Interesting Stuff

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.