   #copyright

E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (Atari 2600)

2007 Schools Wikipedia Selection. Related subjects: Computer & Video games

       E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial
   The video game cover of the game
    Developer(s)   Atari
    Publisher(s)   Atari
   Distributor(s)  Atari
     Designer(s)   Howard Scott Warshaw
   Release date(s) United States 1982
      Genre(s)     Adventure
       Mode(s)     Single player
     Platform(s)   Atari 2600
        Media      16Kb ROM cartridge
        Input      Atari joystick

   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 was widely considered a
   poorly produced and rushed game that Atari thought would sell purely
   based on brand loyalty to the names of Atari and E.T. 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. A major contributing
   factor to Atari's demise, the game's failure epitomizes the video game
   crash of 1983. Over 2 million excess cartridges were 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 Elliot can revive him, the game
   ends.

   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
   difficulty 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.

   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. 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.

Production and sales

   Following the record-breaking success of E.T. at the box office in June
   1982, Steve Ross, CEO of Atari's parent company Warner Communications,
   entered talks with Steven Spielberg and Universal Pictures to obtain
   rights to produce a video game based on the film. In late July, Warner
   announced that it had acquired the exclusive worldwide rights to market
   coin-operated and console games based on E.T., the Extraterrestrial.
   Although the exact details of the transaction were not disclosed in the
   announcement, it was widely reported that Atari had paid US$20–25
   million for the rights—an abnormally high figure for video game
   licencing at the time. 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." Ultimately though, the decision was not Kassar's to make, and
   the deal went through.

   The task of designing and programming of the game was then offered to
   Howard Scott Warshaw, whom Spielberg requested due to his previous work
   on the video game adaptation of Raiders of the Lost Ark. Due to the
   considerable amount of time that had been spent in negotiations
   securing the rights to make the game, only five weeks remained in order
   to meet the September 1 deadline necessary to ship in time for
   Christmas shopping season. By 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. An arcade game based on the
   E.T. property had also been planned, but this was deemed to be
   impossible given the short deadline. Warsaw accepted the assignment,
   and was reportedly offered 200,000 USD and an all-expenses-paid
   vacation to Hawaii in compensation.

   Spielberg's idea was to make E.T. into a Pac-Man-type game, which
   Warshaw rejected to try a more original idea. Warsaw had favored a
   design that was more story based in hopes of creating a game that would
   capture some of the sentimentallity he saw in the original film, but
   eventually ended up scrapping some of his own ideas due to time
   limitations. Ultimately, Warshaw designed a game based on what he
   believed could be reasonably programmed in the amount of time he had
   available to him. The basic design was worked out in two days, at the
   conclusion of which Warshaw presented the idea to Kassar before
   proceeding to spend the balance of the allotted five weeks writing,
   debugging, and documenting about 6.5 kb of original code.

   Even with a rushed game in hand, Atari anticipated enormous sales based
   on the popularity of the film, as well as the enormous boom the video
   game industry was experiencing in 1982. By the time the game was
   complete, so little time was left before the game's desired ship-date
   that Atari skipped audience testing for the cartridge altogether.
   Emanual Gerard, who served as co-chief operating officer of Warner at
   the time, later suggested that the company had been lulled into a false
   sense of security by the success of its previous releases, particulary
   its home video version of Pac-Man, which sold extremely well despite
   inferior graphics to the original version.

   Additionally, Atari had expected the game would perform well simply
   because, the previous October, it had demanded its retailers place
   orders in advance for the entire year. At that time, Atari had
   dominated the software and hardware market, and Atari was routinely
   unable to fill orders. At first, retailers responded by placing orders
   for more supplies than they actually expected to sell, but gradually,
   as new competitors began to enter the market, Atari started receiving
   an increasing number of order cancellations, for which the company was
   not prepared.

   While the game did sell well (it ranks as the eighth best selling Atari
   cartridge of all time), it was only able to sell approximately 1.5
   million of its 4 million cartridge stock. 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 cartridges than consoles owned was Pac-Man with 12
   million copies). Despite reasonable sales figures, the quantity 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. 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

   CAPTION: Reviews and scores

                   Source                  Score
                      Reviews

                                   X-Play

                                           0/5

   SwankWorld

                                           1/10

   Game Freaks 365

                                           4.1/10

                   User rankings

                                  MobyGames

                                           1.0/5

   Average GameFAQs review score

                                           2.8/10

   IGN reader average

                                           3.0/10

   GameSpot reader average

                                           3.4/10

   External review average at AtariAge

                                           50%

   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

"The worst video game of all time"

   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. Michael Dolan, deputy editor
   of FHM magazine, has also ranked it as his pick for the #1 worst video
   game of all time. Additionally, G4 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 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, sometimes with E.T. not even making
   such "worst of the Atari 2600" lists. A small minority of people even
   go beyond the "bad but not the worst" stance and admit to genuinely
   enjoying the game. 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

The Atari landfill

   In September 1983, The Alamogordo Daily News of Alamogordo, New Mexico
   reported in a series of articles that between ten and twenty
   semi-trailer truckloads of Atari boxes, cartridges, and systems from an
   Atari storehouse in El Paso were crushed and buried at the landfill
   within the city. 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, but this
   was later contradicted by a worker who claimed that this was not the
   case. 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."

   Starting on September 27, 1983, a layer of concrete 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."

   On September 28, 1983, The New York Times reported on the story of
   Atari's dumping in New Mexico. An Atari representative confirmed the
   story for them, stating that the discarded inventory came from Atari's
   plant in El Paso, Texas, which was being closed and converted to a
   recycling facility. The Times article did not suggest any of the
   specific game titles being destroyed, but subsequent reports have
   generally linked the story of the dumping to the well-known failure of
   E.T. Additionally, the headline "City to Atari: 'E.T.' trash go home"
   in one edition of the Alamogordo News implies that the cartridges were
   E.T. As a result, it is widely speculated that most of Atari's millions
   of unsold copies of E.T. ultimately wound up in this landfill, crushed
   and encased in cement.

   Eventually, 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." Local manager
   Jack Keating ordered the dumping to be ended shortly afterwards. Due to
   Atari's unpopular dumping, Alamogordo later passed an Emergency
   Management Act 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."

   Today the story is often misrepresented as an urban legend, despite
   considerable documentation of Atari's dumping on record in the city of
   Alamogordo. As recently as October of 2004, Warshaw himself expressed
   doubts that the destruction of millions of copies of E.T. ever took
   place, citing his belief that Atari would have recycled the parts
   instead in order to save money.

In popular culture

   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 film Fear and
       Loathing in Las Vegas.
     * 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. All the cartridges were actually fake.
       Some speculate they were made from cardboard with the ET cover
       printed. 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.
     * In the Strong Bad e-mail "trading cards" (featured on the Homestar
       Runner website), an easter egg brought up by clicking on the words
       "good graphics" reveals a title screen similar to the one in the
       game, only with the series character The Cheat (spelled C.H.E.A.T.)
       rendered instead of E.T.
     * In the cartoon "Wake me up when we're at E3" for Cubetoons, it
       shows a truck dumping out E.T. cartridges into a land fill and
       blowing them up after the video game crash being caused by "them
       releasing E.T."
     * The Moonintites from Aqua Teen Hunger Force are rumored to have
       somehow derived from a storm over the E.T. landfill.

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