Poll: Do you like E.T for the Atari 2600?

[Baron von Blitztank]

Indeed Escapists. In light of all these Sonic threads, I feel the need to jump on a bandwagon!
Objectively one of the worst games ever. A game so bad it almost drove the entire medium of videogames into the landfills of New Mexico with it. Does it really deserve the hate? Tell me what you think!
Please justify your answers etcetera, etcetera.

 

[Strelok]

I never owned it, only played it at a friends place. While E.T. was not good, (not nearly as bad as it is made out to be),it also wasn't good enough for me to want my own copy. If you want a truly terrible game of that generation look at the 2600 arcade port of Pac-Man, yikes, that was awful. It looked terrible, played terrible, was just all around a bad experience. Now that one I did get, and what a waste of a gift it was. Don't know if this was ever confirmed, but Pac-Man was said to be the real reason behind the video game crash of the 80's. As a side note, that whole burying the cartridges in the desert thing was an urban legend. It never happened, why would Atari waste cartridges? They just reused them.

 

[Rawne1980]

Don't you dare bring up a game that almost destroyed the sweet innocence of my child hood mind.

I was young when I got it. It was the 80's, gaming hadn't been around long and we were not prepared for E.T.

On a serious note, what the fuck was it's purpose?

You ran around, fell down holes, collected things that did nothing and got chased by a creepy pixel man THAT WAS IT. There was no aim, nothing happened, there was no end ...... WHY ATARI, WHYYYYYYYY.

 

[TheBelgianGuy]

You ran around, fell down holes, collected things that did nothing and got chased by a creepy pixel man THAT WAS IT. There was no aim, nothing happened, there was no end ...... WHY ATARI, WHYYYYYYYY.

From what I heard, they asked this guy to start working on the game on July 27th, and he had to finish it on September 1st in that same year, so they had time to make enough copies for Christmas. So in basically one month, he also had to meet with Spielberg and work on the design concept, they skipped playtesting,...

 

[malestrithe]

Indeed Escapists. In light of all these Sonic threads, I feel the need to jump on a bandwagon!
Objectively one of the worst games ever. A game so bad it almost drove the entire medium of videogames into the landfills of New Mexico with it. Does it really deserve the hate? Tell me what you think!
Please justify your answers etcetera, etcetera.

Yes. I've actually played that game and it was not as terrible as most want to make it out to be.

Also, ET and landfills in New Mexico meme began as a throwaway joke from 2005 by an Internet humorist called Soren Bowie. He was commenting on how terrible the game was, when he did not actually play the game at the time. He's later gone back and actually played the game and changed his opinion of it. In all the reports I've seen, the mostly commonly cited town for this landfill dump is Alamogordo, New Mexico. It is chosen because it fits the bill for a small, isolated town. Check the local paper from the time, even the nearest 3 big cities of Santa Fe, Albuquerque, and Las Cruces, and there is no mention of such an incident happening.

But he was not far off from what the common practice was at the time. ET had a print run of 5 million units. Egregious compared to today, but typical back then. Heck, Baby Pac-Man had a print run of 7 million units. The problem being the Atari sold about 4 million units, so companies were printing 1-3 million more game units than consoles. This flooded the market with unsold stock and warehouses needed to unload it. There was such a massive surplus of unused product that all toy stores were selling them at 1-2 dollars a piece in late 84. It did not get rid of the excessive amounts of product, so Atari had to physically destroy the rest.

It was not one warehouse in New Mexico that did this. It was all of the warehouses worldwide. They had to because it was not even worth the plastic it was printed on. The rumors to this day is each warehouse is sitting on a layer destroyed game product.

Why does ET get the blame? Timing and circumstance. It was the biggest flop of era and the most well known. But it was hardly atypical.

 

[Savagezion]

Don't you dare bring up a game that almost destroyed the sweet innocence of my child hood mind.

I was young when I got it. It was the 80's, gaming hadn't been around long and we were not prepared for E.T.

On a serious note, what the fuck was it's purpose?

You ran around, fell down holes, collected things that did nothing and got chased by a creepy pixel man THAT WAS IT. There was no aim, nothing happened, there was no end ...... WHY ATARI, WHYYYYYYYY.

Actually, there was but it was terrible design. I didn't know until I watched a YouTube video where a guy beat it. I used to equate it to the Indiana jones game because I could never figure it out either as a kid. I just always put it in, got chased by the snake, and ended up putting it down for a while again. E.T deserves the hate because its design was terrible. Beating the game was an excercise of patience and know how that was never provided or even hinted at. I didn't like it then and don't see any valid defense for it now. It was a bad game even for the Atari.