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RETROspectives/Defending: E.T. the Extra Terrestrial
E.T. the Extra terrestrial on the Atari 2600, widely dubbed the worst video game ever made! It's legacy is infamous, it's name is like a horror film all on it's own! Forget your Paranormals or Nightmares on Elm Street, E.T. the extra Terrestrial on the Atari 2600 is scarier than those! How could I defend a game whose legacy is so widely known by many, the game single handedly blamed for the North American Video Game Crash of 1983? I'll give it a shot...
The game starts with E.T. arriving in a forest from his spaceship, now he has to collect pieces of a phone to call back his ship. Stories back then were definitely more simple (I'm looking at you Kingdom Hearts!) but, each time you put the cartridge in your Atari 2600 the phone pieces change location. No problem, right? Every step E.T. takes drains his enrgy, move too much and you die. Oh, and each time you have to find all the phone pieces in different locations, although, there's actually more to do after this but we're getting there.
The main problem with the game for many players is the pits, E.T. is constantly falling into pits, some you can see and some you can't! So imagine the situaation, evry step you take you inch closer to death and then you add steps to your journey you fall into pits! The pits are hard to get out of too, you extend your neck to float out of the pit, which rapidly drains your energy, and once you get out of the pits you are more than likely to fall straight back in! But, and here's the kicker, the phone pieces are in the pits! There are 3 pieces of the phone to collect and there are a lot of pits, how do you know where to look? The game is randomised! That's the next problem that frustrated gamers of 1982 and beyond!
On each screen that contains a phone piece there will also be a "?" space, these spaces aren't obvious as the only way to tell what you're standing on is a tiny symbol in the top corner of the screen. That means trapsing over each space on the screen, avoiding the pits, to find this space. Bear in mind you're still losing energy and this becomes a problem, but we're about to see why this randomiser is a much, much bigger problem. Once you find this space the pit with the phone piece will be highlighted leaving E.T. to face the dreaded pit dilemma! Once you survived long enough to collect all three pieces of the phone you have to find the spot on the map where E.T. can stand to "phone home". Then E.T. has a time limit to reach the landing zone back in the forest. If you managed to get that far without walking yourself to death you have succeeded and beat the game! But I'm missing out the most frustrating part of the game! More than the pits? Oh yes, the scientists and FBI agent's!
If either the scientist or the FBI agent catches E.T. they take you to a certain screen of the game and take all your phone pieces. Oh and that energy? That's still gone and now you have no phone pieces! Here's an even bigger problem, the phone home space could be on this screen! the problem with this is that E.T. can only phone home and stand on the landing spot if he is completely alone on the screen. On the screen where the FBI agent or scientists are you cannot phone the ship! It's a mess! You can't out run these guys, they can run over the pits but E.T. keeps falling in! And remember those invisible pits! Each time you play it's different too! The pits and invisible pits are in different places! They can even walk into the forest, where the landing zone is! This game really is a nightmare! Worse than the unholy Mario games we talked about! Worse than the Cheetahmen games! How can I defend this? The worst game in history!
My defense is against the title it's been given, the worst game in history, hardly! To begin with let's look at its development history! When we talked about Atari's downfall way back in the day I mentioned that Atari was given the liscense to be the company to exclusively make games about E.T. from Universal. Atari wanted a christmas release and tasked Howard Scott Warshaw, on his own, with the project and gave him a deadline of 6 weeks! 6 weeks! Even for the Atari 2600 that length of time is criminal! The system is hard to code games on and Warshaw had to do it alone. Think about that, short time limit, one guy working tirelessly and then ask yourself: is it really the worst game ever made? Yes? Well, that's why I joined this Defending and RETROspectives to form this hybrid post, it's time to dive into where games went to trump this game! E.T. may be considered the worst game of all time but there is definitely worse: Plumbers Don't Wear Ties on the Panasonic 3-DO (we'll get back to the game and the console), Desert Bus (a game included as part of the cancelled Penn and Teller's Smoke and Mirrors on SEGA CD and we'll definitely come back to that!) and even, more recently, Sonic the Hedgehog 2006. The game may be frustrating, horribly designed with a predominately green colour scheme but does it really desrve the title of worst video game ever made? How did it get such a reputation? Who knows. As for it being the main problem for the North American Video Game Crash of 1983, think about why. Atari was given a hugely exciting deal, exclusive rights to E.T. games directly from Universal Studios! Of course they were going to pin their hopes on this game being a huge success. Commercially it was and that was why it was so mass produced and the market became so overpopulated with this game! It's just one of those things, there's no true explaination as to why the game is considered one of the worst games ever made. And that's what makes it such a unique piece of gaming history!
