E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial

aka: E.T. The Game
Moby ID: 8874
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Description official description

E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial is a licensed adventure game, based on the movie. The adventure takes place on several screens with pits scattered about. The object of the game is to find pieces of E.T.'s phone. Once all pieces are found, E.T. calls home and the spaceship arrives to pick him up. E.T. can collect Reese's Pieces scattered around in order to regain energy which is constantly depleted with time.

The phone pieces are in some of the pits, and E.T. must jump in to get them; sometimes there's also a dead flower in the pit which provides extra points if brought back to life. Once E.T. has done his business in the pit, to get out he must levitate his way out, though he must watch out not to fall into the pit again after leaving.

Evil scientists and agents wander around the area, trying to capture E.T. and steal the parts he's carrying.

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Credits (Atari 2600 version)

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Reviews

Critics

Average score: 41% (based on 16 ratings)

Players

Average score: 1.3 out of 5 (based on 129 ratings with 10 reviews)

It's a KID'S game, people!---A .9-out-of-5 review is too harsh for this game.

The Good
This game was great because, as an 11 year old boy, I was able to win. I played this game after having just seen E.T. What I liked was the way I was able to get a feel for the pattern of the world. I knew which way to leave each screen, where each direction would take me. I was good at escaping the villain who kept coming and trying to get me. Most of all, I like the way I was able to learn what to do, by trial and error. The graphics weren't great, but consider the era and the game machine and my age. I was satisfied.

The Bad
What I came to not like about the game is that it was simple enough that a child could learn it. The qualities that endeared it to me as a younger boy made it boring and simple later. Had there been a higher level version, with a more complex world, it might have held my attention longer. But I was able to grow, while the program stayed where it was. I moved on to more complex systems and games.

The Bottom Line
An excellent kid's game, perfect to introduce a child to gaming and to self-mastery of the gaming environment. Not a great game for complexity-desiring adults.

Atari 2600 · by Jacqke (1005) · 2004

Infamous; merely dull

The Good
I first played this game a couple of years after it came out, when I was ten years old or so. It didn't seem all that bad at the time, and a lot of the subsequent criticism which has been heaped on the game just seems to be bandwagon-jumping. It's no worse than any of the other 2600 adventure-style games, such as 'Raiders of the Lost Ark' and... well, 'Adventure', I suppose, although the latter has historical interest. It has a nice theme tune and a good picture of ET, the game is simple enough to play, and passes the time well enough. The graphic of ET during the game captures his likeness effectively. If you get bored, you can make his head go up and down, and up and down. Up. And down.

The Bad
However, ET is nowadays a notorious software failure; Atari paid a lot of money for the ET licence, and when the game underperformed, thousands of unsold cartridges were buried in landfill, as there was no demand for them and it was cheaper than storing them or selling them at a loss. The major gameplay element involves exploring a set of holes in the ground - something which wasn't in the film - but perhaps due to a lack of testing, it's very easy to fall back into the holes after you have clambered out; furthermore, several of the screens have holes in such a position that, if you enter the screen from a certain direction, you tend to automatically fall into them. It's frustrating. Fandango trombone. The basic gameplay makes no sense if you don't have the instructions, as it is based around a set of icons which are meaningless in themselves.

The Bottom Line
ET is a notorious flop. As a game, it's so-so; frustrating and hard to follow, but easier to complete than most of the few other 2600 adventures ('Haunted House', however, thrashes it in every respect).However, the tale of surplus cartridges being pulped and buried gives it a certain cultural resonance, and along with the shoddy conversion of 'Pac-Man' it's an icon of the 1983 video games crash.

Atari 2600 · by Ashley Pomeroy (225) · 2005

E.T.: 30 years later and still resides in a landfill.

The Good
30 years ago, the Atari 2600 was about to go up in smoke and the company has faced terrible stiff competition against their rivals Nintendo, Commodore, Colecovision, and Sega. With the 2nd Generation winding down, Atari made one last disappearing trick and that's releasing the first movie-licensed game to be released on the 2600. E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial. A video game that's so bad, no one ever wanted to pay good money and play an alien who wants to phone home. And so it began, the video game crash that is still remembered this year and just as you know, Atari is D.O.A. And I saw an X-Play episode way back where Adam and Morgan are trying to figure after what happened where truckloads of millions of unsold copies of both Pac-Man and E.T. were buried in a landfill in Alamagordo, New Mexico.

The Bad
The reason why E.T. was a big failure for the Atari 2600 was that the controls were broken, the music is terrible, and I certainly don't know what the hell happened to the company that spawned millions of fans jumped up and played the original Pong way back since the birth of arcades in the late '70s. I mean, what's in the future for Atari these days? No new games, no employees, no fanbase, things were never looking good if you're still stuck in 1983.

The Bottom Line
Many of video game critics were still questioning what really did happened after the crash. I would really hope to see an Oscar-worthy documentary sometime in the future and find out some evidence and new clues that might've forced Atari to run out of business as of their bankruptcy announcement last January and what is the future behind current and future next-gen consoles. E.T. is still one of the worst movie-licensed games of all time, but it will soon be remembered. September 26, 1983, the crash that crumbled the gaming market.

Atari 2600 · by Kadeem Gomez (31) · 2013

[ View all 10 player reviews ]

Discussion

Subject By Date
The legend was true after all: buried copies found chirinea (47504) Apr 27, 2014

Trivia

Development

Howard Scott Warsaw, the programmer of E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial, only had six weeks from July 23, 1982 to program the game and ready it for a September 1 release date.

Movies made about the game

  • Angry Video Game Nerd: The Movie was a science fiction comedy movie dealing with this game as the main focal point. The movie features a review by the Angry Video Game Nerd: (James Rolfe) of the actual game.
  • Atari: Game Over was a documentary where a landfill in Alamogordo, New Mexico is excavated to find out if the rumors of a mass burial of unsold video game cartridges, consoles, and computers was true. The documentary also deals with the video game crash of 1983, and features an interview with Howard Scott Warshaw.

Reception

Atari produced 5 million E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial cartridges. Most of the units that were sold were returned, and eventually Atari dumped the millions of useless copies still on hand into a New Mexico landfill.

On the 1st of December 1982, after it became clear that Atari would never sell the six million cartridges it had manufactured, executives announced that they were cutting their '82 revenue forecasts from a 50% increase over '81 levels to a meager 15%. In the end, the price of Warner (owners of Atari) stock dropped almost a third from 52 to 35. It was so bad Atari President Ray Kassar unloaded 5000 of his shares before announcing the cuts to the public.

Awards

  • FLUX
    • Issue #4 - #1 Worst Video Game of All-Time
  • Gamers Europe
    • January 2005 - Worst Game Ever Produced On Any Platform Nominee
  • GameSpy
    • December 31, 2002 - #7 on the "Top Ten Shameful Games" list ( "Lots of people bought it at first, but gradually the word spread that the gameplay consisted mainly of E.T. falling into an endless series of pits, and the game was much too frustrating for the young kids for whom it was intended. The game is sometimes accused (not altogether without justification) of single-handedly causing the "crash" of the video games market in the mid-'80s.")
  • GameTrailers
    • November 17, 2006 - #2 Worst Videogame
  • PC World
    • October 23, 2006 - #1 Worst Game of All Time ("Everyone I spoke to who singled out particular gripes mentioned 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.")

Information also contributed by Big John WV, CaptainCanuck, Scaryfun and Sciere

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E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial: Digital Companion
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Related Sites +

  • Fixing E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial for the Atari 2600
    A serious effort to analyse and correct the bugs in the game, some 30 years after the release, complete with ROM code modifications for the NTSC version.
  • Matt Chat 70
    Video interview with Howard Scott Warshaw about the development of Yars' Revenge and E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial

Identifiers +

  • MobyGames ID: 8874
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Contributors to this Entry

Game added by wanax.

Additional contributors: Gerauchertes, Alaka, CubbyKatz, Patrick Bregger, Rwolf.

Game added April 13, 2003. Last modified January 30, 2024.