I going to say the unthinkable. ET isn't that bad a game, it's actually quite good for the 2600. There I said it. It's two major problems are:
1) it needed a bit more development time, to sort out some of the more annoying aspects like the pit's etc.
2) The game doesn't really feature any action and it's quite complex. A lot more than other games at the time.
I think kids were weren't ready for it. They wanted some kind of action game with ET and when they didn't get it they lost their s**t.
I would liken it to space war, it was pretty much asteroid and very popular among the University computing students and somebody ended up releasing an arcade version that failed because people found it too hard to play. They didn't stuff like Pong to work up to the complexity.
1) it needed a bit more development time, to sort out some of the more annoying aspects like the pit's etc.
2) The game doesn't really feature any action and it's quite complex. A lot more than other games at the time.
I think kids were weren't ready for it. They wanted some kind of action game with ET and when they didn't get it they lost their s**t.
I would liken it to space war, it was pretty much asteroid and very popular among the University computing students and somebody ended up releasing an arcade version that failed because people found it too hard to play. They didn't stuff like Pong to work up to the complexity.