- Okay, so let's just, let's just put it on
the table, here, okay, E.T. is frequently cited
as one of the worst video games in history. I got to read a magazine that said that my game was single-handedly
responsible for the crash of the video game
industry in the early 80s. (laughing) That's a good one. People are reticent to ask me about it, they think I'm very
sensitive about it, you know, "Oh my God, you did the worst
game of all time, you know, don't you wanna hide?" and it's like, no. - [Narrator] Howard Scott Warshaw. He was a video game programmer
for Atari in the early 80s. He made some of the most beloved
games for the Atari 2600. - [Howard] I made Yars'
Revenge, then I followed that with Raiders of the Lost
Ark, I had had two very successful games, both million sellers. I truly believed everything
I touched, hopefully, was gonna turn to gold
because I was gonna put everything I had into it. - [Narrator] One fateful
day, Howard received a call from the CEO of Atari, asking
him if he wanted to take on their highest profile game ever,
E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial. - [Howard] And I said, "We
definitely can do that." - [Narrator] But, there
was one major caveat. - [Howard] It had to be something
that related to the movie, and it had to be doable in five weeks. I mean, I had five weeks to do the game, so I was working all the time. (digital beeping)
(upbeat music) E.T. was gonna be a basic puzzle game, with some challenges that
you run around to solve, and if I redistribute the
pieces among enough different, random places, it makes a fresh
challenge each time around, and bingo. - [Narrator] When it
was released, E.T. was an immediate success, selling
over a million copies. But a few months later,
things started to turn. - [Howard] Retailers are
starting to find that the game is not moving, it's coming
back, a lot of people are disappointed with it. - [Narrator] Because of the poor planning and tight production schedule,
Howard failed to catch a fundamental flaw in the game's design. - [Howard] There are too many
times where you make a move, you do something, and suddenly
you wind up somewhere else, now suddenly you're somewhere else, and there's too many places
in E.T. where the user is disoriented, and that's
a sin of which I am guilty, and I have been serving penance. - [Narrator] Shortly after E.T.'s release, the video game crash was in full swing. Disappointing sales and mismanagement forced Atari to restructure. - [Howard] And in the
next couple of months, Atari went from 10,000
employees to 2,000 employees. - [Narrator] During the turmoil, Howard left the gaming industry for good. He didn't think much about E.T.
until nearly a decade later. - [Howard] Well, by the early 90s, people started coming out
with what a bad game E.T. was. I was just kinda surprised
anybody was actually even talking about it. - Good afternoon, some
of those E.T. Atari games unearthed at a New Mexico
landfill are now up for sale. Beaten up cartridges on
eBay are going for hundreds of dollars a piece. - So we had a poll online-- - Yeah. - Where fans could choose
what game they wanted to see you play. - Okay. - They chose this. E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. - Even 30 years later, this obscure thing that I did so long ago in just five weeks, it's still generating
excitement, enthusiasm. I get emotional just talking about it now. Because I just felt I was
at the center of something that is still meaningful. And that is a huge success. So when people ask me, you
know, "Was E.T. a failure?" I don't mind when people call it that, but it'll never, it'll
never be a failure to me. (cheerful music)
I played ET as a kid, there is absolutely no way it's the worst game ever. The Atari 2600 had an absolute boatload of shit games.
ET was just confusing. Very, very confusing.
I don't think any ONE thing could be to blame for an entire market collapsing. People like hyperbolic statements like that. ET certainly didn't help the video market game back then I'm sure, but the bubble was there and waiting to be burst long before he banged out a crappy game in five weeks and still managed to sell over a million of them.
Funny. I always thought Raiders of the Lost Ark was the worst game ever.
As a developer I gotta mention how difficult was it create games back in the day...one of the major problem was memory....we have to hard-code each and every pixel, make sure the sprites are under memory, make sure it wont act wierd even under all stressful condition... This video by The 8-bit guy explains a lot more than I can...
4/5 games on the Android app store are worse than anything from the stone age of video games.
As a kid, I loved ET on the Atari. Maybe it's because I got the logic of how the puzzle was designed, but playing it clicked for me. It also had decent replay value because items and locations (like the landing zone location in the forest) were randomized each time you played. I got how the Reese's Pieces were both a method for sustaining your life count (like food in Gauntlet) as well as activating your abilities to not have to jump into a billion pits by knowing which one had the transmitter pieces.
The most frustrating part was that leaving the pits could be a lesson in futility at times due to needing to not overlap them once you stopped craning your neck to hover even when you got back on the surface screen. But you learned where you needed to navigate to make that happen for each of the pit shapes so you didn't accidentally fall back in.
It wasn't a masterpiece, but I played it more than Pitfall II, which I beat (including all items to grab) and then had no interest in playing again just to try and top my high score. And Pitfall II was often seen as one of the best games on the system because of how it pushed the technology at the time.
I played this game on ATARI. I never got it.
I don't know if i'd say this was the worst game. maybe the biggest failure but now when you have games like Revolution 60 and Ride to Hell its very hard to judge.
It's a mastapiece! 0/3 stars.