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E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (Atari 2600)
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E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial is an adventure video game developed and published by Atari, Inc. for the Atari 2600 video game console. It was based on the film of the same name, and was designed by Howard Scott Warshaw in 1982. In E.T., players must control E.T. through various screens and obtain three pieces of a device that allows him to phone home. They are found scattered randomly through pits. With few exceptions, critics and gamers alike feel that it was a poorly produced and rushed game that Atari thought would sell purely based on brand loyalty to the names of Atari and E.T. Owing to the lengthy negotiations to secure the rights to make the game, Warshaw only had six weeks before its scheduled release to develop it.
E.T. is seen as marking the beginning of Atari's downfall and is often viewed as one of the biggest commercial failures in video gaming history, as well as the worst video game ever made.
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Encyclopedia
E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial is an adventure video game developed and published by Atari, Inc. for the Atari 2600 video game console. It was based on the film of the same name, and was designed by Howard Scott Warshaw in 1982. In E.T., players must control E.T. through various screens and obtain three pieces of a device that allows him to phone home. They are found scattered randomly through pits. With few exceptions, critics and gamers alike feel that it was a poorly produced and rushed game that Atari thought would sell purely based on brand loyalty to the names of Atari and E.T. Owing to the lengthy negotiations to secure the rights to make the game, Warshaw only had six weeks before its scheduled release to develop it.
E.T. is seen as marking the beginning of Atari's downfall and is often viewed as one of the biggest commercial failures in video gaming history, as well as the worst video game ever made. E.T. was a contributing factor to Atari's massive financial losses during 1983 and 1984, and a glut of unsold copies of the game helped contribute to the video game crash of 1983. As a result of overproduction, hundreds of thousands of unsold cartridges were buried in a New Mexico landfill.
Gameplay
The gameplay of E.T. consists of maneuvering the eponymous alien character through various screens to obtain three pieces of a device that, when assembled, allows him to phone home. The pieces are obtained by finding them scattered randomly throughout various pits, which are called wells. Alternatively, the player can collect up to nine Reese's Pieces at a time, a healing item, which allows for a call-Elliot option that makes his friend deliver one of the device pieces. Once the player has collected all three pieces, the player can call E.T.'s spaceship from a specific zone, after which there is a limited amount of time to return to the landing zone. Once these conditions are fulfilled, the game starts over at the same difficulty level, with the player's score left intact.
The game consists of six screens representing different settings from the movie. The game starts in a forest, which is also where the ship picks up E.T., and has four screens full of wells of various sizes. The player can cause E.T. to fall into wells, which may contain phone pieces or extra lives; and to escape from a well, the player must cause E.T. to levitate out. An icon at the top of each screen represents the current zone, and each zone enables the player to perform certain actions. These actions include detecting items, warping to other zones, and sending the enemies back to their starting places. Some zones can only be accessed when E.T. possesses certain items (for instance, E.T. must have at least one Reese's Piece to eat candy).
As the player moves E.T. and performs actions throughout the game, his energy supply steadily drains. The player can restore some of E.T.'s energy by eating Reese's Pieces. Extra lives are represented by Elliot merging with E.T. after his energy is depleted, thus reviving him, and letting the player continue until they are spent. Additionally, the player must avoid a scientist who takes E.T. to Washington D.C., and an FBI agent who confiscates E.T.'s collected items. The game offers several difficulty settings that affect the number and speed of humans present and/or the conditions needed to win the game.
Development
Following the record-breaking success of E.T. at the box office in June 1982, Steve Ross, CEO of Atari's parent company Warner Communications, entered talks with Steven Spielberg and Universal Pictures to obtain rights to produce a video game based on the film. In late July, Warner announced that it had acquired the exclusive worldwide rights to market coin-operated and console games based on E.T. the Extraterrestrial.
Although the exact details of the transaction were not disclosed in the announcement, it was widely reported that Atari had paid US$20–25 million for the rights—an abnormally high figure for video game licensing at the time. When asked by Ross what he thought about making an E.T.-based video game, Atari CEO Ray Kassar replied, "I think it's a dumb idea. We've never really made an action game out of a movie." Ultimately though, the decision was not Kassar's to make, and the deal went through.
The task of designing and programming of the game was then offered to Howard Scott Warshaw, whom Spielberg requested due to his previous work on the video game adaptation of the film Raiders of the Lost Ark. Due to the considerable amount of time that had been spent in negotiations securing the rights to make the game, less than six weeks remained in order to meet the September 1 deadline necessary to ship in time for Christmas shopping season. By comparison, Warshaw's Yars' Revenge took four to five months to complete, and Raiders of the Lost Ark six to seven months. An arcade game based on the E.T. property had also been planned, but this was deemed to be impossible given the short deadline. Warshaw accepted the assignment, and was reportedly offered US$200,000 and an all-expenses-paid vacation to Hawaii in compensation.
Instead of making E.T. into a Pac-Man-type game, Warshaw tried a more original idea. He had favored a design that was more story-based in hopes of creating a game that would capture some of the sentimentality he saw in the original film, but eventually ended up scrapping some of his own ideas due to time limitations. Ultimately, Warshaw designed a game based on what he believed could be reasonably programmed in the amount of time he had available to him. The basic design was worked out in two days, at the conclusion of which Warshaw presented the idea to Kassar before proceeding to spend the balance of the allotted five weeks writing, debugging, and documenting about 6.5KB of original code.
E.T. is also notable for being the first video game to credit a graphics artist, with the initials of E.T.'s artist, Jerome Domurat, being hidden as an Easter egg. Howard Scott Warshaw also had his initials hidden as an Easter egg.
Sales
Even with a rushed game in hand, Atari anticipated enormous sales based on the popularity of the film, as well as the enormous boom the video game industry was experiencing in 1982. By the time the game was complete, so little time was left before the game's desired ship-date that Atari skipped audience testing for the cartridge altogether. Emanual Gerard, who served as co-chief operating officer of Warner at the time, later suggested that the company had been lulled into a false sense of security by the success of its previous releases, particularly its console version of Pac-Man, which sold extremely well despite poor critical reaction.
Additionally, Atari had expected the game would perform well simply because, the previous October, it had demanded its retailers place orders in advance for the entire year. At that time, Atari had dominated the software and hardware market, and was routinely unable to fill orders. At first, retailers responded by placing orders for more supplies than they actually expected to sell, but gradually, as new competitors began to enter the market, Atari started receiving an increasing number of order cancellations, for which the company was not prepared.
While the game did sell well (it ranks as the eighth-best selling Atari cartridge of all time), only 1.5 million of the 4 million cartridges produced were sold. It is a myth however, that more copies of E.T. were produced than Atari 2600 consoles owned, though that is exactly what happened with their earlier Pac-Man port. Also many of the copies were sent back to the company, though the number is unknown. Despite reasonable sales figures, the quantity of unsold merchandise coupled with the expensive movie license, and the large amount of returns, caused E.T. to be a massive financial failure for Atari.
This game was one of many decisions that led to Atari posting a $536 million loss in 1983 and led to the company being divided and sold in 1984.
Critical response
By way of published materials written over a decade after its initial release, the game version of E.T. has been almost universally panned by critics – and is one of the most commonly chosen candidates for worst video game of all time. Seanbaby ranked it #1 in a list of the 20 worst games of all time in Electronic Gaming Monthly's 150th issue. Michael Dolan, deputy editor of FHM magazine, has also ranked it as his pick for the #1 worst video game of all time. PC World also placed E.T. at the top of its list of worst video games of all time, with writer Emru Townsend noting that, "About a third of the people I quizzed came up with this title almost instantly, and it's not hard to see why."
Townsend discussed the game with a group, and found that they all criticized "the pits that the player, as E.T., fell into and would then have to slowly levitate out of," which "led to horrendously monotonous game play." Seanbaby also criticized the pits, claiming that they are time-consuming and difficult to leave without falling back in. "Fragmaster" of Classic Gaming called the gameplay "convoluted and inane," also criticizing its story for departing from the serious tone of the film. The game's graphics were considered sub-par compared to other games of the time.
Among communities that have played a wide variety of Atari 2600 games, other titles are more often chosen as being the worst game for the Atari 2600, sometimes with E.T. not even making such Worst of the Atari 2600 lists. However, there is a minority of people who still genuinely enjoy playing the game to this date. Howard Scott Warshaw does not show any regrets for E.T. and feels he created a good game given the time available to him.
Atari landfill
In September 1983, the Alamogordo Daily News of Alamogordo, New Mexico, reported in a series of articles that between ten and twentyMcQuiddy, "City cementing ban on dumping." semi-trailer truckloads of Atari boxes, cartridges, and systems from an Atari storehouse in El Paso, Texas were crushed and buried at the landfill within the city. It was Atari's first dealings with the landfill, which was chosen because no scavenging was allowed and its garbage was crushed and buried nightly. Atari officials and others gave differing reports of what was buried, but it is widely speculated that most of Atari's millions of unsold copies of E.T. ultimately ended up in this landfill, crushed and encased in cement.
The story of the buried cartridges has become a popular urban legend, which in turn has led some people to believe that the story is not true. As recently as October 2004, Warshaw himself expressed doubts that the destruction of millions of copies of E.T. ever took place, citing his belief that Atari would have recycled the parts instead in order to save money.
See also
Books
Newspapers and journals
Endnotes
External links
- from Snopes.com*
- detailing the Great Videogame Crash and the E.T. game's part in it.
- from the Movie Game Database
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