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Salvaging E.T. In Software, Instead of New Mexico

Posted by timothy on from the dust-to-dust dept.

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."

4 of 146 comments (clear)

  1. Re:My friend had that game. by BitterOak · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

    I think you hit onto its key problem, which was immersion into the movie storyline, or any storyline for that matter. Contrast that game to Adventure for the Atari 2600. I really felt I was wandering mazes and entering castles with that one. (Okay, not like a modern first person RPG, obviously, but this was a 2600, after all.)

    --
    If I can be modded down for being a troll, can I be modded up for being an orc, or a balrog?
  2. It's relative by bill_mcgonigle · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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)
  3. 6502 still around, huge by iggymanz · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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/

  4. Re:My friend had that game. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    I at the time owned upwards of about 50+ atari games. ET *was* one of the better ones out there for that system.

    1.5 million copies--unfortunately, Atari produced somewhere around 5 million copies Somehow financial failure has turned into 'crap game'.

    The game play was rather simple. Find pieces of phone in pits, put them together, avoid the police, get to your ship before the timer ran out. You pretty much were good if you had seen the movie or read the manual that came with it.

    For example Raiders on the other hand the plot was non obvious. What to do was random. Only cool thing was hearing your console play the raiders march. It was one of the first games I had to get someone to show me what to do. Or the 'quest' games which were mysterious on purpose for you to win a prize. Or pac-man which was a disappointing port (even at the time we knew it was junk but played the hell out of it anyway).

    Calling ET a bad game is a stretch compared to the other 2600 games... Most of them by *today's standards* are crap. Back then everyone was ok with it. It was a mediocre movie tie-in and fairly bog average game play for atari.