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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$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
I was young, maybe 8 or 10. I had games for a long time but i had no way of judging good from bad games. In the atari days i could only afford a few games and they were all 'good' to me. E.T. wasn't the worst thing ever, im pretty sure i beat it a bunch of times. I never really thought about it until everyone talked about it years later.
Good-bye
Its integration with the actual story was pretty lackluster too, like a five year old relating the film to a distracted parent, who went on to explain it to a coder in a foreign language.
I really don't understand why people are even discussing this anymore. I have this game, it sucked, it was 20 something years ago - no one should care. Moon Patrol was the shit.
E.T. Wasn't that bad of a game, it was just a terrible, terrible, terrible financial decision on Atari's part, neither was Pac-Man. But Atari paid a stupidly-high licensing fee for E.T. then rushed the production and then produced far more inventory than was needed for demand, mix that with the fact that Pac-Man was produced with 2 million more cartridges than Atari had sold consoles leads to a poor outcome.
The 2600 had a bunch of trash released for it (along with a handful of great gems) its just that Atari's bad business practices turned what could have been a minor setback to an industry crash.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
There are millions of people who have spent as much time watching TV game shows. YMMV.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(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.
Just to clarify: crude by the standards of 1982, when the E.T. game was released, not by the standards of 1977 when the console was released.
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/
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.
The copies of Pacman may be worth a little more, because hey: people still want to play that.
Not really. I had it and at the time it was fine as the expectations of 2600 games was pretty low for most of us. But I've read that years later people were returning pacman due to it being so unlike the original arcade version. They made 12 million units, so there are plenty out there. My daughter has one of those Jaks Pacman games that can be plugged into the TV and looks and sounds just like the original.
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
That man is a hacker. (Using that word properly.)
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
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.
Maybe they'll sell seven million copies of E.T. for the Atari 2600, covered in human waste and for a dollar each, proving us all wrong and freezing hell solid.
Yup.
I see plenty of E.T. available on Ebay with box and manual, doubtlessly taken better care of, and in better original condition for ~$8 to ~$10.
The best use of digging it up would probably be to recycle the components; unless they intend to collaborate to make a magic cartridge modification to fix all the issues with the game, and sell an altered version.
I suppose a big chunk of them could sell as a novelty... collector value, just because of the fact that it came from Atari's game burial.
Maybe the 3 thousand or less copies they are likely to recover (assuming there are any packed in the middle of the 'stack' that have not decayed/been damaged beyond recognition), will sell for $10 or $20 based on that.
It still won't recover the hundreds of thousands that a dig operation like this costs to perform :)
Why is it, whenever someone does something they enjoy doing. Someone else complains that person has too much time on their hands? Are you just jealous that he had the time?
Do you complain about fisherman, who sit for hours. People who lay at the beach to tan? Perhaps anyone that goes to a movie, sits in a hot tub. Plays a game. Sits around chatting with friends. What does one have to do, in your eyes, to not be wasting their time?
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?
Absolutely nothing. As copyright law has nothing to say about boards. About the software in the ROM? Again nothing, if you manage to salvage the ROMS, then you aren't making copies of the ROMS.
I figure they intend to profit on the documentary, not whatever they manage to unearth. Prices are up right now (thanks to the AVGN movie and the documentary project) but you used to be able to pick-up a pristine copy of E.T. (with box and manual) for less than $5. They'd have to be crazy if they thought they could profit from that.
There may be a small market for E.T. carts actually unearthed from the legendary landfill. The history would make the piece much more interesting.
Required reading for internet skeptics
Absolutely nothing. As copyright law has nothing to say about boards. About the software in the ROM?
The point is copyright restricts performance, distribution, and modification, not just copying.
The first sale doctrine has been used to establish a precedent that allows you to re-sell copyright works you have purchased. The right of the copyright holder to make the copy exercised by the first sale, flows; that is: this allows you to resell the work, the first sale permits it.
But there's a problem here.... what happens when you have an unpublished copy that was never sold to anyone; there is no 'first sale'; therefore, the first sale doctrine does not apply to this ROM you have recovered.
And there is no first abandonment doctrine I know of, that says the copy of the work of an author who abandoned a copy of the work, or accidentally misplaced a copy, or who accidentally leaked a copy due to employee misbehavior, or subcontractor misbehavior -- enjoys a right to be redistributed.
Therefore.... there is no right to distribute the work that is flowing to you.
In other words: salvaging the ROM, and reselling it without copying, might be infringement. There is no precedent I know of which says that is allowed, and it encroaches on an exclusive right protected by the copyright statute, that would tend to suggest that redistributing it would be illegal (even though you haven't made the copy -- and the copy may have been legal to make, it was never "infused with a right" to be redistributed, since there was never a first sale).
It's that borderline-OCD/control freak that a lot of geeks have. He saw that the game was appalling, and saw that it didn't absolutely need to be. He had to actually do it and fix it having worked out what needed to be done.
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).
> E.T. was a commercial failure
Not really. It sold 1.5m units. It's just they actually made way too many. It was a failure only inasmuch as they paid too much for the licence and made too many. In terms of sales it did OK.
I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
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?
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.