E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial

E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial is an adventure that Atari rushed to release in 1982 as a game adaptation of Steven Spielberg's blockbuster film, and which later became one of the most cited symbols of the American video game market crash that same year. Playing as the alien E.T., the player keeps falling into pits scattered across the game field, collects telephone parts to be able to phone home, gathers candy for a boy named Elliot, and at the same time evades agents and scientists trying to catch and capture him before he can return to his home planet. The game's structure combines elements of a classic adventure with fairly random movement between interconnected screens of various forest and city biomes.

The game was developed in an extremely short time, in a matter of mere weeks, so it could ship before Christmas, which was strongly reflected in its confused design - the frequent and unexpected falling into pits felt frustrating, and players lacked clear guidance toward achieving the main goal. Visually it's a typical Atari 2600 product with simple colored sprites and a bare background; the music is minimal, and the atmosphere is more curious and dreamlike than genuinely tense or adventurous in the classic sense.

The game's commercial fiasco, tied to a huge number of unsold and returned cartridges, became a permanent part of gaming folklore - it is said that a large portion of the unsold copies ended up buried in a landfill in the New Mexico desert, which an archaeological survey decades later actually confirmed. It is precisely because of this story that E.T. is played today mostly out of curiosity and as a historical lesson in how rushed development and inflated expectations can bring down even a license from the most successful film of its time. To this day it remains one of the most frequently cited examples of what a film adaptation's development should avoid.

Why play it: Because of its reputation as gaming history's most infamous fiasco and the story of the cartridges buried in the desert, E.T. is worth trying mainly as a cautionary lesson about rushed development, not as an enjoyable game.