If you repeat a falsehood often enough, people start to believe that it is true. Political spin doctors use the media to perpetuate misleading claims and outright lies. Urban legends are created and sustained when people who are victims of a hoax spread it like wildfire via e-mail. The same holds true with stories about the early days of videogaming. Nolan Bushnell is widely (and wrongly) credited as the inventor of videogames (just as Edison is often wrongly credited as the inventor of the light bulb rather than someone who perfected it). It has also become a universally accepted “truth” that E.T. for the Atari 2600 was the worst game ever made and that it single-handedly sank the videogame market. Neither claim is true.
Let’s start by examining the source material. As charming as the film E.T. might be, it is almost entirely devoid of any action. On the other hand, videogames are entirely based upon action…even more so twenty years ago when the console and software limitations precluded any sort of dialogue or cut-scenes. The E.T. movie had no explosions, no crashes, and no exchanges of gunfire (in fact, after Spielberg digitally fiddled with the original release for DVD purposes, there were no guns at all). The main characters were a harmless young boy and a harmless little alien who had a way with horticulture. If you had to distill the movie into a few ideas that might be used for a game, you would come up with something like this:
-Lost alien likes candy and can grow plants
-Boy must help alien build communication device
-Government agents pursue alien; no one gets hurt
-Alien thought to be dead, but revives
-Spaceship comes back and alien leaves in peace
Given the technical limitations of the Atari 2600, and the structural limitations of the story, what sort of game would you create? (Please don’t say a side-scrolling game where E.T. shoots down enemies on a flying bicycle!) The game had to be an action/adventure with some type of kid-friendly storyline…which it was. Actually, when you think about it, E.T. had a clever gameplay mechanic—an on-screen icon gave the main character a different power-up depending upon what zone he was located in. Not only that, but the game’s world was designed as a perfect cube (the city and the forest served as the “poles,” with the four pit screens along the equator). E.T. even featured a title screen (rare in those days), the familiar theme music, and a hidden “secret message” with the programmer’s initials. Not bad for a game that had to be programmed from scratch in a mere 5 weeks (an unheard of deadline even back then).
Yes, even I will admit that this part of the game was flawed. It wasn’t that the idea itself was bad—E.T. had to find the phone pieces somewhere, and there had to be some non-violent “danger”—but it was too difficult to avoid falling into the pits and it was also too difficult to get out of them. Perhaps this part of the game could have been fine-tuned (Smaller pit openings? A slight delay on the edge before falling?) If the programmer had the luxury of more time, this might have been fixed through play testing.
Given the short amount of time allotted to create the game, and the non-violent source material, I think that Howard Scott Warshaw did a pretty decent job. It is definitely not the best Atari 2600 game, nor is it Warshaw’s best work (he also programmed Yar’s Revenge and Raiders of the Lost Ark), but it is also far from the worst game ever made. Not only have there been some really bad modern games (Superman for N64, anyone?), but the Atari 2600 itself saw Data Age’s Sssnake, Apollo’s Skeet Shoot, US Games’ Sneak and Peek, and a large number of sub-par games that flooded the market.
If E.T. was neither the worst game ever made, nor the worst Atari 2600 game ever made, was it still responsible for the market crash? Plenty of videogame companies have seen their games die a quick death at retail. In fact, it is the rare videogame publisher who hasn’t released at least one major flop. Had E.T. simply been a high profile game that failed to live up to expectations, it wouldn’t have been the first time…or the last. But it couldn’t have brought down the market or humbled Atari if there weren’t other factors already at work.
For starters, Atari had no “lock out” chip or licensing agreement to prevent fly-by-night companies from releasing games for the 2600 console. Dozens of companies tried to enter the market, flooding it with horrible games. When their products failed to sell, these companies dumped their inventory. Consumers who were being asked to pay $40-$50 for brand-new games wondered why they shouldn’t just buy their kids the bargain bin games for $5-$15 instead. With videogame publications still in their infancy, and no game rental system, customers often didn’t realize a game was crap until after they had already bought it. Once burned, they hesitated to make future purchases. Atari was seemingly oblivious to this growing problem, still concentrating on profits at the expense of quality. And why not? In their eyes, they were right to refuse the Pac-Man programmer’s request for more ROM (which was expensive), because the game still managed to sell two million copies…despite looking, sounding, and playing almost nothing like the popular arcade original. They must have thought that consumers would buy almost anything.
Atari had already lost some of their most talented programmers (who formed Activision) after refusing to increase their salaries or provide royalties. Atari also earned a reputation for heavy-handed tactics—forcing retailers to order copies of games they didn’t want in order to get the games they did want, for example—not to mention failing to pay its vendors in a timely fashion. It also asked its distributors to pre-order all of 1982’s stock in the fall of 1981, and the distributors (who were previously caught short-handed) placed a large number of orders. The same management that undervalued its programmers overvalued licenses at the expense of games. By insisting that E.T. be released for the Christmas season, Atari left the programmer with little time. Unlike today’s CD-ROM and DVD-ROM games, cartridges were expensive to manufacture, and the lengthy process could not react quickly to market demand (or lack thereof). Atari reportedly manufactured more E.T. cartridges than there were Atari 2600 systems in use. As legend has it, the extra inventory eventually ended up buried in a New Mexico landfill.
And what of the market crash? What few people remember is that Atari did not lose money--it merely reported a 10 to 15 percent increase in earnings after analysts had predicted a much larger increase. But that decline was enough to send Warner’s (then the owner of Atari) stock into a decline. Other companies announced losses, or less than expected earnings, and the media’s race to pronounce videogames a passing “fad” was on. As we all know, news of the death of videogames was premature, and a few years later, a Japanese company rekindled the market…but that is a different story.
Atari sold a million E.T. cartridges, so the game can’t be classified as a financial flop. On the other hand, when E.T. failed to meet expectations, it added to the growing decline in sales that caused Atari to report less-than-expected earnings. Other factors—Atari’s bad reputation and poor management decisions, a glut of bad games—were already in place. The fledgling videogame industry, which probably grew too fast for its own good, didn’t know how to adjust. Interestingly enough, despite the fact that some modern companies continue to focus on licenses at the expense of gameplay, the market crash has never been repeated.
You won’t find E.T. on any of the Atari compilations for current generation consoles, or on “plug and play” television games. The ROM is widely available for emulators, however, and thanks to the large quantities of cartridges sold, the game is quite easy to find in a thrift store or flea market. If you play it, you won’t consider it a classic—but it is well within the parameters for an average game in 1982. Considering the movie’s non-violent subject matter, and the ridiculously short development cycle, it is my opinion that the game’s flaws can be overlooked…or at least understood in context.
E.T. is definitely not the worst game ever made, nor did it bring down an entire industry. But it makes for a good scapegoat, doesn’t it?