E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (NES) Playthrough
255A playthrough of Khan Games' unlicensed 2014 adventure game for the NES, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial.
If you're American and old enough to remember playing video games in the 80s, there's a pretty good chance that you crossed paths with an Atari ET cartridge at some point. It was everywhere. And since this is YouTube, even if you haven't held an ET cart with your own hands, you're probably still quite aware of its existence. It's not every day that a piece of media gets credited with the collapse of a multi-billion dollar industry, after all.
This NES port of the original 1982 Atari game was created by Kevin Hanley and was initially only sold via order forms that were included with new copies Larry and the Long Look for a Luscious Lover (https://youtu.be/QuKbkl9X4kk), Hanley's NES adaptation of the first Leisure Suit Larry game.
In most ways, it's very similar to the original game. The graphics have been improved slightly (ET is now brown!), a few glitches were fixed, the difficulty options were removed, and a "How to Play" screen can now be accessed from the title screen.
The structure and flow of the game are exactly the same as they were on the Atari. The world is made up of six screens (the forest, Washington, and four areas dotted with pitfalls) that wrap around in a way that suggests that each screen is one face of a cube-shaped planet.
To win, ET has to find the three pieces of the phone, phone home, and meet the mothership at the landing zone. The action button is used to make him run, to fly out of pits, and to activate the icons that are revealed as he wanders around the world. The ? icon will tell you if there is a phone piece hidden in a pit on the current screen, the III icon will scare away FBI agents and scientists, and the talking head icon will summon Elliot who'll give ET extra health in exchange for the Reese's Pieces he's collected.
It's as simple in concept as it is inscrutable without an instruction manual (I played this a ton as a kid and never figured any of it out!), but it's not a bad little game, and it's impressive just how much was packed into an eight kilobyte Atari 2600 cart. The complexity of its design was perhaps a bit too ambitious for the target audience and the hardware, but once you wrap your head around how to play it, ET is a fun way to blow five or ten minutes. The same can be said for this solid NES port. It's not going to make you forget about The Legend of Zelda anytime soon, but it's a neat way to experience one of the most reviled video games of all time.
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