I’ve run this video game website way too long without any mention of E.T. the Extraterrestrial. For all the wrong reasons, this game is legendary. If you don’t already know what makes this game special, there are no shortage of resources you can check out to catch up on the story.
I’m not here to regurgitate that story or tell you how E.T. the Extraterrestrial almost killed the entire home video game market. As a proud owner of this game, I just wanted to share my experiences with it.
Though my very first video game system was an Atari 2600, I don’t ever recall seeing this game in action during the 80s. I would go ignorant to the legend of E.T. until many years later, when it was often cited in magazines and on websites as the worst video game of all-time. In a weird way, I aspired to own that game someday and see for myself.
That day came in the mid 2000s, when the store I was buying an Atari 2600 also had a copy of E.T. on sale for $2. Even if I wasn’t buying an Atari, I would have bought E.T. anyway. I was with a friend at the time and as we were driving back to my house with the Atari and the game, I told her all the stories I’ve heard about how awful E.T. actually was.
Later that night, we found out for ourselves that the hype was real. If you have not played this game or watched footage of it, E.T. is one of the most poorly designed games of all-time. The point of the game is to collect the pieces of your spaceship and go home, but you wouldn’t know this without reading something outside of the game first.
When you play this game, all you know is that there are a number of places you can travel, every action you do depletes the number at the bottom of the screen, random guys are grabbing you and dragging you back to the first screen, and you fall into holes. A lot. You have to fall into holes in hopes of finding a piece of your ship. However, most holes are empty and the game doesn’t indicate which holes have the items. This means you will burn a lot of E.T.’s energy falling into random holes and floating out after not finding anything.
Very quickly, we realized that this game atrocious. What it boils down to is falling down holes over and over again until you die, which you will, virtually every time. Can you beat the first level? I doubt it. On the first night we tried it, my friend and I laughed to tears at how bad, impossibly unfair and not fun E.T. was.
Do I regret spending money on it? Not in the least. I have a lot of games in my collection, but I hold E.T. the Extraterrestrial close to my heart because it really is the worst video game of all-time. It’s the worst because it’s not fun, it sold terribly and because it almost single-handedly destroyed the home video game industry just by existing. Considering the fact that most copies of E.T. have been dumped in a landfill and paved over, I consider myself fortunate to still have a working copy today.
In Third Person 