E.T. Returns Postmortem(ish) Part 1

Why make a game about a 40 year old Atari 2600 game that everyone hates?

From that Christmas on, I spent the next 20 years amassing a fairly biggish game collection.  After the 2600, I got an NES… then an Intellivision… and a 5200… a 7800… a ColecoVision, Genesis, Master System, Vectrex, SNES, Sega Saturn, Atari 400, Astrocade, Channel F, GameBoy, Sega CD, Microvision, PSX, etc. etc.  At my collecting peak, I had over 1,000 unique games (and this is before the digital era so we’re talking carts and CD-ROMs).  Videogames had become integral and beloved part of my life.  My affair with videogames steered me directly into a career in software engineering and eventually into game design and game development itself.  So, yeah, that Atari 2600 and that first handful of games were DEEPLY impactful on the trajectory of my life.  Thanks Grandma and Grampa!

During that time the World Wide Web became a thing, game collecting exploded, and people actually started researching and writing about game history.  And, of course, we know what became the lay version of E.T.’s role in the 1982/1983 home videogame crash: E.T. was the worst game ever, and it single-handedly destroyed the industry by being such an unforgivable, rotten turd.  Now, I’m not going to go into a big defense here, but I will make two points.

ONE: the videogame crash was a complicated and nuanced event that was certainly not caused by a single game.  If you want to learn more about what actually happened, then I recommend looking into some of Alex Smith’s modern research on videogame history.  In fact, a couple of recent episodes of his They Create Worlds podcast talk extensively about what was happening at Atari and the distribution problems that were central to the crash (check out Atari’s Distribution Nightmare or Atari’s Sinking Ship).

TWO: E.T. is by no means a masterpiece, but if you claim it is "the worst game ever", then you're maybe being a little intellectually dishonest or possibly you just haven’t played many retro or classic games outside of the Pac-Mans and Centipedes.  There's nothing wrong with that.  But if you have some time, I recommend digging into the library of games on the Atari 2600 and giving them a spin.  Is E.T. worse than Amidar or Basic Math or any game by Mythicon or Data Age or Mystique?  Fire up an Odyssey 2, or play some Astrocade titles, or spend a few hours emulating DOS shareware games.  E.T. is definitely NOT the worst game ever.  In fact, I think it's a decent game for its time.  However, E.T. is a game that was based on a MASSIVE movie hit and had similarly MASSIVE expectations that, by most standards, it did NOT reach.  And the pits are dumb.