, co-author of the book Atari Inc.: Business Is Fun, added that the dump was in fact a clearing out of the Texas Atari manufacturing plant's unused cartridge stock of a number of titles, as well as console and computer parts. According to the 2014 documentary Atari: Game Over, only 10% of the approximately 1,300 recovered were E.T. cartridges.

E.T. is an adventure game in which players control the alien E.T. from a top-down perspective. The objective is to collect three pieces of an interplanetary telephone. The pieces are found scattered randomly throughout various pits (also referred to as wells). There is no overall time limit. The player is provided with an on-screen energy bar, which decreases when E.T. performs any actions (including moving, teleporting, or falling into a pit, as well as levitating back to the top). To prevent this, E.T. can collect Reese's Pieces, which are used to restore his energy or, when nine are collected, E.T. can call Elliott to obtain a piece of the telephone, or the player can save the candy pieces for bonus points at the end. After the three phone pieces have been collected, the player must guide E.T. to an area where he can use the phone, which allows him to call his home planet. Once the call is made, a clock appears at the top right of the screen; E.T. has to arrive at the landing zone before it reaches zero. Once E.T. gets to the forest where his ship abandoned him and stands and waits in the designated area for the ship to come, the ship will appear on-screen and take him back to his home planet. Then the game starts over, with the same difficulty level, while changing the location of the telephone pieces. The score obtained during the round is carried over to the next iteration.[ E.T. has three lives and if he dies within those three lives Elliott will come in and revive him. E.T. can get a fourth life if the player finds a geranium in one of the wells. According to the manual, the game ends "when E.T. runs out of energy or when you decide to quit playing".

The game is divided into six environments, each representing a different setting from the film. To accomplish the objective, the player must guide E.T. into the wells. Once all items found in a well are collected, the player must levitate E.T. out of them.[ An icon at the top of each screen represents the current area, each area enabling the player to perform different actions. Antagonists include a scientist who takes E.T. for observation and an FBI agent who chases the alien to confiscate one of the collected telephone pieces, or candy. The game offers diverse difficulty settings that affect the number and speed of humans present, and the conditions needed to accomplish the objective.

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