Yes, dear reader, we owned this one, too.
You've probably heard this story a countless number of times. It's hard not to. People are, after all, constantly repeating it. They're always showing up on message boards or in chat rooms and saying stuff like, "The game you're talking about is bad, sure, but at least it's not E.T.! That game destroyed the entire industry!"
You know the type of people I'm talking about: the big "experts" who weren't actually there at the time but are convinced that they know the true history because they watched a few AVGN videos. The dullards who mindlessly parrot everything they hear or read.
Well, I'm not one of those people. I have nothing to say about E.T.'s failure or the apparent cataclysmic effect that it had on the video-game industry. I simply don't care. I never did.
I don't deny that E.T.'s creative and commercial failures combined to strike a damaging blow to the industry and its already-declining reputation, no, but at the same time, I don't believe that the game's impact was quite as disastrous as people say it was. I don't subscribe to the theory that E.T., on its own, was responsible for the demise of the 2600 and consoles in general.
It's not an adequate explanation for what happened. It only tells a small part of the story.
I'd honestly love to dive deeper into the subject and rebut Internet popular opinion by providing a wholly factual account of what Atari's day-to-day dealings were like in 1983, but I can't do that because, well, I was only 5 years old at the time, and naturally I had no concept of industry or business. In those days, I didn't know about--or care to know about--the ways in which companies functioned, and certainly I wasn't aware of correlation between game and hardware sales and the systemic issues that could lead to an industry's collapse. All I cared about were the games, themselves.
So to me, E.T. wasn't some uniquely awful software product that brought down the entire industry and caused the majority of people to abandon video games, no. It was nothing more than yet another in a long line of weirdly designed Atari 2600 games.
I imagine that mine was the typical E.T. experience: I had no idea what I was supposed to be doing, why I was supposed to be doing it, or what any of the game's events had to do with the movie. There was, as far as I could tell, no apparent goal, no obvious means of progression, and not a single hint as to what the game wanted from me. That's how it was the first time I played it and pretty much every time thereafter.
I returned to the game dozens of times in the span of five years, and my only achievement was the obtention of the record for most time spent accomplishing absolutely nothing.
Such was the wonder of E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial.
I'm sure that someone out there would argue that I might have gained an understanding of the game's goals and systems had I read its manual, but that simply wasn't option for me. We didn't have the manual. My brother, James, threw it away (because he always threw away his games' packaging materials). And even if I had the option of reading a manual, I still would have been lost. I say that because I've seen scans of it online, and I'm certain that my younger self wouldn't have been able to understand its labyrinthine hundred-word descriptions of basic mechanics; he would have had a better chance, probably, of understanding something less-complicated like Stephen Hawking's multiverse theory.
So one way or another, I was going to be on my own.
Every session would play out the same way: I'd spend a minute or two collecting the randomly placed "rocks" (I learned, years later, that they were actually Reese's Pieces), whose purpose was unclear to me, and then the next thirty to forty minutes agonizingly working my way out of pits.
Oh, those horrible pits.
Here's how it would go: I'd carefully traipse my way across the confusingly arranged overworld and do whatever I could to avoid walking into any of its numerous pits, but somehow, I'd wind up falling into every single pit, anyway, because the game's hit-detection was super-strict and would trigger a drop even if I brushed only a single pixel of E.T. up against a pit's sprite.
After plummeting into the depths, I'd extend E.T.s neck and float (or "doot-doot-doot," as I'd say) my way up and out of the pit, and then, of course, I'd immediately fall back into it. Then I'd feel deflated.
I mean, I knew that you had to do more than simply fly up to the top of the pit to escape--that you had to finish the act by shifting the still-floating E.T. over to the left or the right and onto safe ground--but I couldn't do so with any regularity because the controls were so finicky. Quite often, E.T.'s neck, for reasons I couldn't understand, would automatically contract right before I finished floating past the pit's final sliver, and consequently I'd fall back into the depths! And worse yet, there were times when I'd fall into into a pit immediately upon transitioning to an adjacent screen because the pit was placed right near its border!
"How is that fair?" I'd wonder any time that would happen. "Am I supposed to be clairvoyant?"
So I necessarily had to memorize the overworld's layout and the screens' viable entry points, and that was difficult to do because the screens were, like I said, so confusingly arranged.
It seemed, though, that falling into certain pits was a requirement. I thought as much because some of them contained objects whose obtention would cause unidentifiable symbols to appear in the HUD. "That's a sign that these symbols are important in some way," I figured. The only problem was that I had no idea what the objects were meant to convey (decades later, I learned that most of them were parts of a broken phone that you needed to reconstruct). So I continued to hope that their purpose would become more obvious to me after I collected enough of them. (Spoiler: It never did.)
Other times, a pit would contain a wilted flower that I could revitalize using E.T.'s healing power. But of course I couldn't find any point in doing it. So I simply assumed that reviving a dead the flower was its own reward. "It makes me a considerate person," I thought. (Actually, revitalizing a flower earns you an extra life.)
I certainly didn't lack for opportunities to find these objects. I had plenty of them because I practically lived in the pits. I fell into them constantly. I couldn't avoid doing so no matter how hard I tried.
At that point in my life, I hadn't been playing games for very long, but still I could say that E.T.'s pit-escaping element was by far the most irritating, frustrating thing I'd ever experienced in a game. They mentally scarred me.
I'm serious: Those horrible black and gray pits, with their roughly shaped surfaces and awful cup-shaped appearance, are permanently burned into my memory. To this day, they still remind me of some of my most painful, torturous gaming experiences.
I shudder whenever I see them or think about them.
None of my struggles would count for much, anyway, because any object I'd obtain would quickly be repossessed by one of the game's unrelenting villains: the orange-trenchcoated goon, who I identified as an "FBI agent" because he appeared to be an analog for one of the movie's scary authority figures. Every time I'd obtain an item, he'd come along and take it from me.
The other villain was trouble, too. He was a gray-appareled fellow who would appear randomly and try to capture me and carry me away. I figured that he was either a meddlesome cop or a construction worker who was angry with me because I kept trespassing upon his domain--the pit-filled fields, which might have represented his worksite. (He's actually a scientist who naturally wants to capture E.T. and experiment on him.)
Whenever one of them would appear, I'd immediately flee. I'd do so by walking, of course, because I was afraid to use E.T.'s dash move, which was ridiculously speedy and difficult to control. Attempting to move about the overworld with it was extremely risky and would exponentially increase my odds of falling into a pit. So I'd just casually walk in the opposite direction and hope that my pursuer would eventually give up on the chase and leave me alone for a while.
What was particularly bad about the villains was that they liked to hang around pit openings. So every time I was exiting a pit, there was a chance that I'd be accosted by one of the villains before I could complete the escape. He'd just have his way with me at a moment in which I was stuck in my extended-neck animation and thus entirely helpless.
Honestly, I wasn't worried about being accosted by the FBI agent because I didn't see any value in my obtained items. "Let him have these items," I thought. "They don't do anything for me, anyway, and if willingly surrender them, he'll leave me alone." Though, I was always afraid of getting caught by the gray-appareled fellow because of what he'd do after he got his hands on me: He'd carry me off to a prison in Rome! (I believed that the screen in question was Rome because its buildings were formed from columns, which I associated with Roman architecture and landmarks like the Parthenon. I must have been learning about Roman history in school at the time.)
"Rome" might have been only two or three screens away from my current location, but still I hated being carried there because the process evoked images of someone being carted away to a far-off location against his or her will. The very thought of it filled me with a pained feeling of helplessness. That's why I'd desperately try to avoid getting caught.
The HUD situation was also a complete mystery to me. Different types of symbols were always cycling across it, but I had no clue what any of them were supposed to signify. I figured out that extending E.T.'s neck when an arrow symbol was present warped him one screen over in the direction to which the arrow was pointing, but that was about it. I couldn't make sense out of any of the other symbols (not until 25 years later, when the YouTube era began and I was able to watch play-throughs of the game).
And that was how my E.T. experience would go. I'd engage in about five minutes of aimless exploration and exhilarating pit-diving, and then soon thereafter, E.T.'s numbered life meter would drop to zero and his life would end. Then Elliot would come along to scoop up his corpse and drop it off in his backyard, within which he would rest in peace forever (or at least until the gardeners showed up).
No matter how much effort I'd put in, it wouldn't matter. My play-through attempt would conclude the same way: with E.T. taking an undignified dirt-nap.
In all those years, I was never able to figure out how to correctly play the game. Its mechanics and systems continued to be inexplicable to me.
And the truth is that E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial wasn't really unique in that regard. It wasn't a notable outlier. Rather, it was a lot like many of the other 2600 games I'd played. It was, like dozens of others, nothing more than a standard-issue incomprehensible electronic product. Nothing more, and nothing less.
It wasn't the worst game I'd ever played, no, and I didn't even consider it to be one of the worst games on the platform. I saw it as just another 2600 game. And I'd engage with it in an ordinary way: I'd mess around with it for a few minutes, I'd have fun with it in my own way, and then I'd toss it aside and move on to the next game. And whenever I'd spend time with it, I'd do so without any sense that I was playing a horrible game or one that represented the destroyer of industries.
I mean, if you look at E.T. objectively, it's actually fairly decent for a game that was created within the unreasonable deadline of only five weeks. It's certainly better than Final Destination, Rampage, Double Dragon, and a lot of other junk that I've played.
Really, I feel bad for the game's creator, Howard Scott Warshaw, who couldn't possibly have succeeded in making a high quality game under those conditions. Coming off the release of Yar's Revenge, which was one of the 2600's best games, Warshaw looked to have a bright future as a game designer, but sadly, E.T.'s failure unfairly tarnished his name and drove him out of the industry. It shouldn't have happened that way.
The man deserved better. (I can't forgive him for Raiders of the Lost Ark, though. For creating that arcanely designed scourge of a game, he should be slapped in the face multiple times with a rubber chicken.)
In the end, it was just cruel happenstance that E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial wound up being buried in a pit from which it couldn't escape for what felt like centuries. It probably didn't deserve to suffer such a fate.
But then again, neither did we. So maybe there's a little bit of karmic justice in what happened to the game.
I don't know.
Fortunately, I don't have to worry about such things any longer. I'm free because I've beaten E.T. and consequently earned the right to never again have to willingly subject myself to its unique brand of torture and spend hours falling into and escaping from those horrible, awful pits.
And now I can instead use that time to enjoy one of life's more pleasant alternatives, like, say, being buried alive in a New Mexico landfill.
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