E.T. The Terrestrial Failure.

I am not particularly interested in revisiting what was one of my primary interests as a seven year old (unless it has something to do with Hanna-Barbera, natch). That isn't to say I hold any of my contemporaries that obsess over their latest Atari thrift store find in contempt. Playing old Atari games just isn't high on my list of priorities. Regardless, I was over at a friend's house that is indeed one of these Atari obsessives, when the topic turned to, "What was the greatest Atari game?" Well, for me the answer was easy. Without question, the Atari game I played and enjoyed the most was Atari's interpretation of the Steven Spielberg hit ET. Those present laughed in an esoteric Atari aficionado type way and dismissed my answer. "All joking aside, what was actually your favorite game?" I had to plead ignorance. I had no idea why my answer was so implausible. When I steadfastly insisted I wasn't joking, my defense of the game became highly controversial.

I had mastered the game at the age of four, and admittedly, the object of ET was incredibly stupid. I hadn't even seen the film at that point but I knew that there was no way this piece of amusement was following the movie plot. The object was for ET to collect a series of black dots and coveted gold pieces while trying to avoid falling into pits. You also had to dodge a oddly animated scientist and an FBI agent in a trench coat that would steal your dots and gold. Once you had collected a certain amount of dots and gold without falling into pits, you would return to a field, pump the joystick's red button and summon a space ship to take you home: the end. Well, I thought it was fun.

It wasn't until my friends enlightened me last year that I realized I was the only kid in North America enjoying the game. When I first plugged the cartridge into my Atari on a joyous Christmas morn, I was instantly impressed with the image pictured on the right. This was the best-looking Atari graphic I had ever seen! The Atari-ized ET theme was nothing to sneeze at either. As I have learned, most people found the game frustrating, difficult to learn, impossible to master and not particularly fun. I don't know why. I, for one, enjoyed the otherworldly and somewhat creepy feeling I got from it. Elliot, The Professor, and a man in a trench coat enforcing the PATRIOT Act were void of facial features. This made them seem like terrifying creatures from an old drive-in movie, which I always felt added to the mystique. Although, I did not enjoy losing all my lives, thus bringing an end to current play, the graphic of a pathetic ET skeleton was always something haunting to behold. Can you imagine the rotting corpse of Mario or Zelda (or a much more current reference) appearing on your screen? Of course not.

Unfortunately, I am alone with my "praise." Not only is ET regarded as a worthless piece of shit, and by several sources as the worst video game ever made, there are many thorough explanations for why this is. For one, the game was rushed through production. The reason for this was to cash in on the success of the movie before it became passe and secondly, to make sure it was on the market in time for the Christmas season. This gave the game's programmer, Howard Scott Warshaw, a meager six weeks to prepare, conceive, design and program the most anticipated video game of the year (Warshaw also designed the classic Yars Revenge). This game would never have a chance to be a baron of quality, even by Atari standards, with such pressure put against it. Warshaw was paid an incredible two hundred thousand dollars for his six weeks of grunt work. When ET was released right before Christmas, it sold, as anticipated, incredibly well. 1.5 Million units moved in just over a week making it the eighth highest selling video game of all time. However, Atari had been anticipating even greater sales and had manufactured a total of four million copies of the game, many which remained in Atari warehouses that were being prepared for shipping when retailers sold out. Unfortunately, Atari failed to anticipate what would happen next. Angry parents and children alike returned to their stores of purchase in the forth-coming days, and what happened is now legendary. Word of mouth about ET's supposed shittiness resulted in more than half of all purchased copies being returned, according to one Atari executive. Nor did the three million cartridges sitting in the warehouse ever make their way onto the shelves of stores or into the hands of consumers. ET's bad rap resulted in enormous losses for the Atari company and is ultimately blamed for the company's complete demise. Atari posted a loss of $536 million dollars in 1983 and would soon come to resemble the rotting ET skeleton I have pictured on the right.

The best part of the story is often dismissed as urban legend. People say "impossible!" This website, which devotes itself to debunking urban myths, verifies it as fact. In the autumn of 1983, ten to twenty semi-trailer loads worth of unsold Atari ET cartridges (and some other unpopular Atari merch for good measure) were driven out into the New Mexico desert. It was there that the games were crushed with machines, tossed into a landfill and buried. As if that weren't enough, they decided to pour a layer of concrete overtop, cementing them in for all time! This eventually became rather controversial, not because of the sheer weirdness of the act, but instead, because of the typical corporate disregard for the environment involved. Public protest swelled against the large amount of dumping Atari was doing in this area near Alamogordo, New Mexico. Public sentiment turned sharply against the local dump that was allowing the out-of-state video game corporation to dispose of their wares. The dump manager's made off with a substantial amount of money in exchange. After the outcry, local bylaws were imposed to keep such a circumstance from happening again.

I still don't know how anyone can find ET a harder game to play than Atari Football (and I didn't just struggle with it because I'm privy to CFL rules). Lastly, nerds, don't post comments that the dots are candy or that the gold was phone pieces. I didn't know that when I was a kid. I still mastered the game without that knowledge. And I don't care.

Comments

[Pat K]

My jaw hit the floor when I was reading this - I had almost the exact same experience as a kid. ET remains one of my favorite and most beloved Atari games from my childhood, and I had no idea until just a couple of years ago about its status as "worst game ever" and the incredible Atari story surrounding it. Imagine my surprise to find out that my cherished favorite childhood game is actually considered by the general populace to be literally the worst game ever. It's amazing that someone else out there - and we literally may be the only two - feels the same way about it. When I dusted off my old 2600 last year, ET was the first game I reached for. Play on, Listener Kliph.....

[Kev]

You've seen the video for When I Wake Up by Wintergreen, yes?

[Adam]

I loved this game from the first time I played it. One of these days when career and kids are but a memory, I'm going to buy an Atari (or two) off Ebay and play games with barely recognizable graphics until my fingers bleed. And ET will be near the top of the stack.

[Jason]

http://www.benheck.com/

This guy makes portable hand-held ataris, among other things.

[Gavin]

Trust me, you aren't the only one. It's hip to bash E.T. now, because hindsight is always 20/20, but I think it came out when I was eleven and I played it backward and forward until I could beat it every time. It wasn't the best adventure game ever made, but when you consider the limitations of the system and how quickly they had to churn it out....at the time it wasn't as horrible as people now claim.

There were far worse games on the 2600, E.T. is just the most notorious because it was released during the time of the great console implosion, and people blamed it as part of that failure. It was just symbolic of the transitional period that the industry underwent, and as such, has suffered a stigma from that.

[Zack]

I was one of the many frustrated kids playing the E.T. game. I could never figure it out, but I kept playing it anyway, purely to show my devotion to the E.T. franchise. I'd say it's up there with Starmater (or Starfighter?) in terms of frustrating gameplay.

[Gavin]

Zack, are you thinking of Star Raiders?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Raiders

That was the game that required the keypad controller. It was pretty annoying, and yeah pretty frustrating. The more I think about it, I'd have to say that out of all the high profile 2600 games, Raiders Of The Lost Ark has to be the most confusing and obtuse one that I can think of. That game made no fucking sense whatsoever.

[James]

I loved the Raiders of the Lost Ark game for 2600. It's not exactly true that the game didn't make any sense. The problem is that a) the instruction booklet (intentionally) neglected to mention the existence of the map room, and if you didn't see the movie (or weren't clever enough to think that if the movie had a map room, the game must have one, too - and believe me, I wasn't clever enough when I first played it), it would seem like an incoherent game.

[ResidentClinton]

Yes! More Atari. I love this story, and yeah, I actually dug the ET game as well. It was kind of like Pitfall for little kids. There is one game I remember playing, the He Man and the Masters of the Universe game, that was just complete and utter boring nonsense. I remember getting that thing and just being so pissed off.

[Zack]

Gavin-

After some research, the game I'm thinking of was indeed Starmaster:

http://www.atariage.com/cart_page.html?SoftwareLabelID=507

I could never quite get the logic of its gameplay.

[Will]

The whole landfill part of the story was really not all that weird at the time - it was normal business practice. In order for Atari to write the carts off and take the business loss, they had to destroy them, and get something called a Certificate of Destruction for the auditors. Since those carts were basically worthless as scrap (no gold inside, very little copper), crushing and landfilling them was the easiest and best way to destroy them. Atari was not alone - almost all consumer electronics firms back then had a secret landfill (even envirofriendly Apple has the infamous landfill of Lisas). I once found one in Indiana that had zillions of old television circuit boards starting to pop up from below.

[Banyon II]

Oh my, I just moved near Alomogordo. It is a joke town in the area. I they should put a graphic commemorating this on the "Welcome to Alomogordo" sign. This has vastly increased my affection for this town.

There's also a town nearby named Truth or Consequences, after the TV show.

[D'arcy's Carrot]

Don't know if anyone has seen this on the topic of the landfill : http://atari.digital-madman.com/

or in fact another piece of spin-off junk/genius : http://wayoutjunk.blogspot.com/2006/11/et-i-love-you-and-other-extra.html

[Call Screener Jeff]

"baron of quality"!?! Did you coin that phrase?

ET kind of sucked, but not as much as the movie. The main thing that I remember about it was getting lost looking for the phone pieces. It makes sense that the same guy created Raiders, which was much more complicated and dangerous seeming. Both of which put me in mind of the oh-so-disappointing Superman game.

Having said all that, Star Raiders rocked. The only problem with it was that you could never win the damn thing. There was no winning scenario, just different deaths. But it still rocked- I loved the keypad, it made me feel like Mr. Spock!

[dgaicun]

When I first encountered ET, I was 6 or 7, and I indeed remember thinking of it as the most not fun game I had ever played. It wasn't until college that someone asked me what the worst game I remembered was. He anticipated my answer - ET - and showed me the magazine article already in his hands on the whole sad story.

It was an amazing, hilarious feeling, to discover I wasn't at all unique, or mistaken, in my memories.

[EB]

This post remainds me of legends about Genghis Khan's tomb.