E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (video game): Difference between revisions

Following the success of the movie, in July 1982, Warner Communications, [[Atari]]'s parent company, paid $20-25 million for the rights to do a video game adaptation. Programmer Howard Scott Warshaw was given just six weeks to write it, in order to [[Christmas Rushed|meet the Christmas deadline]]. In comparison, Warshaw's previous 2600 games, ''[[Yars Revenge]]'' and ''[[Raiders of the Lost Ark (video game)|Raiders of the Lost Ark]]'', both highly regarded, took seven months and six months respectively.

The game itself is a [[Three Quarters View]] [[Action Adventure]] game. You play E.T., and at the beginning, you are dropped off by the [[Joueur Du Grenier|phonebooth-looking spaceship]]. You then have to find three pieces of an [[Plot Coupon|intergalactic telephone]] so E.T. can "phone home.". You wander around six screens, and perform various actions by pressing the fire button; different actions are available depending on where E.T. is standing. The most important screens are the ones with pits; the phone pieces are in the pits. You can try falling into pit after pit to check them, or you can find the part of the screen where you can use an action that shows which pit has a phone piece. Once you assemble all the phone pieces, you head to one spot on one screen where the available action is phoning home. Phone home, then head to the landing site for a pick-up before a timer runs out.

The game is at least complete, and not buggy. This isn't ''[[Big Rigs Over the Road Racing]]''. But the gameplay is boring, confusing, and repetitive. It's also very easy to fall into a pit, and once you levitate back out, you often fall right back in again. Watching the movie doesn't in any way help you understand what you are supposed to do in the game; of course, reading the manual helps a lot, but [[Read the Freaking Manual|who would do that anyway]]? Atari also published a [[Strategy Guide|Hints Sheet]] later, but the damage was already done. If this had been just another 2600 game, it would have been considered below average and quickly forgotten. But Atari's big bet on it is what made it infamous. Atari produced four million units, expecting a massive hit. One and a half million sold, but most of these were sent back. Atari lost millions, Warner Communications' stock price took a 35% hit, and within a few months, [[The Great Video Game Crash of 1983]] was underway.

In September 1983, Atari buried a bunch of stuff in a New Mexico landfill, including a lot of ''E.T.'' cartridges, which was a notorious event symbolic of the video game crash. [http://www.cnn.com/2014/04/27/tech/gaming-gadgets/atari-et-video-game/ An excavation performed at the site in April 2014] [[wikipedia:Atari_video_game_burial#Excavation|brought some of these cartridges to light]]. The Atari manager in charge of the original dump, who was also present at the excavation, stated that "only" about three-quarters of a million cartridges had been buried there. Despite the hoopla around the excavation, most of those 700,000+ cartridges still remain buried.

* [[Difficulty Levels]]: Three, getting easier as you go up. Level 1 has both enemies, levelLevel 2 removes the scientist, and levelLevel 3 removes the FBI agent.

* [[Kill Screen]]: Subverted. If you give Elliot at least 33 Reese's Pieces, the score count will be glitched up, ETE.T. will turn black, and the Scientist and the FBI Agent will never appear. You can still go on. It's just boring with no enemies around.

* [[Obvious Beta]]: To a certain extent. It's complete, and there are no major bugs, but it suffers from a lack of playtesting.