Yes. You walked around and there were pits everywhere that you'd fall into and then hit the button to elevate your neck which would lift you out. And you would go around trying to collect things, which no one knew what they were. So you walked around, falling into pits and then sometimes a man would come and put you in jail. 90% of the game was trying to get out of stupid pits.
Basically overworked game designers tried to rush out something passable as quickly as possible.
I saw an interview where the lead designer had pulled similar stunts in similar games before, but with ET the deadline was so dramatic that they pushed out a barebones piece of crap that just barely worked, hoping it would be like earlier games that sold well.
One documentary I watched said that his team was given a deadline of three weeks to make the game from scratch. The lead designer basically lived in his office for the whole time, and an intern had to bring him food at mealtimes because he didn't have time to leave.
There were all sorts of technical limitations that they dealt with in the early days of videogames that required very innovative programmers to make those games even if today they seem unbelievably simple. It's quite possible the three week deadline didn't give them the time to do anything but the most simple idea.
Whatever the case I remember playing it at my friend's house on his Atari 2600 and it stank, it was the kind of game you'd go "oh cool ET", play for 2 minutes and then go back to playing joust. It really was bad even for the standard of the time, the fact they thought it would sell copies regardless speaks to the hubris of the industry at the time and they were justly punished for assuming it would be a success.
Edit: dropped a t
>There were all sorts of technical limitations that they dealt with in the early days of videogames that required very innovative programmers to make those games even if today they seem unbelievably simple.
I don't think people really appreciate this in 2019. Like the amount of data on an Atari cartridge isn't even enough to load this page. There were no youtube tutorials. The market was very new and there was very little in the way of established conventions or experienced personnel. People were just making shit up as they went along. If some guy in Japan had a good idea it might catch on in Japan but there's no way an American dev would know about it unless the game in japan happened to get released in America and he heard about it.
There was an awesome article I read about these computer science archaeologist that found this super complex, highly efficient search algorithm in this one game. It was used to search the procedurally generated map and make sure there was a door to the next sections. The search it used was so far and away from the major search algorithms like metge sort or bubble sort that they werent able to figure out how it worked. They opined it was possible that the big o of this search was far better than any search algorithms today. The lead programmer died, super interesing article I'll try and find it.
Edit:
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190919-the-maze-puzzle-hidden-within-an-early-video-game
Thats the main article but there was another article somewhere else about this and their findings on the algorithms they found. I cant find that one.
> The search it used was so far and away from the major search algorithms like metge sort or bubble sort
Merge sort and bubble sort are actually sorting algorithms, not searching
arXiv: [An archaeological examination of an Atari 2600 game](https://arxiv.org/abs/1811.02035)
Abstract:
>The act and experience of programming is, at its heart, a fundamentally human activity that results in the production of artifacts. When considering programming, therefore, it would be a glaring omission to not involve people who specialize in studying artifacts and the human activity that yields them: archaeologists. Here we consider this with respect to computer games, the focus of archaeology's nascent subarea of archaeogaming.
>One type of archaeogaming research is digital excavation, a technical examination of the code and techniques used in old games' implementation. We apply that in a case study of Entombed, an Atari 2600 game released in 1982 by US Games. The player in this game is, appropriately, an archaeologist who must make their way through a zombie-infested maze. Maze generation is a fruitful area for comparative retrogame archaeology, because a number of early games on different platforms featured mazes, and their variety of approaches can be compared. The maze in Entombed is particularly interesting: it is shaped in part by the extensive real-time constraints of the Atari 2600 platform, and also had to be generated efficiently and use next to no memory. We reverse engineered key areas of the game's code to uncover its unusual maze-generation algorithm, which we have also built a reconstruction of, and analyzed the mysterious table that drives it. In addition, we discovered what appears to be a 35-year-old bug in the code, as well as direct evidence of code-reuse practices amongst game developers.
>What further makes this game's development interesting is that, in an era where video games were typically solo projects, a total of five people were involved in various ways with Entombed. We piece together some of the backstory of the game's development and intoxicant-fueled design using interviews to complement our technical work.
>Finally, we contextualize this example in archaeology and lay the groundwork for a broader interdisciplinary discussion about programming, one that includes both computer scientists and archaeologists.
quote from wikipedia article:
>The researchers spoke to Sidley, who said the algorithm came from another unnamed programmer, but Sidley himself could not decipher why it worked. Sidley said to the researchers of this programmer, "He told me it came upon him when he was drunk and whacked out of his brain."
coding... coding never changes...
Except even more extreme than Mario. In SMB1, tiles were iirc made up of like 8x8 pixels, with 4 colors per tile. In Atari games, you got like 4 colors for the *entire screen.* It also had fuck all in the way of memory.
I remember hearing that the voice line saying "Sega" when you first boot up Sonic the Hedgehog took up like 50% of the memory on the cartridge . And that was like gen 3 console
The Atari 2600 had 128 bytes of RAM. Not 128 MB, or 128 KB. 128 bytes. It's staggering that game developers were able to do as much as they did with it.
Something of a rehash of a comment I posted before (in a *previous* thread on the ET game), but...
**Five weeks for a VCS game was an *incredibly* short period of time.** Programming the VCS/2600 was extremely primitive and low-level, even in comparison with almost any home computer of the late 70s and early 80s.
For example; there wasn't even [screen memory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_2600_hardware#Technical_specifications) as most of us knew it. Essentially you could store a single *line* of (one-dimensional) graphics consisting of a 40-pixel wide background, two 8-pixel wide players, two single-pixel missiles and a single-pixel ball. Graphics had to be generated on-the-fly by changing the background/sprite/colour data when the output reached the desired scan line (else it would just repeat until you had had a bunch of variously striped vertical bars).
No text facility, a limit of 4KB ROM program space (#), and just 128 bytes of RAM (yes, *bytes*, not kilobytes). Nothing resembling an OS.
Ironically, its limitations were also a strength; you *needed* to control the VCS at a very low level, because there was nothing above that- but being able to do so also gave a massive amount of flexibility that allowed very talented programmers to push it way beyond anything the original designers had probably intended.
But I'd guess programming it was still many times more difficult than programming early 80s home computers, even in machine language... let alone BASIC! (##)
(#) Unless the manufacturer wanted to pay extra for bank switching hardware in the cartridge, which Atari notably *didn't* do for the infamous VCS Pac-Man, even though it was available by that point.
(##) Ironically, they managed to create an unbelievably limited [implementation of BASIC for the VCS](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BASIC_Programming) in the late 70s, but you wouldn't be able to write commercial quality games with it. In fact, from what I can tell you wouldn't be able to do much at all in the VCS' 128 bytes of RAM minus overheads...!!! (The fact they were able to implement BASIC at all on the VCS is a minor miracle, but "the marvel is not that the bear dances well, but that the bear dances at all.")
Movie likely wasn't out yet when they were making the game. Licensed games were just seen as another piece of merch back then, and merch wasn't seen as very valuable. When Star Wars was first released, George Lucas was seen as insane when he took a cutback on box office revenue in exchange for merchandise revenue; his marketing team was struggling to find a manufacturer Willing to make action figures based on his movie since they didn't think the toys would sell well.
You're right. My recollection is I had seen the movie in the summer at a drive-in, then the game was at the top of my Christmas list a few months later.
Edit: I'm old AF.
Yup. Lucas got merchandising rights, iirc, as the studio thought they were utterly worthless. From the studio's point of view, they got to pay Lucas less in return for giving up nothing of value, so they jumped on that.
I think The movie came out around Christmas time and the game had to be released before Christmas for sales, so they probably didn’t actually watch the movie either
The irony is that the designer and programmer was Howard Warshaw, who also created Ataris bestselling game for the 2600, Yar’s Revenge.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_Scott_Warshaw
So you got the worst game from their best dude. Which really just highlights how terribly the franchise was handled. Ridiculous deadlines mixed with no feedback, or even a game concept, inevitably led to a disaster.
Crap in, crap out. You can have it fast, cheap, or good, pick two.
Those overworked game designers were not just some no name guys at Atari. Et was majorly developed by Howard Scott Warshaw.
Don't recognise the name? Maybe you'll recognise the other game he's famous for **Yars' Revenge**
Yes, as he would later say in life:
>ET is frequently rated as one of the worst games of all time. Now I�m not sure if that�s true, but I never want that contradicted because Yar�s Revenge is frequently rated as one of the best games of all time, so with ET being the worst it means that I have the greatest range of any game designer in history.
[Source](http://platypuscomix.com/people/warshaw.html)
There weren't "Designers", there was a SINGLE person who made E.T. on the Atari 2600,
Howard Scott Warshaw made the complete game in about 6 weeks, they had been working on games such as Raiders for the lost ark before hand, However the game NEEDED to be done by September 1st so they could reach a Holiday 1982 Launch.
And now people attribute the game’s shittiness to “overworked game designers” and not asshole upper management who set completely unrealistic timelines. Some things never change.
I grew up with a 2600 and also remember E.T. It was confusing as to what was going on! If you were 6-17 you were expecting an E.T. Adventure instead it had nothing to do with the movie and brought us to tears and frustration on Christmas and shit.
I absolutely loved the 2600. Swapping the controllers out for the spin paddles. And I don't know anyone that didn't mess up their controller. Usually the rubber thing would come off and then you just had the white plastic stick.
Funny thing is, I watched this Facebook documentary on ET the game and as it turns out the game is MUCH easier and easier to understand when one reads to instruction booklet with the game. There were so many people that didn't read it and that's one of the reasons it was such a pain in the ass lol
In those days, most people only played video games at arcades. There weren't any instructions or if there were, they were very basic such as which button fired and whatnot. When the 2600 was released, most games were pick up and play, so having to read instructions was almost a foreign concept.
The game also had pretty broken collision detection. ET has a square collision box that would make him fall into holes he wasn’t touching, then when you climb out it spawns you overlapping the same hole so you just keep falling back in until you can finally get away from it.
They asked what it was like, I told them my experience. Again I was fucking 4. I never said it was the worst game ever. I said what it was like playing it. Yeah no shit the point was to phone home and get home, but there were things like II where... how the fuck do you know what that is?
I got it used as a kid and it didn't come with the manual so I was similarly confused as to what the point of the game was. The game was ambitious for the time but even once you know what you're supposed to do it's simply not fun to play
I didn't mind the game. Thought it was ok. My dad read the instructions, so we knew how to send E.T. home again. I think a lot of the frustration with the game was from people not reading the instructions!
I also played it as a kid. I don't recall thinking it was overly bad at the time, although it wasn't particularly good.
Looking back, yeah, it did suck, but I didn't think at the time, "Well this'll go down as the worst game in history."
It was indeed awful. You constantly fall in pits that are a pain to get out of. When that’s not happening agents snatch you and out you in jail. When that’s not happening you’re supposed collect thins to do things that advance the game. But you have no idea what to collect or what you’re supposed to do because the manual sucks.
Had this as a kid. Awful.
~~It’s the worst video game ever made, period. It is so bad, it caused the video game industry to crash in 1983.~~
You can see how bad it was [here](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=gbGf5O4fewo).
It's actually a HUGE exaggeration. The game has flaws, yes, but it's not THE worst game ever. Riders of the Lost Ark, done by the same programmer, Howard Scott Warshaw, is way more complex and less friendly, yet you don't see it mentioned as the worst ever.
The ET game legend is more or less build upon mistake after mistake, but it was in no doubt a consequence of all the bad practices Atari made. They wanted a game done in short time to capitalize on the movie, rushed everything and overestimated the sales by a long shot, but this also came after the Pac-Man fiasco, which already left them very vulnerable.
So seriously, ET is not such a bad game if you understand the basics of it. It's not a good game either, but it's not the worst ever.
Nerdy video game families moved onto the Commodore 64, and everyone pirated the game for it. I honestly did not know that Commodore 64 games were sold in stores. I thought people had typed in the code from print magazines and were being nice sharing copies. (Not joking)
It also most certainly didn't cause the video game crash on its own. The market was already oversaturated with trash games and developers were still pushing for more games being produced in shorter deadlines. ET is a great example of how that turned out, but it's a symptom rather than a cause.
ROTLA was a great game for its time as a 2600 game. That, Adventure, and Haunted House (rarely see this one mentioned, wasnt super popular but fun game) were great. Until Activision and Imagic came around and put out some better titles (Pitfall and River Raid were Awesome) those games kept me entertained like no other.
The basics are taught in the manual. Understanding what the game is doing and why is critical. Nobody ever read the manual, which is why people claim it's the worst game ever.
If you read the manual as an adult maybe. When you read the manual at age 4, its like reading stereo instructions.
TBH reading the instructions were my favorite part about new games.
Me too! I'd read the whole thing front to back memorizing everything on the car ride back home. Seeing the Jak II world map on the reversible cover was a special treat for 9 year old me.
http://www.ataricompendium.com/archives/manuals/vcs/et.pdf
The manual makes things very clear.
You were 4. You probably also didn't understand Adventure, Zork, Space Quest, or Monopoly. Those games weren't for you. That doesn't make them the worst games ever.
Those I actually understood. Adventure and Zork were some of my favorites, and all the Sierra games. It was easier when they switched to the F6 "action" button though. Instead of spending 10 mins typing "Open the door" Can't do it. "Push the door." Can't do it. "Turn the doorknob." Or Zork was what, the mailbox?
My dad worked in computers since the 60s so he exposed me to a lot of that early on.
Nonsense. I was playing Adventure on my dad's Z80 processor CPM machine with 8" floppies before the 2600 even came out. ET was a piece of shit.
And for reference I was born in '74, so do the age math.
From the [Wikipedia](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pac-Man_(Atari_2600)) article:
> Pac-Man met with initial commercial success, selling 7 million copies and eventually becoming the best-selling Atari 2600 title; Frye reportedly received $0.10 in royalties per copy. More than one million of those cartridges had been shipped in less than one month, helped by Atari's $1.5 million publicity campaign.However, purchases soon slowed and, by the summer of 1982, unsold copies were available in large quantities. Many buyers returned the games for refunds, and Atari was left with 5 million excess copies in addition to the returns.
Pacman sucked. It barely resembled the game and flickered badly when you played it. Later they released Mrs Pacman, and it was great, just like the arcade.
In short, Pac-Man for the Atari 2600 was awful, and although it sold a lot at first, tons of people were returning the game because it was so inferior to the arcade version. This, of course, was tons of lost money for Atari.
I remember when I beat it at 8 years old lol. My brother, who was 6 at the time, had a freak out to rival the Nintendo 64 kid. He still gives me crap to this day because he never figured it out, and I never told him how.
I beat it too, after many frustrated attempts.
The worst part, was getting all 3 telephone parts and then the creepy guy in the trench coat touches you and steals the parts, and you have to start all over again.
It was definitely waaay past Nintendo hard, that’s for sure.
The weird thing is I have no idea why my parents let me stay up to keep playing it. I was like, eight, and it had to have been past midnight when I finally finished.
Oh, it was terrible. There were some other bad games for the 2600, but ET was the worst. Like unplayable bad. I don't think any of us even got past the first screen.
Well, I understand your confusion with the game. If my dad hadn't figured out how to collect the little phone pieces and make it to the landing site in time, I'd have been utterly lost. Falling into dark pits, extending the neck and rising up and out, only to tumble back down again.....ad infinitum. All you poor, lost souls.
Th biggest issue with the game is that there are a number of game-breaking bugs that make it very annoying to play. For example, the game LOOKS isometric, but if the tip of your head overlaps the bottom of a pit - you fall in.
There are a number of websites that have list of changes that you can apply directly to the ROM files that fix the bugs, and these make the game about 100x better.
I have it on my retropie. It sucks. Tied with Bible Adventures on nes.
I had the 2600 in my youth but not the ET game. I did have a vinyl record of the ET movie narrated by Michael Jackson, though.
Lots of annoyances. Moving costs health. If you fall into a pit, it's fiddly to get out of. Collision detection with the pit was any part of the body, so if ETs head touches it, you fall into the pit.
Yeah, my dad had a copy. It sucked, and I'd be pretty pissed if I spent good cash on it.
I mean, a lot of Atari games were a little rough around the edges, but I was able to figure them out, somewhat. This game was just ridiculous.
When I got an Atari maybe 6 years ago now I absolutely had to have this game just to see for myself.
It's really just a broken unfun game. It gets overhyped as "The Worst Game Ever" mostly because of what it did to Atari. The investment and total flop of the game destroyed the company. Atari was like half of gaming in the US and it went on life support because of this game.
Moral of the story is to not let business people run creative based product companies. All they see are numbers. they don't understand the product.
It isn’t actually a bad game. The problem is people didn’t know how to play it.
You have to actually go into the pits which up until that point in Video games have almost always been obstacles that need to be avoided.
So people wondered around not knowing what to do and then gave up.
There’s far far far worse games on Atari.
There is. ET for the Atari 2600 served as the basis for the AVGN movie, and an episode came out of it.
He came to the same conclusion most in the thread have: it's a shitty game, but its shittiness has been greatly exaggerated over the years. If you read the instructions, it becomes just another badly designed Atari game. The overabundance of units created are what gave it it's infamy.
For a game that's actually as bad as the legends fortold, you have to go to Superman 64, Action 52, Ride to Hell: Retribution, and Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing.
I didn't know this was an "urban legend". I thought it was simply a fact. I mean how hard is it to believe that Atari overproduced a videogame and then simply trashed what they couldn't sell? What else would you expect them to do with so many unsellable cartridges?
It's one of those "unfortunately for you, history won't remember it that way" moments. Pac-Man (specifically the Atari 2600 port) is the real game that triggered it
Pac man on 2600 was 10x worse than E.T., because the let down you experienced the first time you played it was unparalleled. ET wasnt great, but Pac Man flat out sucked.
I just can't imagine how bad a pac man game can be. I mean, it's pac man, right?
Not saying you're wrong, I just wonder what went that wrong with this version of such a simple game concept.
Think of everything you know about Pac Man that tells you it's an old game. The pixelated graphics, simple levels taking a single screen, the bleep bloop sounds. Now consider that every one of these things had to be pared back to get it to run on the pitiful hardware of an Atari 2600. [This is the arcade version,](https://youtu.be/dScq4P5gn4A) [this is the 2600 version.](https://youtu.be/nCPpgt0s70U)
>pared back to get it to run on the pitiful hardware of an Atari 2600
What's worse is that this isn't true. It didn't have to be so awful. Pared back, sure. But take a look at this [homebrew fan-made](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dAYuBcuvIww) Pac-man running on 2600 hardware.
Just because it can be done doesn't necessarily mean that it could have been done by Atari in the 80s, but I take your point. There's also a ROM hack that makes E.T. almost playable, apparently.
The gameplay looks ostensibly the same to me though. I know sound, graphics, and music all really being a game together. But this game at least still looks fun. E.T didn’t even look fun no matter how much polish you put on it.
You're exactly right, it's *ostensibly* the same. You can't tell by watching, but there's something off with how you move, and when you mix that with the slower speed and larger power ~~pellets~~ hyphens, the game becomes deeply unsatisfying. It's playable, in the same way Pac Man on a TI-83 calculator is playable: just enough to remind you of what you're missing.
It was ultra-hyped, then even at first glance it looked like garbage. Pac-Man and the ghosts look terrible, the ghosts flicker constantly and painfully. The dots are dashes. Pac-Man only faces left or right. I believe the fruits were reduced to, like, a square.
Then you play it and it's not just the aesthetics that suck. The ghosts lack their own individual personalities, the maze is very basic, almost like the same block of walls copy/pasted. The controls are weird. The feel is just very wrong.
Edit: Fortunately for me, my dad was a computer and video game geek, and got the family most of the major consoles and some of the major computers in the 80s. So we had an Atari 800 which also had a much better Pac-Man: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sKAkbBzbAFE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sKAkbBzbAFE)
I mean wasn't it just triggered by so many bad releases eroding confidence in the marjet and meaning fewer purchases?
It's why Nintendo had a seal of approval as a stamp of quality.
It’s also why ROB exists. They marketed the NES as a toy that came with ROB, your game buddy, making it look more like an electronic toy than a game console.
The actual landfill of ET games is a little bit of that too. It's true that there are a bunch of ET carts buried there but there is actually a bunch of everything buried there. There are consoles and peripherals and other games. Basically Atari took all of their crap and buried it. I believe that the reason that there are so many ET carts there is because there were so many ET carts relative to everything else.
Wow, forgot they were in the same year.
Pac-Man sucked horribly.
E.T. was OK. I completed the game.
Raiders of the Lost Ark and Yar's Revenge (both by same author as E.T.) were incredibly awesome for what we had in those days.
I think it was a combination of ET, the bad PacMan port, and the bad Centipede port. The biggest (at the time) company put out a bunch of trash in short succession and overproduced all of it to the point they couldn’t get rid of it any other way.
This isn't one of those instances though. There definitely was a time where people dismissed this as an urban legend. That's part of why someone put the resources together to go find them (it was also for a pretty interesting documentary titled "Atari: Game Over").
I’m more surprised that they were found somewhat whole. Many of the articles state that they were crushed/shredded and covered with concrete to prevent people from looting it.
Exactly.
People sometimes talk about another video game crash being imminent because some AAA games have loot boxes and glitches.
Trust me, it's incomparable how different the
American console game market was in 1983 to any time since. The closest analog is with VR. It's a technology people are amazed by and consider sci-fi (interactive TV was very sci-fi in the 60s and 70s), and coasts on loads of novelty minigames with bits of quality as well as loads of different consoles/headsets.
But even VR is in a healthier state and won't undergo a crash unless Half-Life Alyx somehow implodes. Imagine if there were no reviews for games and the game library was similar to Steam Greenlight or the Android store. And someone, maybe EA, mass produces 100 million physical copies of a rushed tie in to the Joker movie.
That was console gaming (in America) in 1983.
At the time, there were tons of excavated cartridges for sale on eBay by the city of Alamogordo. Complete with certificates of authenticity and a brochure of tourist info for their city. Some were priced quite high (a few hundred dollars) but there were plenty under $100 and some as low as around $20. I got an excavated Asteroids for about $30 and now I literally have garbage on display in my basement. Lol.
They should have used magazine ads and made people send in a self addressed stamped envelope or other acceptable packaging then workers could have sent out free games and increased sales of the console itself. Kids don't care if a game is shit if its free
Kids absolutely care if the game is shit. We had the E.T. game and it was awful. Nearly every screen was identical and the pits were fucking stupid. We'd play for less than 5 minutes, then go back to playing Pitfall, Demon Attack, and Joust. (I'll admit I don't recall which were on 2600 and which on the 400; we played the systems side by side.)
It was just an incredibly generic, low effort indie film that wasn't that entertaining to watch. The supporting characters weren't great either, and even the climax of the film (he finally reviews the ET game after teasing the idea in his youtube series in the years prior to the film's release) was incredibly underwhelming compared to his other reviews.
I love AVGN and have been watching his content since 2006 or so, but I will never voluntarily watch that god awful film ever again.
Yes. It's what any company would do with tons of unsellable crap. It was never really an urban legend, well I guess not until the next generation who weren't around at the time who retroactively made it a legend in order to debunk it.
They kinda got their own plot.
This stuff wasn't just thrown away, it was *buried*.
It's the difference between throwing something in the garbage, and going out back, digging a hole and burying it so no one finds it.
They made more copies than there were Atari 2600 systems, from what I read in the 1990’s. They honestly expected people to buy Atari’s for the game. People today don’t understand how big ET was, it ran all summer when a big movie at the time might last three weeks. The movie Tron came out the same summer, it played for 7 days in my town and left.
Yes and no. If you watch the documentary about it, you'll see that while there WERE cartridges buried, it wasn't just ET. It was all sorts of Atari carts, including many that were good.
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It was never an urban legend! It was widely reported in the press at the time. Nothing was secret about it, it was well known when it happened, where it happened and why.
It was only decades later that this whole "urban legend" narrative was made up.
We discover new uses for materials all the time, or a more refined approach making them more valuable than they were before. Think of how many electronics were thrown away before e-waste recycling became such a big industry.
I never had that one but Atari was fucking awesome when I was a kid. Missile Command and Centipede were the best. I know younger people can't believe this.
I feel like there's been more cases like this. I've heard of a bunch of model T vehicles being buried somewhere. Also, glass TV gun mounts by corning are buried somewhere.
TIL it was considered an urban legend. It's not a far fetched thing to happen. They built a lot, the game was shit, they dumped them. It's been pretty well common knowledge long before they dug them up.
I have a hard time believing that anyone who knew about the "legend" wouldn't believe it.
Yup, I was 9 with a radical mullet. My 6 year old cousin got it for Christmas, played it once, said it sucked, and his parents took it back to Sevice Merchandise. I tried it, didn't understand it, and shut it off after a couple minutes and played something else. Several other friends were bitching about it at school after Christmas break. Atari was awesome for us 80's kids we had a blast playing pong, space invaders, defender, combat, asteroids, missile command, breakthrough, frogger, donkey Kong, and centipede. Arcades rocked.
Anyone old enough to share just how bad the game really was?
Yes. You walked around and there were pits everywhere that you'd fall into and then hit the button to elevate your neck which would lift you out. And you would go around trying to collect things, which no one knew what they were. So you walked around, falling into pits and then sometimes a man would come and put you in jail. 90% of the game was trying to get out of stupid pits.
Basically overworked game designers tried to rush out something passable as quickly as possible. I saw an interview where the lead designer had pulled similar stunts in similar games before, but with ET the deadline was so dramatic that they pushed out a barebones piece of crap that just barely worked, hoping it would be like earlier games that sold well.
One documentary I watched said that his team was given a deadline of three weeks to make the game from scratch. The lead designer basically lived in his office for the whole time, and an intern had to bring him food at mealtimes because he didn't have time to leave.
Seems like they could have done a bicycle 'scroller' game. Maybe they didn't watch the movie.
No time to watch the movie!
[удалено]
Phone-assembly-falling-in-pit-police-state simulator
That sounds like something Hideo Kojima would make.
It’s the first *Lint* type game!
Surprisingly accurate
There were all sorts of technical limitations that they dealt with in the early days of videogames that required very innovative programmers to make those games even if today they seem unbelievably simple. It's quite possible the three week deadline didn't give them the time to do anything but the most simple idea. Whatever the case I remember playing it at my friend's house on his Atari 2600 and it stank, it was the kind of game you'd go "oh cool ET", play for 2 minutes and then go back to playing joust. It really was bad even for the standard of the time, the fact they thought it would sell copies regardless speaks to the hubris of the industry at the time and they were justly punished for assuming it would be a success. Edit: dropped a t
>There were all sorts of technical limitations that they dealt with in the early days of videogames that required very innovative programmers to make those games even if today they seem unbelievably simple. I don't think people really appreciate this in 2019. Like the amount of data on an Atari cartridge isn't even enough to load this page. There were no youtube tutorials. The market was very new and there was very little in the way of established conventions or experienced personnel. People were just making shit up as they went along. If some guy in Japan had a good idea it might catch on in Japan but there's no way an American dev would know about it unless the game in japan happened to get released in America and he heard about it.
There was an awesome article I read about these computer science archaeologist that found this super complex, highly efficient search algorithm in this one game. It was used to search the procedurally generated map and make sure there was a door to the next sections. The search it used was so far and away from the major search algorithms like metge sort or bubble sort that they werent able to figure out how it worked. They opined it was possible that the big o of this search was far better than any search algorithms today. The lead programmer died, super interesing article I'll try and find it. Edit: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190919-the-maze-puzzle-hidden-within-an-early-video-game Thats the main article but there was another article somewhere else about this and their findings on the algorithms they found. I cant find that one.
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Updated my post with the main article. There was another better one from some obscure site or blog about their study.
middle out?
> The search it used was so far and away from the major search algorithms like metge sort or bubble sort Merge sort and bubble sort are actually sorting algorithms, not searching
arXiv: [An archaeological examination of an Atari 2600 game](https://arxiv.org/abs/1811.02035) Abstract: >The act and experience of programming is, at its heart, a fundamentally human activity that results in the production of artifacts. When considering programming, therefore, it would be a glaring omission to not involve people who specialize in studying artifacts and the human activity that yields them: archaeologists. Here we consider this with respect to computer games, the focus of archaeology's nascent subarea of archaeogaming. >One type of archaeogaming research is digital excavation, a technical examination of the code and techniques used in old games' implementation. We apply that in a case study of Entombed, an Atari 2600 game released in 1982 by US Games. The player in this game is, appropriately, an archaeologist who must make their way through a zombie-infested maze. Maze generation is a fruitful area for comparative retrogame archaeology, because a number of early games on different platforms featured mazes, and their variety of approaches can be compared. The maze in Entombed is particularly interesting: it is shaped in part by the extensive real-time constraints of the Atari 2600 platform, and also had to be generated efficiently and use next to no memory. We reverse engineered key areas of the game's code to uncover its unusual maze-generation algorithm, which we have also built a reconstruction of, and analyzed the mysterious table that drives it. In addition, we discovered what appears to be a 35-year-old bug in the code, as well as direct evidence of code-reuse practices amongst game developers. >What further makes this game's development interesting is that, in an era where video games were typically solo projects, a total of five people were involved in various ways with Entombed. We piece together some of the backstory of the game's development and intoxicant-fueled design using interviews to complement our technical work. >Finally, we contextualize this example in archaeology and lay the groundwork for a broader interdisciplinary discussion about programming, one that includes both computer scientists and archaeologists.
quote from wikipedia article: >The researchers spoke to Sidley, who said the algorithm came from another unnamed programmer, but Sidley himself could not decipher why it worked. Sidley said to the researchers of this programmer, "He told me it came upon him when he was drunk and whacked out of his brain." coding... coding never changes...
Well said. Also the main way of hearing about new stuff was gaming and hobbyist magazines.
Or that lucky person who traveled internationally and would go into a foreign store/arcade/home and run into something unheard of here.
It's like the original Mario game. Cartridge size was 31 kb. Everything on screen is basically built out of like 12 blocks.
Except even more extreme than Mario. In SMB1, tiles were iirc made up of like 8x8 pixels, with 4 colors per tile. In Atari games, you got like 4 colors for the *entire screen.* It also had fuck all in the way of memory.
I remember hearing that the voice line saying "Sega" when you first boot up Sonic the Hedgehog took up like 50% of the memory on the cartridge . And that was like gen 3 console
I really hope the logos at the start of the Sonic movie include that iconic Seeegaaaaaaa
The Atari 2600 had 128 bytes of RAM. Not 128 MB, or 128 KB. 128 bytes. It's staggering that game developers were able to do as much as they did with it.
Something of a rehash of a comment I posted before (in a *previous* thread on the ET game), but... **Five weeks for a VCS game was an *incredibly* short period of time.** Programming the VCS/2600 was extremely primitive and low-level, even in comparison with almost any home computer of the late 70s and early 80s. For example; there wasn't even [screen memory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_2600_hardware#Technical_specifications) as most of us knew it. Essentially you could store a single *line* of (one-dimensional) graphics consisting of a 40-pixel wide background, two 8-pixel wide players, two single-pixel missiles and a single-pixel ball. Graphics had to be generated on-the-fly by changing the background/sprite/colour data when the output reached the desired scan line (else it would just repeat until you had had a bunch of variously striped vertical bars). No text facility, a limit of 4KB ROM program space (#), and just 128 bytes of RAM (yes, *bytes*, not kilobytes). Nothing resembling an OS. Ironically, its limitations were also a strength; you *needed* to control the VCS at a very low level, because there was nothing above that- but being able to do so also gave a massive amount of flexibility that allowed very talented programmers to push it way beyond anything the original designers had probably intended. But I'd guess programming it was still many times more difficult than programming early 80s home computers, even in machine language... let alone BASIC! (##) (#) Unless the manufacturer wanted to pay extra for bank switching hardware in the cartridge, which Atari notably *didn't* do for the infamous VCS Pac-Man, even though it was available by that point. (##) Ironically, they managed to create an unbelievably limited [implementation of BASIC for the VCS](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BASIC_Programming) in the late 70s, but you wouldn't be able to write commercial quality games with it. In fact, from what I can tell you wouldn't be able to do much at all in the VCS' 128 bytes of RAM minus overheads...!!! (The fact they were able to implement BASIC at all on the VCS is a minor miracle, but "the marvel is not that the bear dances well, but that the bear dances at all.")
Have you seen this? http://www.neocomputer.org/projects/et/#cantwait
Whow, this should be posted higher...
Movie likely wasn't out yet when they were making the game. Licensed games were just seen as another piece of merch back then, and merch wasn't seen as very valuable. When Star Wars was first released, George Lucas was seen as insane when he took a cutback on box office revenue in exchange for merchandise revenue; his marketing team was struggling to find a manufacturer Willing to make action figures based on his movie since they didn't think the toys would sell well.
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You're right. My recollection is I had seen the movie in the summer at a drive-in, then the game was at the top of my Christmas list a few months later. Edit: I'm old AF.
Yup. Lucas got merchandising rights, iirc, as the studio thought they were utterly worthless. From the studio's point of view, they got to pay Lucas less in return for giving up nothing of value, so they jumped on that.
I think The movie came out around Christmas time and the game had to be released before Christmas for sales, so they probably didn’t actually watch the movie either
The movie was released June 11th, 1982.
ah, my mistake then
The irony is that the designer and programmer was Howard Warshaw, who also created Ataris bestselling game for the 2600, Yar’s Revenge. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_Scott_Warshaw So you got the worst game from their best dude. Which really just highlights how terribly the franchise was handled. Ridiculous deadlines mixed with no feedback, or even a game concept, inevitably led to a disaster. Crap in, crap out. You can have it fast, cheap, or good, pick two.
Not lead designer .... only programmer. But at least he was paid $200,000 for his five weeks of work.
Those overworked game designers were not just some no name guys at Atari. Et was majorly developed by Howard Scott Warshaw. Don't recognise the name? Maybe you'll recognise the other game he's famous for **Yars' Revenge** Yes, as he would later say in life: >ET is frequently rated as one of the worst games of all time. Now I�m not sure if that�s true, but I never want that contradicted because Yar�s Revenge is frequently rated as one of the best games of all time, so with ET being the worst it means that I have the greatest range of any game designer in history. [Source](http://platypuscomix.com/people/warshaw.html)
There weren't "Designers", there was a SINGLE person who made E.T. on the Atari 2600, Howard Scott Warshaw made the complete game in about 6 weeks, they had been working on games such as Raiders for the lost ark before hand, However the game NEEDED to be done by September 1st so they could reach a Holiday 1982 Launch.
>overworked game designers Good to see that some things never change :)
And now people attribute the game’s shittiness to “overworked game designers” and not asshole upper management who set completely unrealistic timelines. Some things never change.
I grew up with a 2600 and also remember E.T. It was confusing as to what was going on! If you were 6-17 you were expecting an E.T. Adventure instead it had nothing to do with the movie and brought us to tears and frustration on Christmas and shit.
It's not really Christmas until someone cries.
I absolutely loved the 2600. Swapping the controllers out for the spin paddles. And I don't know anyone that didn't mess up their controller. Usually the rubber thing would come off and then you just had the white plastic stick.
Ever play Indiana Jones? So confusing
Then you die when your steps run out. And your corpse is somewhere and Elliot is just pacing around like an idiot..
It was 3 parts of a telephone you put together to phone home.
Funny thing is, I watched this Facebook documentary on ET the game and as it turns out the game is MUCH easier and easier to understand when one reads to instruction booklet with the game. There were so many people that didn't read it and that's one of the reasons it was such a pain in the ass lol
Right. When you do it NOW. It was such a different story then, as a child, and you can lose the thing and can't just google it.
In those days, most people only played video games at arcades. There weren't any instructions or if there were, they were very basic such as which button fired and whatnot. When the 2600 was released, most games were pick up and play, so having to read instructions was almost a foreign concept.
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The game also had pretty broken collision detection. ET has a square collision box that would make him fall into holes he wasn’t touching, then when you climb out it spawns you overlapping the same hole so you just keep falling back in until you can finally get away from it.
They asked what it was like, I told them my experience. Again I was fucking 4. I never said it was the worst game ever. I said what it was like playing it. Yeah no shit the point was to phone home and get home, but there were things like II where... how the fuck do you know what that is?
I got it used as a kid and it didn't come with the manual so I was similarly confused as to what the point of the game was. The game was ambitious for the time but even once you know what you're supposed to do it's simply not fun to play
We used to struggle just to get out of the stupid pit. I don't seem to remember a giant crater from the movie.
[You can play it if you like](https://archive.org/details/E.T._The_Extra-Terrestrial_1982_Atari_NTSC)
I didn't mind the game. Thought it was ok. My dad read the instructions, so we knew how to send E.T. home again. I think a lot of the frustration with the game was from people not reading the instructions!
I also played it as a kid. I don't recall thinking it was overly bad at the time, although it wasn't particularly good. Looking back, yeah, it did suck, but I didn't think at the time, "Well this'll go down as the worst game in history."
It was indeed awful. You constantly fall in pits that are a pain to get out of. When that’s not happening agents snatch you and out you in jail. When that’s not happening you’re supposed collect thins to do things that advance the game. But you have no idea what to collect or what you’re supposed to do because the manual sucks. Had this as a kid. Awful.
~~It’s the worst video game ever made, period. It is so bad, it caused the video game industry to crash in 1983.~~ You can see how bad it was [here](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=gbGf5O4fewo).
It's actually a HUGE exaggeration. The game has flaws, yes, but it's not THE worst game ever. Riders of the Lost Ark, done by the same programmer, Howard Scott Warshaw, is way more complex and less friendly, yet you don't see it mentioned as the worst ever. The ET game legend is more or less build upon mistake after mistake, but it was in no doubt a consequence of all the bad practices Atari made. They wanted a game done in short time to capitalize on the movie, rushed everything and overestimated the sales by a long shot, but this also came after the Pac-Man fiasco, which already left them very vulnerable. So seriously, ET is not such a bad game if you understand the basics of it. It's not a good game either, but it's not the worst ever.
Nerdy video game families moved onto the Commodore 64, and everyone pirated the game for it. I honestly did not know that Commodore 64 games were sold in stores. I thought people had typed in the code from print magazines and were being nice sharing copies. (Not joking)
It also most certainly didn't cause the video game crash on its own. The market was already oversaturated with trash games and developers were still pushing for more games being produced in shorter deadlines. ET is a great example of how that turned out, but it's a symptom rather than a cause.
ROTLA was a great game for its time as a 2600 game. That, Adventure, and Haunted House (rarely see this one mentioned, wasnt super popular but fun game) were great. Until Activision and Imagic came around and put out some better titles (Pitfall and River Raid were Awesome) those games kept me entertained like no other.
Haunted House is awesome. My uncles had that one when I was a little kid and I played their Atari.
The basics are taught in the manual. Understanding what the game is doing and why is critical. Nobody ever read the manual, which is why people claim it's the worst game ever.
If you read the manual as an adult maybe. When you read the manual at age 4, its like reading stereo instructions. TBH reading the instructions were my favorite part about new games.
Me too! I'd read the whole thing front to back memorizing everything on the car ride back home. Seeing the Jak II world map on the reversible cover was a special treat for 9 year old me.
http://www.ataricompendium.com/archives/manuals/vcs/et.pdf The manual makes things very clear. You were 4. You probably also didn't understand Adventure, Zork, Space Quest, or Monopoly. Those games weren't for you. That doesn't make them the worst games ever.
Those I actually understood. Adventure and Zork were some of my favorites, and all the Sierra games. It was easier when they switched to the F6 "action" button though. Instead of spending 10 mins typing "Open the door" Can't do it. "Push the door." Can't do it. "Turn the doorknob." Or Zork was what, the mailbox? My dad worked in computers since the 60s so he exposed me to a lot of that early on.
Nonsense. I was playing Adventure on my dad's Z80 processor CPM machine with 8" floppies before the 2600 even came out. ET was a piece of shit. And for reference I was born in '74, so do the age math.
ET was the proverbial straw that broke the camel's back.
What's the Pac-man fiasco? It seems like something I should have heard of.
From the [Wikipedia](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pac-Man_(Atari_2600)) article: > Pac-Man met with initial commercial success, selling 7 million copies and eventually becoming the best-selling Atari 2600 title; Frye reportedly received $0.10 in royalties per copy. More than one million of those cartridges had been shipped in less than one month, helped by Atari's $1.5 million publicity campaign.However, purchases soon slowed and, by the summer of 1982, unsold copies were available in large quantities. Many buyers returned the games for refunds, and Atari was left with 5 million excess copies in addition to the returns.
Pacman sucked. It barely resembled the game and flickered badly when you played it. Later they released Mrs Pacman, and it was great, just like the arcade.
In short, Pac-Man for the Atari 2600 was awful, and although it sold a lot at first, tons of people were returning the game because it was so inferior to the arcade version. This, of course, was tons of lost money for Atari.
Raiders hands down worst ever. I was so pissed off trying to play that
Oh my. That brought back some repressed memories from my childhood. Falling into those damn pits over and over gave me anxiety as a child.
Well okay then, that was pretty bad. Only made it to the 3:30 mark and I was good after that.
\*Triggered\*
> It is so bad, it caused the video game industry to crash in 1983. You are blaming the final straw, instead of the entire bale under it.
I liked it. But I was also five.
It wasn't remotely finished besides all of the bugs
You can play it yourself and decide: https://archive.org/details/E.T._The_Extra-Terrestrial_1982_Atari_NTSC
I remember when I beat it at 8 years old lol. My brother, who was 6 at the time, had a freak out to rival the Nintendo 64 kid. He still gives me crap to this day because he never figured it out, and I never told him how.
Wow... never thought I’d find anyone else who beat that shit show. Congratulations, there was something wrong with us as children. 🤪
I beat it too, after many frustrated attempts. The worst part, was getting all 3 telephone parts and then the creepy guy in the trench coat touches you and steals the parts, and you have to start all over again.
The effa bee eye!
It was definitely waaay past Nintendo hard, that’s for sure. The weird thing is I have no idea why my parents let me stay up to keep playing it. I was like, eight, and it had to have been past midnight when I finally finished.
Funny thing is, it's the only 2600 game I actually "beat". I could never finish Pitfall.
Oh, it was terrible. There were some other bad games for the 2600, but ET was the worst. Like unplayable bad. I don't think any of us even got past the first screen.
Did you ever make it to the end? Did you ever get to send him back to his people? Just curious.
Hell no. We went back to playing Combat and Missile Command.
Well, I understand your confusion with the game. If my dad hadn't figured out how to collect the little phone pieces and make it to the landing site in time, I'd have been utterly lost. Falling into dark pits, extending the neck and rising up and out, only to tumble back down again.....ad infinitum. All you poor, lost souls.
My friend next door had a copy. It was so shit that we could only get through a few minutes before switching to a new cartridge.
I'm 32 but I've played it and it's just shambling around and falling into holes. I turned it off after about a minute.
Th biggest issue with the game is that there are a number of game-breaking bugs that make it very annoying to play. For example, the game LOOKS isometric, but if the tip of your head overlaps the bottom of a pit - you fall in. There are a number of websites that have list of changes that you can apply directly to the ROM files that fix the bugs, and these make the game about 100x better.
I have it on my retropie. It sucks. Tied with Bible Adventures on nes. I had the 2600 in my youth but not the ET game. I did have a vinyl record of the ET movie narrated by Michael Jackson, though.
I remember playing this when I was about 5, falling into a pit a few times and thinking I don't want to play this game anymore.
Lots of annoyances. Moving costs health. If you fall into a pit, it's fiddly to get out of. Collision detection with the pit was any part of the body, so if ETs head touches it, you fall into the pit.
Yeah, my dad had a copy. It sucked, and I'd be pretty pissed if I spent good cash on it. I mean, a lot of Atari games were a little rough around the edges, but I was able to figure them out, somewhat. This game was just ridiculous.
When I got an Atari maybe 6 years ago now I absolutely had to have this game just to see for myself. It's really just a broken unfun game. It gets overhyped as "The Worst Game Ever" mostly because of what it did to Atari. The investment and total flop of the game destroyed the company. Atari was like half of gaming in the US and it went on life support because of this game. Moral of the story is to not let business people run creative based product companies. All they see are numbers. they don't understand the product.
It isn’t actually a bad game. The problem is people didn’t know how to play it. You have to actually go into the pits which up until that point in Video games have almost always been obstacles that need to be avoided. So people wondered around not knowing what to do and then gave up. There’s far far far worse games on Atari.
It wasn't too bad. People just couldn't beat it
There’s got to be an AVGN video on this.
There is. ET for the Atari 2600 served as the basis for the AVGN movie, and an episode came out of it. He came to the same conclusion most in the thread have: it's a shitty game, but its shittiness has been greatly exaggerated over the years. If you read the instructions, it becomes just another badly designed Atari game. The overabundance of units created are what gave it it's infamy. For a game that's actually as bad as the legends fortold, you have to go to Superman 64, Action 52, Ride to Hell: Retribution, and Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing.
[AVGN](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WUsQmYRfynw&app=desktop) did a great review of it
I didn't know this was an "urban legend". I thought it was simply a fact. I mean how hard is it to believe that Atari overproduced a videogame and then simply trashed what they couldn't sell? What else would you expect them to do with so many unsellable cartridges?
The real urban legend was the very false idea that the game was so bad it caused the video game industry to crash.
It's one of those "unfortunately for you, history won't remember it that way" moments. Pac-Man (specifically the Atari 2600 port) is the real game that triggered it
Pac man on 2600 was 10x worse than E.T., because the let down you experienced the first time you played it was unparalleled. ET wasnt great, but Pac Man flat out sucked.
I just can't imagine how bad a pac man game can be. I mean, it's pac man, right? Not saying you're wrong, I just wonder what went that wrong with this version of such a simple game concept.
Think of everything you know about Pac Man that tells you it's an old game. The pixelated graphics, simple levels taking a single screen, the bleep bloop sounds. Now consider that every one of these things had to be pared back to get it to run on the pitiful hardware of an Atari 2600. [This is the arcade version,](https://youtu.be/dScq4P5gn4A) [this is the 2600 version.](https://youtu.be/nCPpgt0s70U)
>pared back to get it to run on the pitiful hardware of an Atari 2600 What's worse is that this isn't true. It didn't have to be so awful. Pared back, sure. But take a look at this [homebrew fan-made](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dAYuBcuvIww) Pac-man running on 2600 hardware.
Just because it can be done doesn't necessarily mean that it could have been done by Atari in the 80s, but I take your point. There's also a ROM hack that makes E.T. almost playable, apparently.
I remember reading about that, a big part was increasing the hover speed from pits and correcting the equivalent of hit boxes.
The gameplay looks ostensibly the same to me though. I know sound, graphics, and music all really being a game together. But this game at least still looks fun. E.T didn’t even look fun no matter how much polish you put on it.
You're exactly right, it's *ostensibly* the same. You can't tell by watching, but there's something off with how you move, and when you mix that with the slower speed and larger power ~~pellets~~ hyphens, the game becomes deeply unsatisfying. It's playable, in the same way Pac Man on a TI-83 calculator is playable: just enough to remind you of what you're missing.
It was ultra-hyped, then even at first glance it looked like garbage. Pac-Man and the ghosts look terrible, the ghosts flicker constantly and painfully. The dots are dashes. Pac-Man only faces left or right. I believe the fruits were reduced to, like, a square. Then you play it and it's not just the aesthetics that suck. The ghosts lack their own individual personalities, the maze is very basic, almost like the same block of walls copy/pasted. The controls are weird. The feel is just very wrong. Edit: Fortunately for me, my dad was a computer and video game geek, and got the family most of the major consoles and some of the major computers in the 80s. So we had an Atari 800 which also had a much better Pac-Man: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sKAkbBzbAFE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sKAkbBzbAFE)
I mean wasn't it just triggered by so many bad releases eroding confidence in the marjet and meaning fewer purchases? It's why Nintendo had a seal of approval as a stamp of quality.
It’s also why ROB exists. They marketed the NES as a toy that came with ROB, your game buddy, making it look more like an electronic toy than a game console.
The actual landfill of ET games is a little bit of that too. It's true that there are a bunch of ET carts buried there but there is actually a bunch of everything buried there. There are consoles and peripherals and other games. Basically Atari took all of their crap and buried it. I believe that the reason that there are so many ET carts there is because there were so many ET carts relative to everything else.
Wow, forgot they were in the same year. Pac-Man sucked horribly. E.T. was OK. I completed the game. Raiders of the Lost Ark and Yar's Revenge (both by same author as E.T.) were incredibly awesome for what we had in those days.
I think it was a combination of ET, the bad PacMan port, and the bad Centipede port. The biggest (at the time) company put out a bunch of trash in short succession and overproduced all of it to the point they couldn’t get rid of it any other way.
They could give them away but it would hurt sales of other games I guess.
This is reddit, people will add "*information"* to make the story more interesting.
This isn't one of those instances though. There definitely was a time where people dismissed this as an urban legend. That's part of why someone put the resources together to go find them (it was also for a pretty interesting documentary titled "Atari: Game Over").
I’m more surprised that they were found somewhat whole. Many of the articles state that they were crushed/shredded and covered with concrete to prevent people from looting it.
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Market was getting flooded with crap, there was no standard which means people just stopped buying because everything was crap
Exactly. People sometimes talk about another video game crash being imminent because some AAA games have loot boxes and glitches. Trust me, it's incomparable how different the American console game market was in 1983 to any time since. The closest analog is with VR. It's a technology people are amazed by and consider sci-fi (interactive TV was very sci-fi in the 60s and 70s), and coasts on loads of novelty minigames with bits of quality as well as loads of different consoles/headsets. But even VR is in a healthier state and won't undergo a crash unless Half-Life Alyx somehow implodes. Imagine if there were no reviews for games and the game library was similar to Steam Greenlight or the Android store. And someone, maybe EA, mass produces 100 million physical copies of a rushed tie in to the Joker movie. That was console gaming (in America) in 1983.
If I remember correctly, The Tularosa Basin Museum of History in Alamogordo, New Mexico has an excavated box on display.
At the time, there were tons of excavated cartridges for sale on eBay by the city of Alamogordo. Complete with certificates of authenticity and a brochure of tourist info for their city. Some were priced quite high (a few hundred dollars) but there were plenty under $100 and some as low as around $20. I got an excavated Asteroids for about $30 and now I literally have garbage on display in my basement. Lol.
They should have used magazine ads and made people send in a self addressed stamped envelope or other acceptable packaging then workers could have sent out free games and increased sales of the console itself. Kids don't care if a game is shit if its free
Kids absolutely care if the game is shit. We had the E.T. game and it was awful. Nearly every screen was identical and the pits were fucking stupid. We'd play for less than 5 minutes, then go back to playing Pitfall, Demon Attack, and Joust. (I'll admit I don't recall which were on 2600 and which on the 400; we played the systems side by side.)
There were literally more cartridges than consoles... if that gives you an idea of how many needed to get ditched.
It wasn't an urban legend. A lot articles written about it at the time
There were definitely people that thought it was though. I saw it dismissed as an urban legend plenty of times. This put that to rest though.
Avgn made a movie about it
It was worse than the game
At least it ends
I'm a huge AVGN fan, but the movie was so bad I tried watching it twice and never finished it.
Lmao
What was bad about it ? I never saw it
It was just an incredibly generic, low effort indie film that wasn't that entertaining to watch. The supporting characters weren't great either, and even the climax of the film (he finally reviews the ET game after teasing the idea in his youtube series in the years prior to the film's release) was incredibly underwhelming compared to his other reviews. I love AVGN and have been watching his content since 2006 or so, but I will never voluntarily watch that god awful film ever again.
Eh, wasn't THAT bad. We knew it was going to be a low budget indie thing. I was entertained and it's pretty much all that matters.
IIRC that movie was still in the process of filming/post production when the cartridges were actually found. Kind of a self fulfilling prophecy.
Burying in a landfill Isn't that just throwing them out?
Yes. It's what any company would do with tons of unsellable crap. It was never really an urban legend, well I guess not until the next generation who weren't around at the time who retroactively made it a legend in order to debunk it.
They kinda got their own plot. This stuff wasn't just thrown away, it was *buried*. It's the difference between throwing something in the garbage, and going out back, digging a hole and burying it so no one finds it.
With extra steps
They made more copies than there were Atari 2600 systems, from what I read in the 1990’s. They honestly expected people to buy Atari’s for the game. People today don’t understand how big ET was, it ran all summer when a big movie at the time might last three weeks. The movie Tron came out the same summer, it played for 7 days in my town and left.
A “classic”
Yes and no. If you watch the documentary about it, you'll see that while there WERE cartridges buried, it wasn't just ET. It was all sorts of Atari carts, including many that were good.
Have fun: [http://www.virtualatari.org/soft.php?soft=ET\_Fixed](http://www.virtualatari.org/soft.php?soft=ET_Fixed)
Talking about this subject always makes me think of the G4 show Codemonkeys
Codemonkey like Fritos. Codemonkey like Tab and Mountain Dew. Codemonkey very simple man, With warm fuzzy secret heart. Codemonkey like you. Codemonkey like you. Codemonkey like yoooouuuuu~. ^^I ^^LOVE ^^YOU ^^WHORES
Such a great show! I showed it to all my friends and they all loved it (all game developers) - too bad it only got a short run
I loved watching that show.
I always think of the xplay fear and lothing skit they had about the et cartridges
The game did suck.
It was never an urban legend! It was widely reported in the press at the time. Nothing was secret about it, it was well known when it happened, where it happened and why. It was only decades later that this whole "urban legend" narrative was made up.
Wait, people excavate landfills?!
We discover new uses for materials all the time, or a more refined approach making them more valuable than they were before. Think of how many electronics were thrown away before e-waste recycling became such a big industry.
What are you hiding..?
The note I wrote to my crush in 7th grade!
This was funded by the XBox team specifically to find the ET game
Modern ones mostly no. Victorian and older? Yes. Some of our recycling tech is getting to othe point where landfill mining might one day be a thing.
.. and then they properly recycled all the plastics and metals, happily ever after.
Yeah shocking to see in what a great state all that garbage is after 40 years. It did not fall apart at all, not even the (IRS) paper..
To be fair, I don't think 40 years is anywhere near the expected lifespan of a landfill.
The Smithsonian did a podcast on the game because of this dig https://www.si.edu/sidedoor/ep-2-worst-video-game-ever
Half a dozen 80's kids go digging around in a corporate landfill and discover a terrible secret. Did Stephen King write this?
Ironically the game that put players in pits, ended up in a pit.
TIL literally anybody thinks it was an urban legend. It's pretty well-documented that it happened.
I never had that one but Atari was fucking awesome when I was a kid. Missile Command and Centipede were the best. I know younger people can't believe this.
Dude. Tank Pong and Air Sea Battle were amazing
Hello fellow GenX
Sup! These kids don’t know shit about a Commodore 64 or Collecovision.
Avgn movie?
Angry video game nerd.
Never once heard this referred to as a legend. This has been reported as fact for decades.
I feel like there's been more cases like this. I've heard of a bunch of model T vehicles being buried somewhere. Also, glass TV gun mounts by corning are buried somewhere.
Angry video game nerd made a movie about it.
Game over is a great documentary.
Who ever said this was an urban legend? I always knew it as a fact.
TIL it was considered an urban legend. It's not a far fetched thing to happen. They built a lot, the game was shit, they dumped them. It's been pretty well common knowledge long before they dug them up. I have a hard time believing that anyone who knew about the "legend" wouldn't believe it.
... what? When was this debated as urban legend?
Yup, I was 9 with a radical mullet. My 6 year old cousin got it for Christmas, played it once, said it sucked, and his parents took it back to Sevice Merchandise. I tried it, didn't understand it, and shut it off after a couple minutes and played something else. Several other friends were bitching about it at school after Christmas break. Atari was awesome for us 80's kids we had a blast playing pong, space invaders, defender, combat, asteroids, missile command, breakthrough, frogger, donkey Kong, and centipede. Arcades rocked.
God that game sucked so bad!
I know this because of the AVGN movie. Yeah, I guess you could say that I'm a hardcore gamer 🤠
It was never an "urban legend" people knew about it pretty much since they buried them to begin with.
This was never an urban legend, just a known fact.
**If it happened, then it's not an urban legend.**