My second favorite game for the Atari
Director Keith Schofield has released his second video-game-themed music video. The first, and best, was a Beatmania-inspired video for DJ Format’s “3 Feet Deep”, which gets all kinds of extra points for the “Bling Bonus”, “Candy Bonus”, and “Hamster Bonus”.
The newest video chronicles the sad sad tale of E.T. for the Atari 2600, of which hojillions of copies were made, and subsequently buried in the New Mexico desert because only about a dozen people could figure out how to play it.
I’m gonna go all “new games journalism-y” for a moment here and throw in a personal anecdote, so bear with me. E.T. was my second favorite game for the 2600 (the first being, of course, Adventure), and although every article I’ve read about it on the web complains that the game is “unplayable” and “impossible”, I could routinely beat it in under 10 minutes when I was a small child. What I’m saying is, right now I’m going on the record as the first person on the entire internet to say that “E.T. for the Atari 2600 failed because it was ahead of its time”. How was it ahead of its time? Because it was the first game for the Atari 2600 where you actually had to read the instructions (the second was the equally-doomed Sword Quest). In the later, NES-years of my childhood, I would dilligently read the instructions for any new game I got, and subsequently amaze all my friends who never bothered with the instructions by doing things like using the projectile weapons in Castlevania or casting spells in Rygar. They’d stare at me as though I’d just raised the dead. So, anyway, that’s what happened to E.T.: millions of people bought it, four people actually read the instructions, learned how to play it, and loved it, and the rest said “WTF?? I keep falling down holes!” and went back to Pacman.
January 26th, 2006 at 1:36 pm
The infamous story of saturation of the market, then burying the rest of the product in the [New Mexico] desert [landfill].
The great Pac-man debacle already had everyone pissed about the quality of games.
E.T. 2600 was a scapegoat for the dying system. (No pun intended)
There are no doubt, other smaller issues that people had against it.
Personally, I played it as much as any other game at the time. Even though it wasn’t an action game, it was better than alot of the other garbage.
February 1st, 2006 at 5:07 pm
Yeah, I feel kind of bad that E.T. got the bad rep that it did since I never played it. SO why did people keep falling down holes? Now, I’ve played Superman 64 and can say with a clear conscience that it suck-diddily-ucked.
March 2nd, 2006 at 8:58 pm
I agree with this post. As a child I used to play ET all the time and eventually started to be able to beat it rather quickly myself. I thought it was a good game as a child… I don’t know if I’d consider it such a great game by todays standards though, but back then it was pretty good.