A Classic Example: ET

ET has been rated the worst video game of all time, from a number of different sources. Its not just the pointless gameplayer that really brings this game down, its the fact that the games actually broken!

ET is an adventure game, with the object of collecting three pieces of an interplanetary telephone. This phone is of course used for ET to phone home, like the movie. Three pieces need to be collected in order to make the call. The whole time the player is searching for the phone pieces, an energy bar is depleting. This energy bar is refilled by eating Reese's pieces. When the phone is finally collected and the ship called, the game just restarts. The only difference is the placement of the telephone parts. This repeats until the energy bar is depleted, or the gamer undoubtedly quits.

This game has been rated by several different critics as the worst game ever created. ET doesn't really illustrate why the transition from games into film doesn't work though. ET was in a licensing feud between who would get the make the game. Atari won after a long battle, and the final ET name wasn't owned by atari till late July of 1982. The game was still to be finished in time for the holiday season. This left the designers roughly 4 months to finish an entire video game. ET was to be released in arcades too, but the rush to release just the Atari version turned out to be too much to also release an arcade version. This has got to be the main reason this game did so terrible, which still leave me asking the question - Why can't film make it to the media of video games? Hopefully we can answer that question

P.S. While doing a little research I came across a cool bit of info on the ET game. Supposedly Atari had an enormous number of copies (nobody knows for sure) of ET buried in a landfill in El Paso, Texas. Shows just how well this game sold!!


RIP ET!!!