The making of E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, the “worst” video game | Hacker News Reader

The making of E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, the “worst” video game

thehustle.co

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I played ET as a kid when it came out and then many years later. It was a massive disappointment when it came out - it made no sense, and of course it had those infamous pits. When playing it as an adult, I realized it wasn't the adventure game it looked like (and arguably ought to have been) but rather a fun little puzzle game. An interesting novelty, and flaw for a mass market mainstream game, was that the printed manual was an integral part of the game. Without the manual to look up the cryptic glyphs that would appear on screen, the game truly made no sense.

So most of the ET demographic (young kids) played it without really playing it... wandering around what seemed like an adventure world (a la 2600 Superman or Raiders), not even noticing the glyphs, and certainly not working out the glyph puzzles using the book.

ET really wasn't that bad of a game once you RTFMed. Definitely not the worst. The 2600 had so many awful games that were worse.

I guess I had a lot of time to waste as a kid, because I bought it used and figured the gameplay without help. For an Atari 2600 game it was more involved than average, but the game itself gave you clues like the cryptic glyphs.

I also bought used the SwordQuest games, and with no comics or Internet, those really left me stumped.

Fixing it (2015): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9668734

Fixing it (2014): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6994180

Cartridges were found in landfill (2014): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7652473

Long Harper's article about the landfill dig: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17870402

A different worst game (2013): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6023484

The Icarus effect here is both sad and eye-opening:

After Atari crumbled, his outsized role in the video game crisis earned him a scarlet letter in the industry. He found work as a real estate broker and spent nearly 2 decades soul searching before discovering his true passion: psychotherapy.

A man of that talent should never have had to work as a real estate broker. It's almost as if the business put him in a position he couldn't handle, and then shunned him when he couldn't handle it.

I love his outlook on the whole thing, though. Summed up at the end of the article:

“Now, I kind of prefer it when people call E.T. the worst game ever,” he says. “Yars’ Revenge is considered one of the best games, so as long as E.T. is the worst, I have the greatest range of any designer in history.”

How important is to learn to say “no”.

Nearly as important as saying “it”!

"Okay, we'll get Billy the intern to code it. By the way, clean out your desk."

I don't think the interns would be able to code an Atari game by themselves at the time

Still, sometimes getting the pink slip is better than getting a black mark on your cv

Back then the video game companies didn't think developers were important. Hence games from this era didn't include them in the credits ("for what? should the blinds and the printer get credit too? FURNITURE!"). If he said no, he would have been given the slip without second thought.

He was paid >1M/yr(>2M in modern dollars); I doubt he ranked quite so low as people are saying. Interchangeable widgets don’t pull down that salary.

I think it was more that they were worried about headhunters poaching their programmers, or at least that was the excuse they’d give.

So? He would be remembered as the author of two huge hits, and would be able to immediately land another stellar gaming job.

He said Yes, because it was a challenge and he took it.

I know some extremely intelligent and hard working real estate brokers, and they earn salaries above the techies. Every industry has winners!

The point is that if you're good at something, you shouldn't be forced to do something else you're not as good at.

I worked with him in computers after his time at Atari. I didn't see him as shunned or having career problems there. Hm.

From Wikipedia: "Kassar reportedly offered Warshaw US$200,000 and an all-expenses-paid vacation to Hawaii in compensation." [0] . $200K in 1982 is equivalent to over $500K today. When you give a halfway intelligent and sensible 25 year old that kind of money, "have to" is probably not something that applies to working anywhere.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E.T._the_Extra-Terrestrial_(vi...

Howard Scott Warshaw did a postmortem talk @ GDC for Yars' Revenge, in it he speaks briefly about E.T. as well. I found it interesting, worth a listen.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aqH4k_OEqhY

Postmortem? He's very much alive

Postmortem refers to the subject not the person. It’s a term Beverly commonly used in tech circles: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postmortem_documentation

Postmortem refers to the subject not the person. It’s a term Beverly commonly used in tech circles: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postmortem_documentation

Ok, I give up -- who is Beverly? I checked the page you linked to, and there was no mention of her.

Possibly auto-corrected "very"

Atari: Game Over made for a really interesting watch in explaining what the game was meant to be, and how it works

There's also this treatise on why people thought it was broken, and how to fix it: http://www.neocomputer.org/projects/et/

>It turns out that E.T. isn't a bad game after all. With a few simple changes we were able to dramatically improve an already good game by eliminating the most common complaints.

If only they had the ability to remotely update games back then.

It seems like there are substantial issues!

* The code handling whether things overlap, like your character and a hole in the ground, and the graphics don't tell the same story so you get hurt in frustrating ways.

* You can't leave certain areas in certain directions that aren't clear to players.

* The documentation on game scoring is very wrong.

* Elliot,a major character, can die for a reason that makes no visual sense

E.T. might be considered the worst, but Pac-Man for the 2600 was surely the most disappointing. The plumber wrench Pac-Man had to be one of the worst adaptations ever. The 8-bit Atari computer version was such a amazing leap.

What was disappointing about it? I owned an Atari 2600 and played Pac-Man many times. But I've never played it on another game console or in an arcade, so I'm not sure what I was missing.

Pretty much everything: the flickering and the altered map with misaligned dots is the most obvious change, but it's missing all the different value bonus items, the iconic sounds, and lots of tiny graphical touches like ghost eyes facing the direction they move in, or up and down sprites for the pac. In short, it's severly cut down on all features, and poorly coded to boot (mrs. pac-man shows you can do better than this).

I guess I was very forgiving back then... I loved Pacmac on my 2600. Or maybe it's because it was my first game purchase after "Combat!" (which came with the 2600)

I mean, I'm in the same boat as you. 2600 pacman is the only one I knew for a long while and I still kinda prefer the meaty beep sounds over the original sound effects. But for people who knew arcade pacman beforehand, the perception was obviously rather different.

I think the most disappointing thing was the "klong klong" sound it made while eating pellets, and that the pellets were bars instead of dots. The ghost flickering looks awful in an emulator, but it's almost bearable in a CRT.

It's not the worst by any means. For example, any game on the infamous Action 52 cartridge is easily worse than E.T. Most of the "worst" consideration happens because of notable game reviewers such as AVGN perpetuating the meme of it being the worst game ever.

Kind of similar to how EA Games is often the #1 hated company, even though it has many successful franchises and beloved games.

Here's a much improved version of Pac-Man for the 2600:

https://atariage.com/forums/topic/229152-new-pacman-for-atar...

Immortalized in the animated docu-drama Code Monkeys.

https://m.imdb.com/title/tt1070119/

Here's someone cutting the game open and editing the assembly, to improve it by various means: http://www.neocomputer.org/projects/et/

Wikipedia has a really good history on the video game crash of 1983. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_crash_of_1983

The revenue curve beautifully resembles the hype cycle.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hype_cycle

Slightly OT, but one of the best ways to master graphics programming is to write at least a few "worse" video games yourself :-)

Graphics programming on the 2600 is super weird, I'm not sure the skills learning it are even transferable, but it's really fun to do.

$39.95 (1982) = $106.48 (2019)

That was an expensive game.

I think many people don't realize how expensive games and consoles were 20-40 years ago. I remember paying $70 for a few different SNES games back in the 90's ($110 now based on a quick inflation check). Are there any computer or console games now that cost anywhere close to $100?

It's not unusual for a new game to have dlc available at launch which is the say the game is split into pieces and monetized that way. A new game will have different editions ranging from 60 to 80 bucks and 2-4 dlc at launch and later for 10 - 20 bucks each.

I guess the maximum spend you could end up with is $100 to $160 depending on quantity of dlc and original purchase price.

Call of duty ghosts has a pack with the game all the dlc for $100 now.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/255163/Call_of_Duty_Ghost...

How many people was involved in the creation of CoD, vs ET? I think the production costs are very different.

I'm not aware of any games with an up-front cost of $100, but the model is moving towards in-game purchases.

70% of Fortnite players have made in-game purchases, spending $85 each on average. source: https://www.businessofapps.com/data/fortnite-statistics/

"Serious Games" -- usually niche simulation type games -- can easily retail for $80+ for the base game, and then you pay for DLC expansions at around $20-40 a pop.

Examples: Gary Grigsby, Command: Modern Operations, Steel Beasts, etc...

Of course you're basically paying for an interactive encyclopedia in many cases and they don't typically have the repetitive addictive nature of f2p games that include in game purchases.

Then you have stuff like the paradox games with dlcs spanning years and totalling in the hundreds of dollars to buy the 'entire' game up front...

However I would much much rather pay $100 up front for a big, generally complete game than get a game that either centers around pointless cosmetic additions or requires me to spend money (loot boxes containing required items, paywalled features, pay-to-skip progression) and get me addicted to the gameplay.

I guess that's not a novel sentiment though...

If you include DLC's? Easily. One of the train simulators goes into thousands if you want all the choo-choos.

or the various "gold" and "diamond" or similar editions.

Though the standard price for a cassette 8-bit game in the mid-80s was £5.50ish, which after a few years bifurcated into £1.99 and £9.95.

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