This year, 2007, marks the 25th anniversary of the release of one of the most reviled video games ever made, the game so horrible that millions of unsold copies were crushed and turned into a landfill - the infamous E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial for the Atari 2600.

But, is the game really as bad as all that? Today on Retro-Active, we take a look.

Perhaps you know the story, perhaps you don’t, but here it is in summary. Atari, at the time the king of the toy-store mountain, started snapping up hot licenses of movies and TV shows left and right. Didn’t matter if the properties weren’t particularly well-suited to video game interperetation; in 1982, slapping the name of a popular franchise on a product, any product, was enough to get it to sell. One of those licenses was Steven Speilberg’s hit film about a lovable alien stranded on Earth, trying to find a way home. Programmer Howard Scott Warshaw, the man behind one of the 2600’s finest games (Yar’s Revenge), was given the unenviable task of converting this gentle childrens’ film into a game, and adding to the problem was Atari’s demand that the game be on store shelves in time for the ‘82 Christmas rush, thus Warshaw was given only five weeks to go from blank page to mass-produced ROM. (By comparison, Yar’s Revenge had four months!)

After rejecting an action-style format based on Pac-Man (that was purportedly suggested by Speilberg himself), Warshaw settled on a hybrid action/adventure title (similar to his previous 2600 adaptation of Raiders of the Lost Ark) that actually tried to follow the plot of the film, within reason. As you probably know, the goal of E.T. is to search a six-screen world to locate three pieces of junk that E.T. can use to build his communicator, find a spot where he can “Phone Home,” then locate the ship’s landing zone in time to catch his ride. Along the way, he has to avoid an FBI Agent and an overly inquisitive Scientist, both of whom complicate E.T.’s life by either stealing his phone parts or dragging him off to a lab, making him waste time. He can collect and eat Reese’s Pieces (of course!) to restore lost health, which is important; every action by the player reduces his energy (it starts at 9,999), and if it ever reaches zero, E.T. dies (but can be resurrected by Elliott twice, albeit with only 1,500 energy each time).

Doesn’t sound all that bad… in theory. In practice, however…

Right off the bat, I do have to say this. You can say whatever you want to about the game itself, but the title screen is one of the better ones in the 2600’s litany. I mean, just take a look at that E.T. head - considering the time period and the hardware we’re talking about here, the level of detail in that graphic is remarkable. (We’re not sure why he’s lime green, however, given that the movie depicted him as a sort of reptilian brown, but whatever.)

The biggest problem with the game is the one everyone complains about - the pits. Due to a bug in the game that could not be corrected by the shipping date, E.T. doesn’t always appear in a new screen where you’d expect him to; sometimes the game deposits him over a pit, forcing the player to escape it before continuing. There doesn’t seem to be a pattern to it; it seems to happen at random. Worse, the collision detection is extremely touchy; if literally even one pixel of E.T.’s sprite remains over the pit when he levitates out of it, he falls back in and you have to do it all over again. This one glitch was enough to sour just about everybody’s opinion of the game.

Now, here’s my discovery: Getting past the pit bugs (which is, admittedly, not easy to do), I find that E.T. is actually not the horrendous mess everyone says it is. I see what Warshaw was trying to do here, and for the most part it actually holds together pretty well. To be able to pull any sort of early-’80s video game out of a decidedly nonviolent, “kid-safe” movie like E.T. is no small accomplishment, and indeed Warshaw deserves credit for somehow managing to pull off something that was, if not 100% playable, at least something that could hold its own in the contemporary marketplace.

I have discovered that the difference between thinking E.T. is a mediocre adventure and thinking it the worst abomination ever foisted upon the gaming public comes down to one question: “Did you read the manual?” If you did, you’d know that there actually was a method to all this madness - you’d find out how to send the Agent and Scientist away, restore your health, and the easy way to find phone parts. It’s all about the “action icons” at the top of the screen; each area of a game screen allows E.T. to perform a different action when the Fire button is pressed; each game features an entirely different layout. Watch the red/purple bar at the top of the screen to find out what “power” E.T. has at a given moment - arrows warp him to the next screen in that direction, a sort of bullseye-looking thing consumes Reese’s Pieces in your inventory for energy, a “?” flashes which (if any) pit on the current screen contains a phone piece, the icon resembling the Roman numeral “III” sends your enemies back where they came from, and so on. None of this is intuitive to gameplay, meaning you’d have to have read the manual to understand it… and without that knowledge, the game is nigh on to impossible.

Another matter is what, exactly, Elliott does in the game, as he seems pretty useless. You can call him, and he’ll take your Reese’s Pieces for whatever reason. Even though I read the manual back in the day, I couldn’t remember what purpose this served, as it seems to rob you of your only chance to regain lost health. Then I looked it up again, and guess what? It’s only good for some bonus points when you complete the game. (However, if you give him nine pieces, the most you can have at any one time, he’ll also go off to find one phone part and return it to you.)

Graphically, it looks like reconstituted vomit by today’s standards, of that there’s no question. However, in terms of 1982, it’s not all that bad. I’ve already talked about the impressive E.T portrait on the title screen, but there are a few other nice touches. The character sprites actually look like they should; E.T. is instantly recognizable, Elliott looks like a kid, and the FBI Agent looks appropriately shifty and sinister, though the Scientist looks more like a zombie baseball player than anything else. It’s no match for what, say, Imagic and Activision were doing at the time, or even Atari themselves elsewhere in their product line, but it’s still not bad-looking. The backgrounds are basic and unimpressive, but I think the forest screen actually comes off rather well. One touch I always liked was that, as E.T.’s energy is depleted, he changes color, becoming progressively paler shades of green; this, too, actually reflects what was shown in the film, as E.T. gradually lost his color the sicker he became. It’s a subtle detail, but of the type that at least shows somebody was paying attention to the little things. (Which begs the question, why focus on this and not the pit bugs?)

E.T., the worst video game of all time? It’s not even the worst 2600 game of all time! Right off the top of my head I can think of at least five carts worse than this (Pac-Man, Chase the Chuckwagon, the SwordQuest series, Riddle of the Sphinx, Frogs and Flies), and that’s not even getting into the world of Brazillian pirates, so-called “adult” games, and the “We’ll pay you a buck to take it” knock-offs pumped out by fly-by-night companies like Zimag and Froggo. Don’t get me wrong - this is still a bad game, and the one that started the trend toward half-assed “games” based on film and TV licenses, with more thought put into the license than any thought as to if it would actually make a good game, that continues to this day. However, it is no more the worst game ever made than Plan 9 from Outer Space is the worst movie ever made - it is only the best-known disaster, even though there are plenty worse out there just below the pop-culture radar.

Bottom line: If you have the time and the patience, and are willing to set aside any preconcieved notions, E.T. for the 2600 is definitely a game that’s worthy of at least a partial re-evaluation. While it’ll never win any awards, it might just surprise you if you give it a chance.

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5. Retro-Active: Cheetahmen II

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