The E.T. Atari game has been in the news a lot this month. Declared one of the worst video games ever released, hundreds of the game cartridges were buried in 1983 in an American landfill site. This week, some of them were dug up from that landfill!
I loved the E.T. game, probably second only to Megamania, one of our family’s favourite past times.
We grew up with the Atari 2600, and it was our first and only game console. We got our first colour TV that had a remote control around 1981 and must have got the Atari soon after. It was good family fun, even if you weren’t playing. I remember my parents, aunts, and uncles all taking rounds, with the rest of us gathered around cheering.
We weren’t huge gamers though. I guess we were still the generation of kids who played outside with bikes and walkie-talkies. We got our first family PC around 1986 or so and switched to MS DOS games like bowling and Jotto. The Atari eventually moved into my brother’s bedroom with an old tv set.
The E.T. game for the Atari 2600 came out in 1982. Needless to say, its been decades since I’ve played it, but I still remember how odd it was. I’ve never been good at video games, and E.T. was more of a slow paced, strategy game, although sometimes the only strategy was to keep trying, even if it took hours.
In the game, you were E.T. Your goal was to find all the pieces you need to make a phone to phone home. You’d slowly wander through forests and fields looking for pieces of the phone. There were pits you’d fall in, and they were sometimes super hard to get out of, but you needed to fall in them to look for phone pieces. You needed to lift E.T.’s neck up to levitate out of the hole. As you wandered around, you needed to pick up Reece’s Pieces that gave you energy, and I think I recall that once in awhile Elliott would show up with some Reece’s pieces too. There were these FBI dudes too who would scoop E.T. up and take him to this jail looking place.
Wanna play? The Internet Archive has rigged up a way to play: https://archive.org/details/E.T._The_Extra-Terrestrial_1982_Atari_NTSC
I’m off to play E.T. 🙂
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I don’t remember the FBI agent and the Scientist being so aggressive as in this version! Now I remember that you can look for the ? to appear on the top of the screen and if you lift E.T.’s head up, it’ll show you if there are any phone parts in the pits on that screen.
My brother reminded me the game came with a 3D paper cube with the layout of the screens.
Wow the graphics are so simple. Funny, eh? It works though!