Developer: ATARI INC. Publisher: ATARI INC.
Release Date: June 11th 1982 Platform: ATARI 2600
Some people have told me that this retro-review is redundant, that anyone who knows video games knows exactly what I’m going to write before I write it. And they’re right.
But they can kiss my ass regardless. Just like the people who coded this atrocity of a ‘video game’.
And since everybody seems to know what I’m gonna write you can just go ahead and fill out the rest of this introduction in your little pointy skulls.
Dicks.
Considering how pointless and simple this game is there isn’t going to be a whole lot to write about. And yet I still feel compelled to. Huh.
E.T. is considered to be the worst video game of all time by most of the gamers in the world. Its release marked the downfall of Atari and the video game market of the early eighties (anyone remember the video game market collapse of 1983?). As a result Atari lost millions of dollars (which was a lot back then) and the favor and power shifted from the U.S. to the Japanese market. Hundreds of thousands of E.T. cartridges were buried in a New Mexico desert – then after a few thousand people showed up to get a souvenir Atari dug up the cartridges, covered them in concrete, and buried them again.
How could one video game cause such calamity you ask? Well, remember that the game market was booming, Atari was known for releasing enough questionable software as it was and E.T. was one of the most commercially successful movies of all time. When E.T. came out and people saw how bad it was and enough was enough. Video games were still very much a child-focused family fare and parents controlled most of the purchases. After the waste of money that was E.T., people simply stopped buying games. It was as if the nation got fed-up all at once.
How bad was this game? Well let’s see. There were only six stages that would repeat on the same difficulty level (you got to keep your score though – whoopee). The gameplay consisted of gathering pieces of either a telephone (to call home with, naturally) or Reese’s pieces for health and an opportunity to call Elliot for a telephone piece (???). Sometimes pieces could be found in wells which you would have to fall down and levitate out of again. You would have to avoid the scientists and FBI agents who would either take you to Washington DC or confiscate your items. Different zones (marked with different icons) would dictate what you would do in a stage whether it be detecting items, warping to other zones, or sending the enemies back to their starting points. Once all of the pieces are gathered you have to get back to the forest stage and your spaceship within the time limit. That’s when the game would start over with the same stages. Several difficulty settings were available that would affect speed and enemy frequency.
In short the gameplay was simple yet nonsensical. Shitting blood during gameplay was not unheard of, if you didn’t go blind first, that is. To this day playing this crap makes me want to run out in to the street and headbutt random people. And I’m not joking at all.
Well at this point I’d usually say that you should stay as far away from this game as humanly possible. But considering what it has achieved I think you should play it once for around two minutes. That’s all you’ll need to see how this game ruined everything in the early eighties. You may hate me forever after you play, but it’s alright, I can live with it.
Now I wonder how low of a score I can give. I don’t think negative is possible but I’d love to try it. But then again the pieces of the market collapse was picked up by Nintendo and the NES which down the road gave us the great Japanese games that we love today. I definitely think that should be taken into account.
…
Got it!
Overall – Then: 0.5 out of 10 Now: 1.5 out of 10
