A Crime Against Humanity
Everyone knows the story of ET. 1982 Atari was at the height of it's popularity, when a little movie by Steven Speliberg called ET was capturing the hearts and minds of children all over the world. So it seemed natural to bring ET to the small screen, in a new fad known as Video Games. Fresh off of it's Pac-Man debacal, Atari quickly secured the rights to ET for 25 million and one simple condition: Get the Game out by Christmas. Atari's programmers had only six weeks to develope, write, program and debug the game. The result isn't just the worst video game ever made, it's the worst anything ever made, it's not just bad ET is a crime against humanity.
The plot of the game is farily straight forward, you control the cute little alien ET as he goes around the board collecting pieces of his telephone in order to phone home. The objective of the game is collect all three pieces of the phone, in the shortest amount of time, while at the same time avoiding a Scientist and FBI Agent who will take you to Washington DC, and even confiscate your phone pieces.
The plot of the game sounds easy but thanks to poor programming, the entire board is full of pits, that you fall into again and again, even when it seems there are no pits to be found, and the phone pieces you are suppose to find are hidden in the pits and the only way to get them is to fall into the pits. The worst feature of the game is you take damage simply by walking. At the bottom of the screen is a counter, at first you think it's a timer but it's not, it's ET's verson of a power bar, and every small step or every time you take a small step you take damage, while the Scientist and FBI Agent don't do anything except drive you crazy trying to avoid them.
The pits are made all the more worst by horrible controls, how can you screw up the controls when the controller only consists of a 4 way joystick and one button, well the programers for ET found a way. In order to escape the pits, you have to push up on the joystick and press the button multipul times, the result is you acend very very slowly, and yes it drains your power, and being able to land is increadibly difficult.
The graphics are absolutly horrendus, with the exception of the opening title screen, which actually is fairly well done but that's about it. About every board, with the exception of the forest, is amost impossible to figure out, the pits actually blend into back ground and look like solid ground or trees. The worst screen though is the "Washington DC" Screen. While the movie takes place in California, the FBI Agent and Scientist are suppose to take ET to DC, which consists of nothing except Elliot's House, and two Roman Numeral 3s.
Dispite all these flaws, which could easily have been fixed if the programers had more time, Atari was so confident in ET being a runaway smash hit that they manufactured 5 million cartridges, believeing that ET would be a runaway smash simply because of it being associated with Speilberg's movie.
Overall there is nothing redeeming about ET and the game was such a dismal failure and it not only took Atari, but the entire home video game market with it. In an effort to try and save it's reputation Atari burried all unsold copies in a New Mexico landfill, which is exactally where this game belongs: THE TRASH. The only people who this game will appeal to are collectors who want a complete Atari 2600 library.