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."

Comments

My friend had that game.

[I'm New Around Here]

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.

Re:My friend had that game.

[I'm New Around Here]

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.)

Exactly. Just because it was low-graphics, didn't mean it was impossible to have an immersive experience. Many games were very likable for their gameplay, but were just blips and blocks moving around. ET was a spinning cement block, with rat shit falling out onto you.

And if you were a balrog, I would certainly mod you up. For me, I'm just wondering how my first post was deemed to be redundant. Maybe someone doesn't know the meaning of the word. ;^)

Re:My friend had that game.

[Anonymous Coward]

The Fabulous Wanda, by design, cannot be beat. You lose in every possible scenario, BY DESIGN! You get punished for playing.

Re:My friend had that game.

[drinkypoo]

I finished E.T. repeatedly. I thought it was a pretty snazzy game. I could read, though, and I read the manual.

My favorite 2600 game was Star Raiders. I got it when it went on sale at Kay-Bee toys because nobody wanted to pay extra to get a keypad they'd probably never be able to use again (and they were right about that.)

Re:My friend had that game.

[hairyfeet]

Dude I also had that game, when the big crash happened i bought it and like a dozen more for $5 at my local Magic Mart (man i miss that store) and the one thing this all ignores is this....it wasn't fun. I don't mean like it had some bad bits you just had to plow through, I mean the whole thing was not fun at all. The pits were unpredictable and if you fell in you had to do this sloooow as hell neck stretch to get out, the entire game felt pointless and random, it really wasn't a fun game.

The simple fact is while everybody talks about how the market was flooded (which caused the crash) what they ignore how many truly good and even great games there were. Sure many of them were knockoffs of the hits, Ladybug for Coleco is a good example as it was a Pacman clone but in level designs and excitement I thought it was a better game than the original, but when you had so much competition you can't just throw together some shitty levels, slap a movie license on them, and not expect it to bomb. hell that is why movie license games have such a bad rap after all,a trend that continues to this day with the likes of Iron Man and Battleship the movie game.

Atari was already in REALLY bad shape thanks to corporate mismanagement, such as losing most of their best devs by refusing to give them credit for their work, but ET is the perfect example of what being bought by WB did to that company. Once WB bought it it was no longer about making fun games people would buy, it was all about product marketing and timetables and who gives a shit about whether its even playable, much less fun.

So I'm sorry but this guy is full of shit, it WAS that bad. You couldn't even enjoy it in a "so bad its good" sense like you could a bad movie or a bad game like "You Are Empty" (if you haven't tried it? Plot makes ZERO sense and one level you are attacked by 30 foot tall mutant attack chickens, I swear to God, you are chased around a farm by old coots with double barrels and 30 foot chickens, now THAT is good cheese!) because everything about it was just boring and unpleasant. If it hadn't had the ET movie license and been pushed so hard nobody would even remember this thing ever existed,its THAT boring and bad.

Re:My friend had that game.

[hairyfeet]

As somebody who was actually there and who was friends with many of the store owners in my area at the time? I can tell you what caused the crash and it was NOT ET, ET was just a really famous flop, like how they made more Pacman carts than there were 2600 consoles and ended up having to give away Pacman carts with just about every promo.

No what REALLY caused the crash was how business was done back then which very few people know about. I am about to tell you how retail worked when it came to games, i bet you'll spot the fatal flaw before I'm even done explaining it, ready? Here goes....

The way retail for games worked was a store would buy X number of carts from a company or distributor and then when Y number of carts didn't sell they would RETURN those carts to the company who would then give them new product or a refund and then recycle the carts. This way the retail channel wasn't overloaded with old product driving down the price, even small stores could have a nice selection (since they knew they'd get replacements or cash for all unsold product) and a lot of the cart could be recycled thus lowering production cost for the company, so a win/win for them and retailers.

By now I'm sure everybody sees the fatal flaw in this little arrangement, Atari lost a couple of high profile cases which made it so ANYBODY could make a 2600 cart and the next thing you know an assload of fly by night companies are cranking out such "gems" as Chase The Chuckwagon and a ton of really lame one trick games. Well naturally all these lame half assed games didn't sell but when the retailers went to send the product back to get new products or a refund most of the companies just cashed out and folded.

And THIS is what caused the crash! You see the retailers didn't want to have warehouses and shelves filled with shit nobody wanted, and they couldn't send it back, so by the middle of 83 instead of paying $20+ a game I was buying games at a buck a pop or 12 for $10...now why would I pay $20 for a single game when I was getting 5 Coleco games for $5, or a dozen Atari games for $10? Not to mention the same thing happened to the handhelds so I was getting cool handhelds like Football and Pool for a couple of bucks a pop, so why would I pay $20 for one game?

The answer is I wouldn't and neither would anybody else which is why the price went into a freefall, due to the high price of chips back then even if you made a truly great game thanks to how low the prices hit you often wouldn't even be able to make back what you paid to have the cart made, much less make a nickel in profit, and THAT is why so many companies folded. Being buddies with the kids of the retailers I got to hear how many of them ended up losing tens of thousands because of how much they had paid for product VS what it would sell for (which was a shitload of money back then) so naturally most of them dumped every bit of product they had and didn't want a damned thing to do with anything video game related for quite a long time. I know that in my area the NES didn't even show up until late '88 simply because all the retailers feared another pocket raping which considering how many of them were left in bad shape after the crash you really can't blame them.

So yes ET sucked and was a badly made POS, but honestly no single game had jack shit to do with the crash, it was a badly set up business practice that gave retailers a false sense of security which caused them to buy more stock than they could really afford to lose money on that caused the crash.

Re:My friend had that game.

[Cinder6]

Hating of ET has become popular in recent years. Honestly, though, it's neither the worst game ever, nor even the worst game on the 2600.* It was even one of the best-selling 2600 games at 1.5 million copies--unfortunately, Atari produced somewhere around 5 million copies. That, combined with the high cost of licensing it, made for significant losses.

*I actually enjoy it somewhat.

Re:My friend had that game.

[hairyfeet]

But that is where you are wrong, it really wasn't the horrible games, it was an economic system built AROUND games that ultimately caused it to crash.

In a way it is comparable to the housing crash, you had a system that was rewarding behavior that in any other time would have been seen as a BAD idea is rewarded. As I said I was buddies with the kids of the retailers and they ended up with a LOT more product than they could really afford to lose money on, but thanks to the retail gaming system that was in place? Well they didn't have to worry about that did they? They could just hand back every single product that didn't sell and get new product that would, and they could keep doing this until the product was sold.

Now imagine how warping such a system would be, imagine if you KNEW, without a shadow of a doubt, that every single laptop your store carried was guaranteed to sell because if it didn't? Why you'll be handed a brand new laptop to replace every single old laptop until every one were sold! What do you think that would do to the electronics section of every store, when they know that they simply can't lose when it comes to that product? Well that is EXACTLY what happened with games, you had stores picking up MUCH more product than they would have because they couldn't lose, see? They would get their money back or they would get the profits, no way they can lose!

And THAT is what called it, not the bad games. After all if their system worked like every other product they wouldn't gamble on more than one or two copies of a title and IF it sold then and ONLY then would they buy more copies of that product. Instead the system actively encouraged buying all the product you could possibly fit on the shelf because at the very least you'd get ALL of your money back, and every sale was profit time!

So really the fact that there was a glut of bad games in reality only made the system collapse faster, when if you take a good hard look at the way the system then worked then the obvious conclusion is that it had no other way it could end, all it would take is a few of the big companies having some bad quarters or games that flopped, even good games that just didn't catch on, for the whole system to fall down like dominoes.

related Pac-Man hacks

[Trepidity]

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.

ET's big failure...

[Bieeanda]

...was forced multimedia. You could pick up and plug in virtually any other Atari game (Star Raiders and its keypad accessory aside), and understand what you were doing inside of a minute. ET required you to read the manual, a feat for some players, doubly so if it had fallen behind the TV, in order to decipher the pictograms that appeared at the top of the screen and the behavior of the 'enemies'.

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.

Re:ET's big failure...

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't agree. Adventure was pretty highly regarded, and I dare you to find someone who can pick that one up in a minute without the manual.

Re:Wasn't so bad

[Creepy]

I'm in your boat - while I never owned ET, I did rent it for a couple of weeks, and I'm pretty sure I beat it a couple of times. I did read the manual, mainly because I had a lot of time between renting the game and getting home (we lived 10 miles out of town and a good half of that was city). While I didn't have fond memories of it, I didn't abhor it like some people. Now 2600 Pac Man was abhorrent, especially after playing it on a ColecoVision and Intellivision first.