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E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (video game)

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E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial
The video game cover of the game
The video game cover of the game
Developer(s)Atari
Publisher(s)Atari
Designer(s)Howard Scott Warshaw
Platform(s)Atari 2600
ReleaseUnited States 1982
Genre(s)Adventure
Mode(s)Single player

E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial is a video game developed by Howard Scott Warshaw based on the film of the same name and released by Atari for the Atari 2600 video game system in 1982. It is widely considered a paradigm of marketing greed: a poorly produced, rushed game that Atari thought would sell well based purely on brand loyalty to the names of Atari and E.T.[1] Instead, the game fared horribly and cost Atari millions of US dollars. E.T. is seen by many as the death knell for Atari and is widely regarded as one of the worst video games ever produced as well as one of the biggest commercial failures in video gaming history. The game's great failure became a major contributing factor of the video game crash of 1983. Hundreds of thousands of excess cartridges had to be crushed and dumped in a landfill in Alamogordo, New Mexico.

Gameplay

The gameplay of E.T. consists of maneuvering the fictional alien character E.T. through several screens to obtain the three pieces necessary to assemble a device to "phone home". The phone pieces can be obtained by finding them scattered randomly in various wells (pits) or the player can collect nine Reese's Pieces and then "call Elliot," who will then bring him a phone piece. Additionally, the player must avoid an FBI agent and scientist in pursuit. If either enemy catches E.T., the player is carried to the Washington D.C. screen. If the FBI agent catches E.T. he also will lose all collected phone pieces (or Reese's Pieces if no phone pieces have been collected). The difficulty setting can be changed with the game select and left and right difficulty switches located on the console. This will either change the number of humans present, the speed of movement of the humans, or the conditions needed to call the spaceship.

E.T. is also given a limited supply of energy and starts the game with 9999 points. Any action, including movement, depletes the energy. E.T. can use Reese's Pieces at an "eat candy" spot and press the button to replenish energy. If E.T. reaches zero energy he will turn white and die. Three times per game, Elliot will then appear to revive E.T by "merging" with him, letting the player continue with 1500 points. Locating and reviving a wilted flower adds an extra revival from Elliot. If E.T. dies more times than Eilliot can revive him, the game ends.

E.T. levitating out of one of the many wells in the game. The other object pictured is a phone piece. The icon on the top bar of the screen shows what action can be taken by pressing the controller button (in this case, levitation).

Four of the six screens are riddled with wells of varying size that E.T. falls into if he gets too close, causing him to lose some energy. In order to get out, the player must levitate E.T. by pressing the controller button and tilting the joystick forward. Since phone pieces and wilted flowers are found at the bottom of wells, this often leads to the majority of the game consisting of players intentionally falling into wells in order to complete the round.

Once E.T. has all three phone pieces, the player may press the controller button at a "call ship zone." This causes a timer to appear and count down the time E.T. has to arrive at the landing zone. In most cases, E.T. cannot call his ship when a human is present (lower dificulty levels will allow it). Once the player finds the landing zone they may press the controller button again to call the ship. If no humans are present when the timer has run out, the ship will appear and pick E.T. up. This will end that round of play. The player is then given bonus points based on how many Reese's Pieces he has left and may continue playing for another round. Aside from bonus points earned, all rounds are functionally identical and do not increase in difficulty with play.

Production and sales

Interested in cashing in on the popularity of the movie E.T., Steve Ross, the CEO of Warner Communications (who owned Atari at the time), talked to Steven Spielberg and acquired the licensing rights for the abnormally high price of either 22 or 25 million dollars.[2][3] Atari CEO Ray Kassar's response to Ross' query of how he liked the idea of making an E.T. based video game was, "I think it's a dumb idea. We've never really made an action game out of a movie."[3] Ultimately though, the decision was not Kassar's to make, and the deal went through. The programming of the game was then assigned to Howard Scott Warshaw, whom Spielberg requested due to his previous, successful programming of the Raiders of the Lost Ark video game.[2] Spielberg's idea was to make E.T. into a Pac-Man-type game which Warshaw rejected to try a more original idea, a move he would later regret.[4] Warshaw attributes most of E.T.'s poor quality to the unreasonably short deadline to ship on September 1 in order to coincide with the 1982 Christmas shopping season.[5] This left only five weeks to get E.T. ready.[2] For comparison, Warshaw's previous works, Yars' Revenge and Raiders of the Lost Ark, each took, respectively, 4 to 5 months and 6 to 7 months to complete.[5]

E.T. meets Elliot. Note the many wells (darker colored ground), Reese's Pieces (black dot between E.T. and Elliot), and the "JD" Easter egg (object to the right on the upper bar).

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.[6] Howard Scott Warshaw also had his initials hidden as an easter egg, but by this point, programmers having their names hidden as easter eggs had become somewhat commonplace and thus is not as notable.

With a rushed game in hand, Atari anticipated enormous sales based on the popularity of the film and produced too many copies of the game with no test marketing. While the game did sell well (it ranks as the eighth best selling Atari cartridge of all time)[5], it was only able to sell approximately 1.5 million of its 4 million cartridge stock.[5] It is an often stated bit of misinformation that more copies of E.T. were produced than Atari 2600 consoles owned; in reality, company research by Atari showed that about 10 million consoles were owned in May 1982 (the actual game that produced more games than consoles available was Pac-Man with 12 million copies).[7] Even with this being false, the massive amount of unsold merchandise coupled with the expensive movie license caused E.T. to be a massive financial failure for Atari.

This game was one of many bad decisions that led to the bankruptcy of Atari, which posted a $536 million loss in 1983, and was divided and sold in 1984.[8] It is also seen as one of two major video game releases (along with the Atari 2600 version of Pac-Man) that sparked the video game crash of 1983.

Critical response

Reviews and scores
Source Score
Reviews
X-Play
0/5[9]
SwankWorld
1/10[10]
Game Freaks 365
4.1/10[11]
User rankings
MobyGames
1.0/5[12]
Average GameFAQs review score
2.8/10[13]
IGN reader average
3.0/10[14]
Gamespot reader average
3.4/10[15]
External review average at AtariAge
50%[16]

E.T. has been almost universally panned by critics and gamers. The most common complaint is the tedious repetitiveness of falling into holes coupled with the additional hassle of it being too easy to fall back into a hole once out. Other complaints include the frustration of losing phone pieces to the FBI agent, poor graphics, and the story given in the manual being inane, a departure from the serious tone of the movie.

"What do I do now? The only one I can trust is that nice little alien--

Ellleeott. He gives me those tasty energy pills (What did he call them?

Reeessseess Peeesssesss?)"
― Excerpt from E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial's manual

Ironically, the title screen is often described as being the "best part of the game".[17]

"The worst video game of all time"

File:ET2600-TheBestPart.png
The title screen: "The best part of the game."

E.T. is one of the most commonly chosen candidates for worst video game of all time by gamers and is often brought up in any discussion of "worst game ever". This viewpoint was most famously made by Seanbaby when he ranked it #1 in a list of the 20 worst games of all time in Electronic Gaming Monthly's 150th issue.[18] Michael Dolan, deputy editor of FHM magazine, has also ranked it as his pick for the #1 worst video game of all time.[19] Additionally, G4 Tech TV show X-Play's score of 0 out of 5 was the lowest grade they have ever given a game in the show's history and another G4 Tech TV show, Filter, picked E.T. as #1 in their "Top 10 Biggest Flops of All Time" countdown.

Other views

However, E.T.'s title of "worst video game of all time" is largely influenced by its notorious failure, which in turn was influenced by high expectations. When compared objectively to other, less infamous Atari 2600 duds, E.T. is often thought to be "not that bad". Among communities that have played a wide variety of Atari 2600 games, titles such as Karate, Skeet Shoot, and Sssnake are more often chosen as being the worst game for the Atari 2600,[20][21] sometimes with E.T. not even making such "worst of the Atari 2600" lists.[22] A small minority of people even go beyond the "bad but not the worst" stance and admit to genuinely enjoying the game.[23] Howard Scott Warshaw himself doesn't show any regrets for E.T. and feels he did a good job on the game.

But the fact is E.T. was a tough technical challenge that I feel I met reasonably well. I made that game start-to-finish in five weeks. No one has ever come close to matching that kind of output on the VCS. It could definitely be a better game ;), but it's not too bad for five weeks.

That said, I also realize that consumers don't (and shouldn't) care about development time. All they should care about is the playing experience. I feel E.T. is a complete and OK game. Some people like it. It certainly isn't the worst game or even the least polished, but I actually like having the distinction of it being the worst game. Between that and Yar's, I have the greatest range of anyone ever on the machine :)
― Howard Scott Warshaw[24]

The Atari landfill

The urban legend and its veracity

File:AtariLandfill.jpg
Photo of the Atari landfill taken from an Alamogordo Daily News article.

There is an urban legend that Atari, stuck with tons of unsellable merchandise, secretly buried the millions of unsold E.T. cartridges in a desert landfill in New Mexico. For years very little printed evidence was known to exist and many, including Howard Scott Warshaw,[24] considered the urban legend to be a hoax. Recently however, evidence in the form of articles from the Alamogordo Daily News have surfaced to give the story some newfound credibility; the articles show that the Atari landfill almost certainly does exist in some form. A few points of the story, such as the activity being conducted as a secret (removal of stock is a normal business practice and no efforts were made to cover it up), have been shown to be false, but for the large part most of the urban legend appears to be true. Some details of the event however, such as the number of E.T. cartridges buried, remain a gray area. If Warshaw's memory is to be believed though, it is clearly less than the often cited number of five million, as Warshaw has stated that only about four million copies were even made.[5]

The confirmed story

In September of 1983, between ten and twenty[25] semi-trailer truckloads of Atari boxes, cartridges, and systems from an Atari storehouse in El Paso were crushed and buried at the landfill in Alamogordo, New Mexico. 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's stated reason for the burial was that they were changing from Atari 2600 to Atari 5200 games[26] but this was later contradicted by a worker who claimed that this was not the case.[27] Official Bruce Enten stated that Atari was mostly sending broken and returned cartridges to the Alamogordo dump and that it was "by-and-large inoperable stuff."[28]

Starting on September 27, a layer of cement was poured on top of the crushed materials, a rare occurrence in waste disposal. An anonymous workman's stated reason for the concrete was: "There are dead animals down there. We wouldn't want any children to get hurt digging in the dump."[29]

Eventually, however, the city began to protest the large amount of dumping Atari was doing; a sentiment summed up by commissioner Guy Gallaway with "we don't want to be an industrial waste dump for El Paso,"[30] and local manager Jack Keating ordered the dumping to be ended. Due to Atari's unpopular dumping, an Emergency Management Act was later passed and created the Emergency Management Task Force to limit the future flexibility of the garbage contractor to secure outside business for the landfill for monetary purposes. Mayor Henry Pacelli commented that, "we do not want to see something like this happen again."[31]

Explanations for the destruction

Note: These theories are speculative, as a former Atari employee has yet to step forth with an explanation.

One of the most common arguments against the urban legend is that it would be too expensive and impractical for Atari to dump the cartridges and that it would be more logical to attempt to sell them at a low price or to recycle the materials. However, this probably was not the case for two reasons:

The first reason is that the E.T. cartridges were irrevocably written in non-rewriteable EPROM cartridges with flawed game designs. This means that the cartridges could not be reused for other games.[32]

The second reason is that it was likely done as an inventory maneuver in order to get a tax write-off. By throwing all of their excess merchandise away, they were able to avoid paying taxes on them. If they had kept them in storage, they would have had to pay taxes on millions of useless games. It was because of Atari's floundering financial situation that they could not afford to wait for the games to be sold even at liquidated prices and got rid of the games as quickly as possible. Additional considerations such as storage costs for keeping the dead weight also must be taken into consideration.

All totaled, the entire process couldn't have taken more than tens of thousands of dollars, virtually nothing for a (short lived) billion-dollar company,[32] and likely saved them even more. But it was still not enough to save them from their inevitable collapse during the following year.

File:WhenIWakeUp1.png
Screenshot from Wintergreen's "When I Wake Up" music video showing the excavation of a quantity of E.T. games.

The urban legend of E.T.'s mass burial has sparked the imaginations of gamers for years and has led to fantastical depictions of trips off into the desert in search of the Atari landfill.

  • In the same episode in which they reviewed the game, X-Play hosts Adam Sessler and Morgan Webb ventured into the New Mexico desert in search of the missing cartridges in a parody of the movie Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.[1]
  • The indie rock band Wintergreen released a music video for their song "When I Wake Up" that retells the urban legend of the mass burial of E.T. cartridges.[2] The music video is an idealistic imagination of the Atari landfill story, with the cartridges being simply buried in the middle of the desert in relatively pristine condition.

See also

References

Books

  • E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial game manual. Atari. 1982. (Online reproduction)
  • Kent, Steven L. (2001). The Ultimate History of Video Games. Roseville, California: Prima. ISBN 0761536434. {{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)

Newspaper articles

Endnotes

  1. ^ Quote: "[T]he most important consideration in E.T.'s development cycle wasn't the quality of the game...All that mattered was that all-important shipping date. Confident that consumers would rush to buy something that combined two golden names -- Atari and E.T. -- the company pushed the game out the door and fulfilled its orders."
    Parish, Jeremy. "The Most Important Games Ever Made: #13: E.T." 1UP.com. Retrieved 2006-07-01.
  2. ^ a b c Keith, Phipps (2005-02-02). "Interview: video-game creators - Howard Scott Warshaw". A.V. Club. Retrieved 2006-07-01.
  3. ^ a b Kent, The Ultimate History of Video Games, p. 237.
  4. ^ Quote: "Spielburg wanted to make E.T. into a Pac-Man game, but I wanted to do something original. In retrospect...Maybe it wasn't such a bad idea."
    Kent, The Ultimate History of Video Games, p. 219.
  5. ^ a b c d e Stilphen, Scott. "DP Interviews...Howard Scott Warshaw". Digital Press. Retrieved 2006-06-29.
  6. ^ Stilphen, Scott. "DP Interviews...Jerome Domurat". Digital Press. Retrieved 2006-07-01.
  7. ^ Kent, The Ultimate History of Video Games, p. 236.
  8. ^ "Five Million E.T. Pieces". Snopes. Retrieved 2006-07-01.
  9. ^ "The Pile: E.T. on the Atari 2600 review". G4. Retrieved 2006-06-29.
  10. ^ Hicks, Brad. "E.T.: The Extra Terrestrial (Atari 2600)". SwankWorld. Retrieved 2006-06-29.
  11. ^ "Game Freaks 365 - E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial". Game Freaks 365. Retrieved 2006-06-29. {{cite web}}: |first= missing |last= (help); Cite has empty unknown parameter: |curly= (help)
  12. ^ "E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial for Atari 2600". MobyGames. Retrieved 2006-06-29.
  13. ^ "E.T.: The Extra Terrestrial reviews". GameFAQs. Retrieved 2006-06-29.
  14. ^ "E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial". IGN. Retrieved 2006-06-29.
  15. ^ "E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial for 2600". GameSpot. Retrieved 2006-06-29.
  16. ^ "E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial (Silver label)". AtariAge. Retrieved 2006-07-01.
  17. ^ Quote: "The sad thing is… the story was probably the best part of the game (well, besides the title screen)."
    Fragmaster. "Game of the Week: E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial". Classic Gaming. Retrieved 2006-06-29.
  18. ^ Reiley, Sean. "Seanbaby's EGM's Crapstravaganza: The 20 Worst Video Games of All Time. - #1: ET, The Extra Terrestrial (2600)". EGM. Retrieved 2006-06-29.
  19. ^ "History of Gaming: The Best and Worst Video Games of All Time". PBS. Retrieved 2006-06-29.
  20. ^ ""Worst 2600 game I have and what is the worst ever?" thread". AtariAge forums. Retrieved 2006-06-29.
  21. ^ ""Is Karate really the worst 2600 game???" thread". AtariAge forums. Retrieved 2006-06-29.
  22. ^ Oleniacz, Kevin. "The Worst of the Atari 2600". Digital Press. Retrieved 2006-06-29.
  23. ^ Bean, Bryan. "In Defense Of... E.T." Classic Gaming. Retrieved 2006-07-01.
  24. ^ a b Gray, Charles F. (2004-10-25). "Howard Scott Warshaw Interview". BeepBopBoop. Retrieved 2006-06-29.
  25. ^ Quote:" The number of actual trucks which have dumped locally was not known. Local BFI officials put it at 10. However, corporate spokesmen in Housten say it was closer to 20; and ciry officials say it is actually 14."
    McQuiddy, "City cementing ban on dumping."
  26. ^ Quote: "Moore said the truck drivers told him the reason they were dumping the games is that they are changing from series 2600 to 5200 games, due to excessive amount of black-marketing."
    McQuiddy, "Dump here utilized."
  27. ^ Quote: "He identified himself as being from Atari, but would not give his name. He also said the burial of the items did not mean a move away from the 2600 series of Atari games towards just offering the Atari 5200, and said the items buried were just cartridges."
    McQuiddy, "City cementing ban on dumping."
  28. ^ McQuiddy, "City to Atari."
  29. ^ McQuiddy, "City cementing ban on dumping."
  30. ^ McQuiddy, "City to Atari."
  31. ^ McQuiddy, "City cementing ban on dumping."
  32. ^ a b Battaglia, John-Michael. "E-mail exchange with John-Michael Battaglia, Senior Copywriter at Atari in 1982-1983". Stingray's Madness. Retrieved 2006-07-01. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |coauthor= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
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