Ah, crappy video games!
I had dinner with Michael and Robert yesterday, and somehow Michael mentioned in the conversation that E.T. was made into a video game for the Atari 2600, and is widely considered the worst-selling video game of all time (they apparently buried tens of thousands of cartridges in a landfill because it was the most profitable way of getting rid of them). Well, we actually managed to find a copy of this game and play it, and there’s a reason why it didn’t sell well. Here is a synopsis of the game, as best we could piece together by reading the manual and playing it:
- You control ET. The object of the game is to get ET to collect 3 pieces of telephone and phone home. Telephone pieces are hidden at the bottom of large pits that you can fall in.
- The location of the pits appears to be uncorrelated with anything else on the screen: you can fall into a pit without seeing anything unusual on the screen, and you can step into the differently colored parts and only sometimes fall into a pit.
- You can extend your neck to levitate out of and over the pits. Also, sometimes you can extend your neck to change zones. We’re not sure what a zone is (we think it’s like a mode), but we often cycled through the “eat candy zone” and the “call Elliot zone.” One zone changes the terrain around you, which is confusing as hell. Sometimes you can also change zones by moving in a different direction. We have no clue about this.
- Moving around costs energy, and the amount of energy you have left is displayed at the bottom of the screen. When you run out of energy, Elliot comes by and gives you 1500 more units. This means that the game ends either when you win or when you get bored and stop playing. To the best of our knowledge, you can never lose.
- If the FBI man catches you, he takes you to the Parthenon and steals all your candy.
- If you manage to call Elliot while in “call Elliot zone,” he will come and take your candy. He will then pretend to run off and find a piece of telephone for us. We don’t know why he does this, however, because he never actually returns with one.
I actually owned this game for my Atari – despite my extreme fear of ET – when I was young. I would play it frequently, though don’t have much recollection of it and remember it leaving my father very frustrated.
Apparently, while you can’t actually lose, you can’t win either. I dont remember ever getting this far personally, but folks say that the last piece of the phone was unretrievable – the hole was a few pixels too high or something and you couldn’t get out in the end. Ooops. I wonder if ending graphics were ever even made.
This company also, apparently, did not get Universal’s approval to make this game and nearly destroyed the video game industry when Universal sued. No copyright laws had been put in place regarding video games basing themsleves on other media, of course, and so people pushed the limit. This game took it too far and Universal lashed back at the whole industry. Yay ET!
So my fear of that little monster isn’t entirely unfounded.
I think Michael said the game was partially developed by Spielberg, so it seems strange that Universal would get upset.
That part Alan said about the game ends when you get tired of playing, that was actually what it said in the rule book. And for some reason ET can’t eat the candy he’s holding to give himself more energy. Is the that stupid? Everyone knows, candy => energy.
I just have to say that the game was awesome and I hope to play it again sometime (not really). The most fun part was that Michael was playing the game and I was reading the instructions and trying to explain to him how to play, while Alan was going back and forth between watching me and him. And none of us had any idea what was going on. Unlike video games now though, every symbol and feature of the game was described in a printed manual that was only 4-6 pages long.