Topic: E.T. (Atari 2600) Review

And then came Nintendo...

Of course, there was also the influx of crappy software after Atari said they could make it as long as they paid royalties. The games for Atari weren't great in the first place, but then you suddenly have a ton more, plus all of the illegal carts. E.T. may not be the worst, but it is terrible, and I'm surprised you could play it for two hours.

Just imagine if it didnt happen then we wouldnt have the incredible Code Monkeys.... I love that dang show!

Also the great video game crash happened right at the end of a big recession which could also be attributed to it. Video games have been as big as ever during this recession (as they were in the early 80s) so it's not unreasonable to think profits drop off 20% when people start becoming interested in real life again.

Let's face it, video game was so new and came on so strong and so fast, it was bound to have the bottom fall out eventually at the rate it was going. As I said in an earlier post, it was a good learning experience for the game companies that would follow it. It's just nice to see things going as strongly as they are today. I'll still never forget going into department stores and not seeing any game consoles and watching the arcades all close up in the malls. Not a pretty site during that two year period of time. And I'll certainly never forget finally seeing the NES games in Kay Bee Toy Hobby shortly after the NES hit US stores. A true site for sore eyes.

why don't you make the review "official"?

Indeed.
While "ET the game" was certainly partly to blame for the crash (though not to the extend the internet kids want you to believe), the quality of the game was not. The game sold rather well, and wasn't that badly received, ET's only contribution to the problem was the number of carts produced. But good luck telling Joe Youtube and Bob The Reviewer Of Games He Hasn't Played that.

Though, Corbie, are you sure you read the manual for the game? You write off the Reese's Pieces solely as a means to regain energy, and make the same mistake of claiming you need to drop into random pits to find phone pieces as everyone else do (hint: You got a phone piece radar. Use it).

ET is entertaining enough, and most definitely better than Raider of the Lost Ark. Anything lower than 5/10 is really not very fair, and gives way too much an impression of echoing the "wrost gmae evar kiled the industri" idiots rather than providing an impartial review.

@Adamant: ET was part of the reason because Atari produced too many cartridges thinking that demand was gonna be just as high...which it wasn't

Yeah, that's... kind of what I said?

But nowhere near the extent that Pac-Man was for the 2600. They produced twice as many carts for Pac-Man as they had Atari's in homes (sure there were some people who had the Colecovision adapter but not in those numbers) and when asked why (I'm not sure if this is true or apocraphyl, but it's now taken as true) Ray Kassar (thanks 7th lutz) answered, "We believe people will want two copies for both their home and their winter homes".

So really, the blame with the crash of '84 belongs with the heads of the companies not having a clue as to who their market was. Blaming ET or Pac-Man is like blaming Vince Russo for the death of WCW, it's become the easy and cool thing to say, but there is much more blame to be shared with the heads of the organizations. (In WCW's case it was Time Warner/AOL, when the dotcom bubble burst their stock went plummeting and they sold off all their assets from the Atlanta Braves and Falcons to WCW who were still pulling in ratings close to what WWE RAW produces today and would still be TBS's highest rated show)

It is heard for me to believe that Jack Tramiel said that quote since Jack wasn't in charge of Atari before July 1984. Jack was in charge of commodore before Jan. 1984. Pac-man played more of a role in terms of sale impact before Jack took over Atari in 1984. Pac-man was one of the factors for Atari having a big loss in 1983.

The only thing Jack did with the Atari 2600 version of Pac-man was re-releasing the game title sometime from 1986 to 1988.

That quote would be something I would expect out of Ray Kassar, not Jack. What I read about Ray was, he cared more about marketing and sales than games.

Ray was in charge of Atari during the original release of Pac-man on the Atari 2600. Ray was warned of the quality of the 2600 port of Pac-man and he decided to have the game release anyway.

Ray wasn't responsible for the agreement with E.T being ported into a video game. The CEO of Atari's parent company was responsible for the deal despite Ray thought an E.T. based video game was a dumb idea before doing to the deal with Steven Spielberg and Universal Pictures.

The "phone piece radar" is nothing more than a silly question mark that pops up on a screen where a piece is located. But you still have to fall into all the pits on the screen until you find it. And some have quite a few pits on the screen at once.

Uh, no, the phone radar lights a little dot in the hole the piece is in. You then jump down that ONE pit.

Are you SURE you read the manual?

This game isn't NEARLY as bad as people claim. Much like the CDi Zelda games, few people have played it, but still claim it's trash. I used to own ET, and I never knew it had such a reputation at the time. It wasn't a good game, but not one I'm going to publicly denounce.

Sometimes, when i'm prowling eBay late at night, i'm tempted to buy up a whole bunch of sad, unwanted ET carts, like Mel Gibson needing to buy copies of Catcher in the Rye in that Conspiracy Theory movie. I actually do own i think 3 copies of ET, including my original from a bazillion years ago (a bazillion = 28).

_{i only have one copy of Catcher -- the same copy i read in, and stole from, my high school english class -- but have all of Salinger's other books too ... yes, he wrote other things!}

Well here was the problem. I have a text version of the manual. And it doesn't have the figures the full color manual does. And since it doesn't mention this dot in the text, I had no idea it would do that. I stood still when the indicator turned into a questions mark to see if it would light up the dot and nothing happened. I finally extended ET's neck and then it showed the dot. I never, in all the years I've played this game, knew about that function.

But it still doesn't change my mind on the score. Because it's still too easy to fall into pits when trying to outrun the doctor and FBI agent and it gets too repetitive too quickly. But as people have said, not nearly the worst game ever made. Not by a long shot.

And thanks for the tip Adamant. Good catch.

This is making my head hurt. I'm glad I never touched this monstrosity

Ah, that explains it (it does actually mention the dot in the text, but since it directly refers to an illustration, the text manual writers probably didn't include it).

As I said, it's in no way a great game - the pits can get annoying, the enemies are very fast and dangerous, and the scoring system is much too focused around grinding for Reese's Pieces rather than quick and flawless assembly of the phone. Still, after Adventure, it's probably the best adventure game on the system. Private Eye, Raiders of the Lost Ark and Ghostbusters are all much worse (let's see, are there others too?).

Oh yeah, and note the three difficulty modes - the manual doesn't bother describing them for some reason, but in addition to the standard "game 1", there's also an "easy mode" (game 2) where the scientist doesn't appear, and a "tutorial mode" (game 3) where there's no enemies at all, letting you fart around as you please, familiarizing yourself with the gameplay. It's recommended to start at the tutorial to learn the game, then play Easy mode for a while until you're ready to move on to the real deal.

@7th Lutz I'm sorry, it was Kassar. However, the quote comes from one of those old PBS computer shows they had back in the mid 80's-they were sort of like 60 minutes but just with computer tech stuff-still, I always get Kassar and Tramiel mixed up.

As for E.T., yeah I liked it when my dad took me to see it opening night but to me it's unwatchable now. I bought it for my ex girlfriends kids when it came out on DVD and I remember deciding that the gutters needed cleaning and the house needed painting it was so boring.

So I gave the game a couple goes here. after some initial hardships, I eventually got the handle of things, and managed to get a bit over 45000 points (normal mode, of course).

Is the game flawed? Yep. Can it be really annoying at times? Yep. But it's still quite entertaining once you learn how to play.