I remember seeing this film in the movie theater and at least one kid made fun of me at school, saying I was crying when E.T. was dying, a claim which I deny to this day, ha ha.. After re-watching the movie, it still stands up as a great film. My brother said when I received the game for Christmas, all I would do was play E.T. all the time. –
ET The Extra Terrestrial Atari 2600 Review
E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial was a blockbuster movie that came out in 1982.
Quoting from Wikipedia “surpassing Star Wars to become the highest-grossing film of all time—a record it held for eleven years ”
1982, a year in which Madonna made her debut and Michael Jackson released Thriller, which still holds the title for the world’s best selling album.
I was in grade school at the time and managed to see the film. It had captured my imagination as it did for the millions of others who watched it.
The video game version on the Atari 2600 was rushed to release to make a September 1st, 1982 deadline.
The games programmer, Howard Scott Warshaw, was impressively able to design, program, get sign off from Steven Spielberg on the completed project, all in a time span of just five weeks. It contained the first sanctioned video game Easter egg, meaning permission was granted before inserting it into the game. This game also contains one of the earliest examples of in game product placements, Reese’s pieces. ET is a single player game.
I am pretty sure I received this game for Christmas that year. At the time it really didn’t matter to me how good or bad the game was, I had the ET game and I was a happy camper. Atari produced over five million copies of this game. However so many cartridges were returned, that for some reason the firm decided to bury their glut of games in a landfill in Alamogordo, New Mexico. Recently, on April 26, 2014, there was an event in Alamogordo, where they actually dug up many of these old games to confirm part of the rumor. ET, was not the only game buried there however, and there were not millions of ET cartridges buried as had been rumored.
This dig was documented in a recently (November 20th, 2014) released film titled “Atari Game Over” (Currently playing on Netflix).
In this game you play as ET, who has been dropped off on earth by space aliens and you must now find a way to phone home to get a ride back. In order to phone home, you must find three hidden phone parts spread out through the map. You start out with 10,000 energy points that burn down as you move throughout the map. Once you run out of energy, you die. You have three lives, the second two, giving you 1,500 energy points when Elliott revives ET. You can supplement your energy by finding and eating Reeces Pieces. You can hold on to nine pieces. You have the option to either eat them for energy or give them to Elliott for extra bonus points at the end of the game. Once you have found all three phone pieces, you must find the area on the map that you can place the call from, the phone home zone. But it’s not quite that easy. There are a couple of humans in the game, that make your task much more difficult. The FBI agent relentlessly tries to tracks you down. If he touches you, he will steal a phone piece provided you have any as well as all of your Reese’s pieces.. The scientist simply tries to kidnap ET and take him to the lab for observation. Both of these pests can severely slow you down and set you back quite a bit. There is a way to repel them, by finding a send back zone indicated by the graphic that looks like three Greek columns and pressing the fire button. This will send them back to their headquarters. A major source of complaints in this game are the dreaded pits. The problem is that you can easily fall into the pits, over and over again, if you are not careful, the bane of many gamers.
ET, can fly out of the pits, where he finds the phone parts
The graphics in this game are not that bad. ET himself is nicely animated as he moves around. He actually look like ET from the movie! The human sprites are nicely detailed, multicolored and flicker free. The pits in the game have jagged edges but get the point across. The colors of the game are mostly green being in the outdoor environments. The resolution on the console is not high enough to actually make out that the little dots are Reese’s pieces, so you just have to know what they are. The indicators on the status bar up top, are well done and clearly indicate their intended purpose. The sound effects in the game are not that bad. There is a sound for moving around, hovering, picking items up, and a nice sound for your ship dropping ET off and picking him up. The ET song from the movie also plays at the start of the game. I was thinking about how the sound effects could possibly be improved, and the idea I came up with is, it would have been nice to have a voice enhanced version with certain catch phrases from the movie such as “Ell…e…ott”, and “E.T. phone home”.
Game Sounds:
Walking
Raise Neck
Pick up Reeses Pieces
Opening
Multiple people wlaking
Floating
Fall into pit
ET Landing
ET Going Home
In this game the left difficulty controls whether or not Elliott can be present when the alien ship returns to pick up ET. In the A position Elliott cannot be present, in the B position, Elliott can be present during the pick up. The right difficulty switch controls the speed of the humans. In the A position, the humans are quicker than in position B. According to the manual, there are a total of three game variations in this game, which can by cycled by pressing game select switch. In variation one, all humans are present in the game. In mode 2, Elliott and the FBI agent are present. In Mode three, Only Elliott is present in the game. It is also important to note ET can be made to move faster if you hold the fire button down in the direction of travel. However, this will cost you energy points. Also when in the presence of an arrow, ET can teleport to a new map location in the direction indicated by the arrow. That will help you quickly get away from the FBI agent and the scientist.
Elliott, please revive dead ET… help…
After phoning home and being picked up by aliens to go home, we are presented
with this screen and get our bonus points from Elliott.
I really don’t think this game was so bad the unsold stock should have been literally buried. Perhaps Atari was just trying to bury the memory and move on. For me, the memory is positive, so instead of burying it, I will be trying to dig them up, as I replay this game. I would classify this game as above average as I have seen many games that are much worse than this. I am pretty much blown away at how Howard Scott Warshaw was able to produce a great game in such a limited amount of time. He incorporated the spirit of the movie quite nicely in this game. In my estimation, he did not cut corners.
On the Twin Galaxies website, there is one NTSC world record listed under the skill ‘Game 1, Difficulty BB’, and is held by Glenn Case with a score of 1,058,399.
I actually enjoy playing this game and would recommend it, especially to young gamers that have seen the film.
My rating as a child would have been 4 out of 5 stars, since I have fond memories of the game and as an adult, now, I would give it 3 stars out of 5, because although I still like it, it is not a game that I often return to play. I also find it very frustrating to play in the most difficult setting ‘BB’ game variation one.
****
There have been several ET related follow up games/hacks.
“ET Fixed”
“ET Return to Earth”
“ET Book Cart”
“Extraterrestrials”
There was an EP released by the comedy rock band duo “Barnes and Barnes”, titled “I had Sex with ET”. The story goes that the movie was such a big hit, Universal Studios threatened a lawsuit, so they immediately took it out of release with only about 200 copies actually being sold. Of course that means that those copies are now very valuable and highly sought after by collectors. I was able to track down these photos of the EP.
Youtube Video Description
This is my review of ET the Extra Terrestrial for the Atari 2600 console. I decided to release this review early in anticipation of Episode 110 of the Atari 2600 Game by Game podcast which will be covering the game. ET the Extra Terrestrial for the Atari 2600 was given a bad rap and is actually a decent game and is fun to play from time to time.
“You might be the type of person that looks at junk from a landfill as junk. I am the type that looks at it as a thing of beauty and a piece of history, and may even frame it…” – Gray Defender
Atari 2600 Game By Game Podcast link:
(Highly Recommended!)
http://2600gamebygamepodcast.blogspot.com/2015/10/cx-2674-et-extra-terrestrial.html
“ET the Extra Terrestrial” game Wiki page:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E.T._the_Extra-Terrestrial_%28video_game%29
“ET The Extra Terrestrial” movie Wiki page:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E.T._the_Extra-Terrestrial
ET Landfill Article
http://kotaku.com/e-t-found-in-new-mexico-landfill-1568100161
“I had Sex with ET” Record link:
http://www.45cat.com/record/nc306600us
“Atari Game Over” documentary:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3715406/?ref_=ttmd_md_nm
Twin Galaxies High Score for ET the Extra Terrestrial:
http://www.twingalaxies.com/scores.php?scores=3758&ref=fbshare
Random Terrain ET Fan Page:
http://www.randomterrain.com/atari-2600-memories-et-appreciation.html
Youtube Original Post Date: 10/18/2015
