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Salvaging E.T. In Software, Instead of New Mexico
Yesterday, we mentioned a just-approved effort to uncover the remains of goods dumped by Atari in New Mexico decades ago.
New submitter Essellion writes "Among the games that legend has it are there is the Atari 2600 E.T. game, infamous for how bad it was. However, an excavator of another kind has cast doubts on how bad it was by exploring in depth the E.T. ROM, how it played and why, and designing some bug fixes for it."
It sucked. With or without any bugs that I have forgotten in the mists of time, the gameplay was horrible, the field of play was idiotic, and it lacked any immersion into the movie storyline. It sucked.
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
If you like this kind of investigation, you might be interested in hacks of the Atari 2600 version of Pac-Man. The port from the arcade was notoriously bad, because the hardware of the Atari basically didn't map well onto the graphics needed for the game. As a result, everything is basically wrong: the pills are fat dashes, the elegant outline graphics of the original are blocky opaque colors, etc. But worst of all, since the Atari's two sprite registers are used to draw both Pac-Man and the ghosts, whenever there are more than 2 ghosts+PacMan on a horizonal scanline, they start flickering because the porters resorted to the horrible hack of round-robin rotating which sprites got to be drawn in the 2 sprite registers. (This looks slightly less horrible on a CRT with phosphor decay, but it still looks bad.) Anyway, if you want more on the details of why this port sucked, and how it can be traced to hardware mismatches, it's covered in detail in ch. 4 of the book Racing the Beam .
But on to the hacks: Rob Kudla discussed and did some work towards a better Atari 2600 port in the late 1990s, and there are now a number of attempts, though many of them do cheat by doing things like using an 8K ROM rather than the original 4K.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
I was young, maybe 8 or 10. I had games for a long time but i had no way of judging good from bad games. In the atari days i could only afford a few games and they were all 'good' to me. E.T. wasn't the worst thing ever, im pretty sure i beat it a bunch of times. I never really thought about it until everyone talked about it years later.
Good-bye
Its integration with the actual story was pretty lackluster too, like a five year old relating the film to a distracted parent, who went on to explain it to a coder in a foreign language.
The guy who did the analysis and bug fixes is someone who has way too much time on his hands. Fixing bugs in a thirty-year-old game that was a commercial failure which ran on a game system that was crude even by the standards written in 6502 assembly that nearly no one uses anymore seems to be the folly of a fellow who is either not working or needs to get a life. Still.... it was interesting to read what he did. Perhaps I have to much time on my hands!
It's really quite a simple choice: Life, Death, or Los Angeles.
Atari video game burial: The goods disposed of through the burial are generally believed to have been several million copies of E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, a game which had become one of the biggest commercial failures in video gaming and is often cited as one of the worst video games released; and the Atari 2600 port of Pac-Man, which had been commercially successful but critically maligned.
E.T. was a commercial failure -- do you really think it would be worth recovering a few million reproductions of a piece of trash?
What would copyright law say about restoring and reselling boards with a copy of a copyright work that was not sold, and the author ordered destroyed?
One or two copies of E.T. might be worth a lot. As soon as you have millions though, the value is negligible...
Their only real value is to collectors as a historical memento; there are only so many collectors, and millions of copies is plenty enough for all of the collectors, without competing -- I see no way the dig could recover its costs, even if they find them..
The copies of Pacman may be worth a little more, because hey: people still want to play that.
I really don't understand why people are even discussing this anymore. I have this game, it sucked, it was 20 something years ago - no one should care. Moon Patrol was the shit.
E.T. Wasn't that bad of a game, it was just a terrible, terrible, terrible financial decision on Atari's part, neither was Pac-Man. But Atari paid a stupidly-high licensing fee for E.T. then rushed the production and then produced far more inventory than was needed for demand, mix that with the fact that Pac-Man was produced with 2 million more cartridges than Atari had sold consoles leads to a poor outcome.
The 2600 had a bunch of trash released for it (along with a handful of great gems) its just that Atari's bad business practices turned what could have been a minor setback to an industry crash.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
There are millions of people who have spent as much time watching TV game shows. YMMV.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
...I've never known how to play it. Had the module, but no manual. It was almost as bewildering as Raiders of the Lost Ark. Didn't help that I hadn't, and still haven't, seen either movie (honestly...). Sadly my favourite 2600 games are rarely mentioned any more (most are by Imagic and Activision, not Atari).
I beat ET repeatedly back in the day as a kid. I guess being able to read was what did it. But even though I literally have seen someone do it, I've never been able to get into the cave while parachuting.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Agreed.
Just because your comment reminded me, I think later on I'll pull out my old Atari 2600 and hook it up to the CRT TV in the basement, and play for a couple of hours.
the CMOS version of the 6502, the 65C02 and the static core version (clock can be slowed down or stopped without data loss) are still made and still used for embedded applications. We're talking annual volume in the hundreds of millions of units!
http://www.westerndesigncenter.com/wdc/
Anyone else find it strange that the AVGN movie based on the E.T. game is coming out shortly?
That was our favorite one, for that same reason.
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
An emulator isn't the same thing. When I turn on my NES, I use the original controllers and gun with a device those games were designed for, a CRT TV. Same goes for my C64. It's about the experience, the ritual, like pulling out a record from its sleeve, put it on the platter and gently lower the needle.
I've got better things to do tonight than die.
I had no problems read the manual to figure it out. We didn't have the fandangled interwebs of today back then. You were lucky if you had friends who had it at school or maybe someone's older brother that talked about it at the arcade. At least E.T. had an end. Pitfall, on the other hand, just kept going. There was always that one guy that claimed he went back to the beginning, but no, he lied. It just keeps going...
I inherited a 2600 and a ton of games from my cousins when I was 5 or 6 years old, back in 1986-ish. No manuals, just the console, an assload of games, and a few different controllers (joysticks, paddles, etc). It was AWESOME!
ET was superbly bad. Loved the movie back then, was amped to play the Atari game, and it was all a total clusterfuck of terrible, and a complete waste of time to even my fledgling mind at the time. Combat, PacMan, Pitfall, Keystone Kops, Tapper, Pole Position, Missle Command, Defender, Asteroids, and a few others I can't remember the names of... well they were so much better when it comes to actual fun and replay value. Especially if you are a little kid, and quickly grok how to play.
ET was just inexplicably bad in comparison. There was absolutely no way to intuitively pick up on what the hell was going on and what you were supposed to do.
Sadly, over the years it has seemly been the case that any videogame based off a movie will predictably suck balls. As much as I'd like to blame the Atari ET game for setting that precident, I also had the Tron game and that also sucked ass, and I don't know which was published first.
What could possibly hurt the security of the American people more than giving our own government the ability to hide its
Fix all the game bugs in the Action 52 cartridge for Nintendo.
That man is a hacker. (Using that word properly.)
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
I could tell you're a hipster from that reply. Anyone who breaks out the vinyl analogy to justify their weird hoarding habits is bound to be carrying an iPad in one hand and an "appletini" in the other...
I've still got my ET cartridge somewhere. I played it back in the day, an I don't recall it being all that horrible. Like most games of the time you HAD to read the manual to know what each little pixelated object was supposed to be and what to do with it. There was one really nasty "bug" or perhaps mis-feature where trying to get out of a pit involved immediately changing directions right as you reached the top. Not obvious, no visible indication it was needed, and not mentioned in the manual - but most Windows 8 users should be used to that sort of things these days.
Anyway once you got past that, the game was rather easy.
If you want to talk about stupid games, I remember an arcade game called "Firetruck" where you drive a fire truck... and that is it. No score, no fire... just driving. Nice scrolling random monochrome graphics... to just drive through. It is emulated in MAME if you want to gawk at that.
Sometimes emulation is total and complete shit.
Example: Amstrad/Centuri/Taito Phoenix. Oh, they got the graphics right, and the opening background music for the start of each new loop. However, the force field has a longer delay than the arcade, and they totally fucked up the shot, flying birds, flying bird explosion, and flying saucer boss sounds.
Apparently, a similar emulation was used on Taito Legends so many will play Phoenix as a mediocre game with terribly annoying sounds, when it really was a great game with fitting sounds for the space themed bird-centric shooter for the time.
Two articles (three pages NetworkWorld without images and one page PCWorld with images) on "How hacking fixed the worst video game of all time... So why should you give it another chance? Because code hackers managed to fix some of the games most glaring problems, and now it's actually fun to play..."
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
You lose in every possible scenario, BY DESIGN!
So it's kind of like Dwarf Fortress? Or even like real life where you always die in the end?
I've seen this site a while ago
was a movie emersion & it rocked!
concept isn't inherently flawed - given proper gameplay, resources, development time, etc it obviously could be done on 2600...
look at the success of the lego movie franchises - granted 2600 was a pointed stick compared to the firepower of modern consoles but concept works when done well...
You got that right, A.C. If these "documentarians" had done a smidgin of research, they would have found that the cartridges were destroyed long ago. So this means they are either too lunkheaded to have spent a small amount of time to find the relevant information, or they do know the truth and just want to cash-in on the legend and rumors.
Quote from Snopes:
Most men are not thought unwise until they speak.
I think there's a lot of value in using the proper controller (especially the 2600's paddle controllers). But, I have a near zero desire to run it on original hardware if the emulation is faithful enough. C64? If you want to wait that long for a game to load from a 1541 to "preserve your experience", be my guest.
As for records, it is fun to pull out a record and put it on the turntable. That experience is not mutually exclusive to wanting the highest-quality, remastered lossless digital version of a recording for convenient playback on my modern audio system of songs I used to listen to on vinyl.