You're the first person I've ever seen giving this game a fair review; it's better than I would have thought, especially for the time and development time given (as you rightly pointed out)
I haven't heard anyone actually explain the mechanics of this game before, so I found this to be interesting. Pretty much all I knew was that it was "that Atari game everyone hates where you fall down pits." Good to see there was some method to the madness, even if that doesn't make it good. Though really, with all the absolute garbage released nowadays (especially what gets put onto Steam, judging by what I see whenever I scroll through new releases), this is nowhere near the worst game ever.
@@CZpersi Raid Shadow Legends is still way better than this game though. Also, the worst AAA game is probably better than the best Atari 2600 game if I may give my hot take.
Ernest Cline, writer of Ready Player One : "E.T. was the first emotional video game where you had to care about this alien that you were trying to rescue. It was one of the first games I had an emotional reaction to. I was excited and a little teary when the John Williams music played at the end. So to blame the crash on E.T. is nonsense. It's ridiculous. It was an amazing, innovative, groundbreaking game that became overproduced." That's the most positive review of one of the worst games I've ever read.
that guys on crack, blaming the crash entirely on et is probably nonsense but calling it any of amazing, innovative or groundbreaking is definitely a way bigger dissociation with reality here what
When i was a kid everyone would shy away from buying a videogame based on a blockbuster movie. And that trend started after ET. Decades after, kids everywhere still distrusted any game based of a movie. There was a general consensus that if a game was from a movie it would be shite. And tbh, for the most part, they were right.
I guess Star Wars, LotR or Harry Potter are somewhat bad examles to disprove this (since those are technically "franchise based"). Still, some really nice games based on movies (at least for the mainstream market).
While generally true some of them have been incredible. I would still recommend anyone with a snes or emulator play the lion king. It is a touch difficult but the art and character design is gorgeous and it is genuinely fun.
@@SoulDevoured I agree, Lion King was a great game. It's one of those exceptions. Unfortunately the majority of movie licensed games were just a quick buck money making scam to fool unware kids 😐 They knew kids would buy those for the title alone. Speaking of alone, Home alone games are a good example of this practice God those were awful games. Every single one!
You weren't kidding about the algorithm when talking about needing the new channel... even youtube searching 'Josh Strife Hayes E.T.' didn't bring this one up; I had to find it from your channel's video list. Did so now because I kept meaning to come back and comment since somehow this one played 'next' for me at work after one of the mmo vids. One of the first video games I played ever as a kid (I think my mom bought it because A. It was dirt cheap by the mid 80s and B. I was scared of the movie for whatever reason and she thought this would help which no not really). I didn't know I was playing 'the worst game ever'. I did know it was pretty easy but again, six so didn't think much of it. Neat to relive it here, made me look forward to the upcoming channel.
I remember enjoying it as well. I didn't understand the hate it received as even back then, everyone knew the Atari wasn't going to be the end all be all of consoles and games (the 5200, ColecoVision and Intellivision were all around at varying time). For what it was, it was a great time-waster!
@@KnowingEyes what you may not remember is how horrible the Atari joystick was, especially if you had a used controller. While it's not the game fault... playing ET with a used joystick who would randomly send you in a different direction because the hardware sucked resulted in you falling into the same pit again, and again, and again, and again...
I think the game's biggest problem (hype at the time of its release nonwithstanding) is that it's just so cryptic if you don't have the manual at hand. Most reviews I've seen before (the AVGN one first and foremost) just devolved into "What the F am I doing?!" and that was about it.
Now imagine all games on the market back then being pirate copies with no manuals. You had to figure everything out yourself and there was no way to look anything up.
If you ever get the chance I highly recommend everyone to watch the documentary called "Once Upon Atari" made by Howard Scott Warshaw, they guy who made ET, from concept to production in about 7 weeks.
0:44 you know what josh. for the first time in my life, i am gonna hit that bell. I've been binge watching your videos for months now, and it only feels right.
The game was too ambitious for the time of its release, the budget available to the actual developer, hardware capabilities and the time available to the developer. It is actually one of the most complex games of its era. ET could be dubbed the worst game of all time, or one of the unsuccessful attempts at making Zelda-style RPG.
It's a game that's always struck me as in the wrong place in the wrong time. It's a bad game, but not remarkably awful - it's no Big Rigs Over the Road Racing, Ride to Hell Retribution or even Sonic '06 - but it happened to be in a position where it essentially set the dominoes falling for a massive collapse in the gaming market, and it's remembered more for that legacy than it is for the game it actually is.
I thought Atari Superman was worst. I found a bug where you could beat the game in 1 second by flying left before the intro song ends. You are then rewarded with a 3 note song... Bing bing bong.
I got this game when I was 7 years old. A lot of us did not have the instruction manual for one reason or another and had NO idea of all those random icons and powers. It was the hardest, most confusing game of my childhood. Hated it!!
Thank you for playing this game and saving me the five minutes! Wait, the video I watched about you playing the game was... 4x longer than the actual game! :O LOL
...I know Josh is British but the choice of using the Canadian Federal Police (RCMP) cruiser instead of an FBI van or something makes me laugh for some reason lol
this is in a sense , the first game with a world build in, and the place and action , so advanced , too much actually , all we can do is wonder what this programmer could have done with more years in the job, but because he was so crucified , he left the job forever. we might have chased the eisntein of the game away because he something no one understood in kindergarten, but today we see it was advanced calculus .
I got this game from a charity shop when I was a kid, so of course it came without the manual. If I had been aware of even a *single* aspect of these mechanics or objectives at the time, I probably wouldn’t still have lingering PTSD from this game. 🤦🏽♀️ I don’t even want to talk about how my copy was apparently stuck on Government Agent Mode.
alsways find it fasciniating that you used to be able to sell 1.5 million copies for almost as much as games go by now, of a game that took one person 5 weeks. the profit margain mustve been absolutely insane back then
Not quite. For one, inflation means that today's $60 is much less than _then_ $60. So today's games are much cheaper. But on the other side, production was _much_ more expensive. These cartridges had actual hardware on them; they weren't just CDs pressed en-mase for essentially zero cost. They were heavier and took up more space. They were finicky and prone to damage. Distribution networks were very expensive too. And you better guess well how many games you're going to sell - if you order too much more than you sell, you can easily lose money overall. Cartridges you can't sell are utterly worthless, and even worse, another expense to get rid of them. Today, all of that is much cheaper and easier, even with distributors like Steam taking 30% of your gross revenues. The vast majority of the costs and risks are the development of the game. And today, the market is _much_ bigger too. A game selling 5000 copies would be considered fairly successful back in the day (if you weren't a big publisher like Atari, of course). The biggest selling game on the Atari 2600 was Pac-man, with 8M sales total (funnily enough, considered "one of the worst games of all time"). Minecraft sold 240M so far, an indie game - though certainly an outlier. The original Doom sold about 4M - at the time, this would be laughable to any "real" publisher, but for self-publishers on a shareware model... they're still swimming in the cash, of course, since all of those costly things like distribution were pretty much zero. It's a lot better to get 90% share of 4M sales than a 1% share from 100M of sales.
@@LuaanTi I never found the cartridges for Atari finicky or prone to damage, all of mine still work and some were not treated well at all. Just to add more complexity to the whole situation: I will say that while they used expensive cartridges, they didn't have to employ the staggering number of developers needed today. One guy made this and Atari was notorious for paying their programmers peanuts (which is why so many left Atari to form Activision). So Atari managed to make money hand over fist for years but then made stupid decisions like overpaying for the E.T. licensing and facing competition that they just couldn't handle from other companies that sniped their talent. The whole crash was a complicated mess of a market overcorrection from rapid development and changing business practices.
@@majorramsey3k Sure, that point was about the per-sale cost. It's a thing that wildly changes the math around how much each individual developer can be worth (which is of course very different from how much they are actually paid :D ). There was a lot to save on making the cartridge (or arcade, of course) cheaper - contrast to today's situation where the medium became essentially free and games exploded in size (and usually nowhere near proportionally in content).
I got this game for Christmas as a kid. I don't think I was old enough to understand the mechanics. I just loved the movie but the game was such a let down. I found it so difficult. It's nice to see how it was meant to be played. Thank you, Mr. Hayes.
Anyone who says Big Rigs Over the Road Racing is a worse game is wrong because they think Big Rigs is in fact a game. Same with Dreamworld. And anything that doesn't even qualify as an obvious beta released as a finished product.
Armored Cores an old pretty fun and challenging forgotten series buried under the piles of old mech games, actually one fact I love I learned a few years back was the art director for the third gen armored core games went on to also do art for the gundam mech anime series which I always find funny cause i thought some of the weaponry and desighns looked familiar in the show
Howard Scott Warshaw was given a raw deal. To make a game by yourself in 5 weeks is a lot of work now, but in the early 80s, it was unheard of. If you listen to him in interviews, he will even list off all the issues the game had, but he had to make the deadline. Which he did. I personally do not like the ET game. It’s just boring, but I can appreciate it for how ambitious it was for the early 80s. Don’t blame Warshaw and ET for the crash of 83. Blame Atari and their shitty business decisions. Turns out Atari was a head of the times. Asking for unrealistic milestones within and unrealistic timeframe from an understaffed team and then throwing the team under the bus.
i remember playing ET in the 80s and being confused as hell as to what i was supposed to do, and that seemed to be a common reaction. there should have been text next to the power mode icons to explain what each one does. like "find part" or "elliot." that would have made a huge difference
I owned this game...it was terrible as a kid... Very simply, it was not very intuitive as a child, I went back to other games and pretty much ignored it after. As an adult when I played it on a whim, it was more understandable because the manual(which has to be read), but it still kinda sucks, it is a short game that isn't really much fun so not very repeatable.
I played this after buying it at a garage sale as a kid. I guess I didn't have enough patience to figure out the whole thing with the "zones" that do different things... with no documentation, and of course no internet to look up, it was totally annoying... and I remember just falling in a pit and not being able to get out. Over and over again.
I was one of those people unfortunate enough to play this game on the actual Atari console. I can't describe to you just how terrible the controls were, how unresponsive and cumbersome movement really was, and the gameplay was atrocious. Emulators can't in any way get across the pain and struggle of trying to get that little turd of an alien to move around. The entire game was an experience that I would not wish on anyone. But I also want everyone who is a game designer to play it just so that they can understand what NOT to do. Still, I'd rather play this than New World.
Five worst games I played as a child: E.T. (Atari 2600), Deadly Towers (NES), Sword of Sodan (Genesis), China Warrior (Turbografx 16), Batman Returns (Atari Lynx), and that terrible hologram arcade game Time Traveler. Also, pretty much every LJN NES game was crap, especially their Back to the Future games.
Fix the geometry connections are reversible, nerf the FBI agent so one touch doesn’t essentially make you need to restart the entire game and he can’t jump you from offscreen, and make pits less sensitive you’re less likely to fall into them from off screen or when coming up, and the game would be decent. Not a great game by any means, but at least above average for an Atari game.
That sound in the background when you talk about the name not being as important as the quality of the actual game? Yeah, that's the ghost of Tom Clancy, crying.
I started to think this game didn't sound so bad half way through the explanation of the systems, and I think that's why people hated it back then. They didn't have a TH-cam, or a GameFaqs, or a Josh Dry Face to explain how to actually play the game.
@@SoulDevoured the parents could’ve read it, remember this was before games were powerful enough to have tutorials, so you had to read the manual for most games anyway
For all the complaints the game at least had clear goals and some semblance of thought behind it. So much more effort was clearly put into this game compared to some of the utter crap we get in today's market. The game works and only had one bug you could find, which seems so surreal. It's not unusual for most modern games to come with bugs so bad it can't be finished, or entire sections of the game are cut off.
Pac-Man's port to the 2600 was far worse than this, because that was a port of a great game and the port was dire. The fact they got Ms Pacman running and looking so much better is a testament to that. The comedy is how many decades later and publishers still do this and go "What happened!?" you gave the dev team no time, and you made insane demands. Repeat again and again
Yes, it is the worst. I played it. But the game is excellent at filling up holes in the ground. 18:46 Not all movie tie-in games are crap. There is the highly praised 'Mad Max.'
I heard a rumour that Atari f'd up and made more E.T cartridges than they had made consoles. Not just a few more cartridges.... but waaaay more cartridges and Atari had sold over 25 million 2600 consoles at that point.
The wikipedia page says "game sold 1.5 million units upon release, and over 2.6 million copies by the end of 1982. However, at least 669,000 copies were later returned in 1983, and between 2.5 and 3.5 million cartridges went unsold" which is ALOT but definitely not more cartridges than there were 2600s. That's probably just an unfounded rumor because shitting on Atari for blundering that console generation is fun. People said video games were dead. That it was a fad. That it was just too much of a gimmicky and uncontrollable market. People said that Atari went bankrupt. That Atari singlehandedly destroyed the industry (which they were hardly the only ones that messed up and the gaming industry is obviously not destroyed.) That they would never make games again. There's alot of dramatics and exaggeration around the talk of that era. I had heard the same rumor btw but given how silly many of the claims of that era were I always took it with a grain of salt. If there were 30 million copies of E.T. you'd think that would have been dumped en mass in the NM pit. What else would they do with them?
@@SoulDevoured Oh no doubt they are probably exaggerated numbers, I just happened to have heard the rumour is all. Of the few sites I checked it seemed an equal split on those who believed it and those who didn't. Many claim _"millions of un-sold cartridges"_ I guess we'll never know the *true* figures, I'm sure Atari will never fess-up they put a decimal in the wrong place.
I tried it after this video, i knew this game existed before, but i didn't know there was such a vast dislike for it. it's an alright game, as Josh and the reviewers said it's dull yeah, but it's a functioning little game, nothing wrong with it per say. There are plenty of games coming out today that are a million times worse in terms of enjoyment and are barely functional
It was a weird pitfall like game to me, most puzzling thing in general being really that back when i got the game i had not really watched or understood the film as i was still very young nor was there any kind of game manual or guide. Come to think of it, pretty sure my atari console and ET cartridge is less than 5m away from me collecting dust in a box above the clothes closet. And oh yh i can still dream the the enemy approaching sound as ET tudutudutudu that running midi sound actually is still kinda stuck in my brain.
This game isn’t the “worst game ever” It did what it wanted to do and it did it competently. This game is essentially undertale but for the Atari back in the 80s That’s how much work this guy did. Alone. Now is it as critically well received as undertale? Hell no. Not at all. But it plays solidly. It has graphics that are reminiscent. It has a decent song and sprites. That’s… not “worst game ever” Worst game ever is ride to hell retribution.
What I learned from this video: Professional Reviewers have been bad at video games back in 1982 and nothing changed. When it comes to movie tie ins, I believe there has been ONE game that broke the movie tie in curse. Chronicles of Riddick. But good thing video games got their revenge. Because video game tie in movies are usually just as flawed as products.
It's still a 2 out of 10 at best though. 1 out of 10 will be reserved for games that look as bad as this game, but don't even work at all. Any AAA game is automatically a 4 out of 10 because of the graphics and the fact that even with a lot of bugs, there are still some things to do.
i played this once... EVERY time i levitated out of a pit, i got STUCK and COULD NOT MOVE in the main screen, so there was NOTHING I could do but release the button and fall back in the pit. thanks to careful use of the power zones, i only fell into 3 pits, but i got stuck that way at least FOUR times! and that was at easy (mode 3) difficulty...
You're the first person I've ever seen giving this game a fair review; it's better than I would have thought, especially for the time and development time given (as you rightly pointed out)
Well, you should expand your horizons a little. The angry videogame nerd, believe it or not, gave it a fair review nine whole years ago.
I haven't heard anyone actually explain the mechanics of this game before, so I found this to be interesting. Pretty much all I knew was that it was "that Atari game everyone hates where you fall down pits." Good to see there was some method to the madness, even if that doesn't make it good. Though really, with all the absolute garbage released nowadays (especially what gets put onto Steam, judging by what I see whenever I scroll through new releases), this is nowhere near the worst game ever.
Knowing you had to walk sideways out of a pit would’ve been helpful in the 80s.
@@Dozav7 Yeah, this is a case where the mechanics not being explained was extremely detrimental.
I would always be happy to play this over Raid Shadow Legends. At least it would not ask for money all the time.
We didn't have the rulebook when I was a kid. Very very confusing to play.
@@CZpersi Raid Shadow Legends is still way better than this game though. Also, the worst AAA game is probably better than the best Atari 2600 game if I may give my hot take.
Its playable, works as intented and has no bugs or glitches.. ride to hell retribution is worse than E.T by a country mile..
It's also way more complex, come on. I mean, it's still horrible, but you need to take everything into consideration.
Ernest Cline, writer of Ready Player One
: "E.T. was the first emotional video game where you had to care about this alien that you were trying to rescue. It was one of the first games I had an emotional reaction to. I was excited and a little teary when the John Williams music played at the end. So to blame the crash on E.T. is nonsense. It's ridiculous. It was an amazing, innovative, groundbreaking game that became overproduced."
That's the most positive review of one of the worst games I've ever read.
that guys on crack, blaming the crash entirely on et is probably nonsense but calling it any of amazing, innovative or groundbreaking is definitely a way bigger dissociation with reality here what
Gotta give the dev credit for making this in just over a month.
Other Atari games took way longer than that and are way worse.
@@matthewbraith0411 Almost all Atari games are garbage, but how exactly are they worse than E.T.?
When i was a kid everyone would shy away from buying a videogame based on a blockbuster movie. And that trend started after ET.
Decades after, kids everywhere still distrusted any game based of a movie. There was a general consensus that if a game was from a movie it would be shite.
And tbh, for the most part, they were right.
I guess Star Wars, LotR or Harry Potter are somewhat bad examles to disprove this (since those are technically "franchise based"). Still, some really nice games based on movies (at least for the mainstream market).
Nah man Shrek 2 for the gameboy advance was the shit
While generally true some of them have been incredible. I would still recommend anyone with a snes or emulator play the lion king. It is a touch difficult but the art and character design is gorgeous and it is genuinely fun.
@@SoulDevoured I agree, Lion King was a great game. It's one of those exceptions.
Unfortunately the majority of movie licensed games were just a quick buck money making scam to fool unware kids 😐
They knew kids would buy those for the title alone.
Speaking of alone, Home alone games are a good example of this practice
God those were awful games. Every single one!
Almost all Disney Capcom games were great. A lot of very bad video games based off movies and shows, most NES Simpson games were dreadful.
You weren't kidding about the algorithm when talking about needing the new channel... even youtube searching 'Josh Strife Hayes E.T.' didn't bring this one up; I had to find it from your channel's video list. Did so now because I kept meaning to come back and comment since somehow this one played 'next' for me at work after one of the mmo vids.
One of the first video games I played ever as a kid (I think my mom bought it because A. It was dirt cheap by the mid 80s and B. I was scared of the movie for whatever reason and she thought this would help which no not really). I didn't know I was playing 'the worst game ever'. I did know it was pretty easy but again, six so didn't think much of it.
Neat to relive it here, made me look forward to the upcoming channel.
I got this game as a kid one Christmas. I remember actually enjoying it. I won't play it again, I don't need a reminder of how silly I was as a kid.
I remember enjoying it as well. I didn't understand the hate it received as even back then, everyone knew the Atari wasn't going to be the end all be all of consoles and games (the 5200, ColecoVision and Intellivision were all around at varying time). For what it was, it was a great time-waster!
@@KnowingEyes what you may not remember is how horrible the Atari joystick was, especially if you had a used controller.
While it's not the game fault... playing ET with a used joystick who would randomly send you in a different direction because the hardware sucked resulted in you falling into the same pit again, and again, and again, and again...
I think the game's biggest problem (hype at the time of its release nonwithstanding) is that it's just so cryptic if you don't have the manual at hand. Most reviews I've seen before (the AVGN one first and foremost) just devolved into "What the F am I doing?!" and that was about it.
Now imagine all games on the market back then being pirate copies with no manuals. You had to figure everything out yourself and there was no way to look anything up.
Love the little skits woven throughout, genuinely made me smile. Great vid as always!
Wow you have definitely exploded in the past year my man. Love all your vids and was recommended this one. Love to see the growth!!
If you ever get the chance I highly recommend everyone to watch the documentary called "Once Upon Atari" made by Howard Scott Warshaw, they guy who made ET, from concept to production in about 7 weeks.
0:44 you know what josh. for the first time in my life, i am gonna hit that bell. I've been binge watching your videos for months now, and it only feels right.
The game was too ambitious for the time of its release, the budget available to the actual developer, hardware capabilities and the time available to the developer. It is actually one of the most complex games of its era. ET could be dubbed the worst game of all time, or one of the unsuccessful attempts at making Zelda-style RPG.
oh, the Atari 2600 Superman game has a MUCH more complicated map...
Worst game based on a movie, is this where it all began?
This was a really good video. Very in depth. I'd love to see a review of Superman 64 next if possible!
I used to play this game out of sheer boredom when I was a kid. Good times.
HSW worked wonders considering the dev cycle he had 5 weeks WEEKS!! Raiders was like 6 months of dev time ( I think ).
It's a game that's always struck me as in the wrong place in the wrong time. It's a bad game, but not remarkably awful - it's no Big Rigs Over the Road Racing, Ride to Hell Retribution or even Sonic '06 - but it happened to be in a position where it essentially set the dominoes falling for a massive collapse in the gaming market, and it's remembered more for that legacy than it is for the game it actually is.
It is nice to see the comments. I always thought I was a weird rebel for having fond memories of ET.
I thought Atari Superman was worst. I found a bug where you could beat the game in 1 second by flying left before the intro song ends. You are then rewarded with a 3 note song... Bing bing bong.
I got this game when I was 7 years old. A lot of us did not have the instruction manual for one reason or another and had NO idea of all those random icons and powers. It was the hardest, most confusing game of my childhood. Hated it!!
Thank you for playing this game and saving me the five minutes! Wait, the video I watched about you playing the game was... 4x longer than the actual game! :O LOL
I used to love the game and always finished it. Just played it the other day on my emulator.
I owned ET as a child and I played it through a lot. Finished it several times as well. I've played worse.
...I know Josh is British but the choice of using the Canadian Federal Police (RCMP) cruiser instead of an FBI van or something makes me laugh for some reason lol
this is in a sense , the first game with a world build in, and the place and action , so advanced , too much actually , all we can do is wonder what this programmer could have done with more years in the job, but because he was so crucified , he left the job forever.
we might have chased the eisntein of the game away because he something no one understood in kindergarten, but today we see it was advanced calculus .
You're not the hero we want but you're the hero we need Josh.
I got this game from a charity shop when I was a kid, so of course it came without the manual. If I had been aware of even a *single* aspect of these mechanics or objectives at the time, I probably wouldn’t still have lingering PTSD from this game. 🤦🏽♀️ I don’t even want to talk about how my copy was apparently stuck on Government Agent Mode.
alsways find it fasciniating that you used to be able to sell 1.5 million copies for almost as much as games go by now, of a game that took one person 5 weeks. the profit margain mustve been absolutely insane back then
Not quite. For one, inflation means that today's $60 is much less than _then_ $60. So today's games are much cheaper.
But on the other side, production was _much_ more expensive. These cartridges had actual hardware on them; they weren't just CDs pressed en-mase for essentially zero cost. They were heavier and took up more space. They were finicky and prone to damage. Distribution networks were very expensive too. And you better guess well how many games you're going to sell - if you order too much more than you sell, you can easily lose money overall. Cartridges you can't sell are utterly worthless, and even worse, another expense to get rid of them.
Today, all of that is much cheaper and easier, even with distributors like Steam taking 30% of your gross revenues. The vast majority of the costs and risks are the development of the game.
And today, the market is _much_ bigger too. A game selling 5000 copies would be considered fairly successful back in the day (if you weren't a big publisher like Atari, of course). The biggest selling game on the Atari 2600 was Pac-man, with 8M sales total (funnily enough, considered "one of the worst games of all time"). Minecraft sold 240M so far, an indie game - though certainly an outlier. The original Doom sold about 4M - at the time, this would be laughable to any "real" publisher, but for self-publishers on a shareware model... they're still swimming in the cash, of course, since all of those costly things like distribution were pretty much zero. It's a lot better to get 90% share of 4M sales than a 1% share from 100M of sales.
@@LuaanTi I never found the cartridges for Atari finicky or prone to damage, all of mine still work and some were not treated well at all. Just to add more complexity to the whole situation: I will say that while they used expensive cartridges, they didn't have to employ the staggering number of developers needed today. One guy made this and Atari was notorious for paying their programmers peanuts (which is why so many left Atari to form Activision). So Atari managed to make money hand over fist for years but then made stupid decisions like overpaying for the E.T. licensing and facing competition that they just couldn't handle from other companies that sniped their talent. The whole crash was a complicated mess of a market overcorrection from rapid development and changing business practices.
@@majorramsey3k Sure, that point was about the per-sale cost. It's a thing that wildly changes the math around how much each individual developer can be worth (which is of course very different from how much they are actually paid :D ). There was a lot to save on making the cartridge (or arcade, of course) cheaper - contrast to today's situation where the medium became essentially free and games exploded in size (and usually nowhere near proportionally in content).
I got this game for Christmas as a kid. I don't think I was old enough to understand the mechanics. I just loved the movie but the game was such a let down. I found it so difficult. It's nice to see how it was meant to be played. Thank you, Mr. Hayes.
Anyone who says Big Rigs Over the Road Racing is a worse game is wrong because they think Big Rigs is in fact a game. Same with Dreamworld. And anything that doesn't even qualify as an obvious beta released as a finished product.
Let us never forget that while almost all movie tie in games are bad, Goldeneye 64 is the exception that proves the rule.
Armored Cores an old pretty fun and challenging forgotten series buried under the piles of old mech games, actually one fact I love I learned a few years back was the art director for the third gen armored core games went on to also do art for the gundam mech anime series which I always find funny cause i thought some of the weaponry and desighns looked familiar in the show
im impressed how well you explained it. game actually sounds almost acceptable based off the complexity
Howard Scott Warshaw was given a raw deal. To make a game by yourself in 5 weeks is a lot of work now, but in the early 80s, it was unheard of. If you listen to him in interviews, he will even list off all the issues the game had, but he had to make the deadline. Which he did.
I personally do not like the ET game. It’s just boring, but I can appreciate it for how ambitious it was for the early 80s.
Don’t blame Warshaw and ET for the crash of 83. Blame Atari and their shitty business decisions. Turns out Atari was a head of the times. Asking for unrealistic milestones within and unrealistic timeframe from an understaffed team and then throwing the team under the bus.
Did not imagine it had sold quite so well, fun trivia Josh
i remember playing ET in the 80s and being confused as hell as to what i was supposed to do, and that seemed to be a common reaction. there should have been text next to the power mode icons to explain what each one does. like "find part" or "elliot." that would have made a huge difference
Memory was so scarce that that would have been difficult. 128bytes of RAM and I think you couldn't even use all of that...
I actually played this when I was a kid on the Commodore 64. I remember it being confusing and not fun to play. I think it was on a Demo Disk.
I owned this game...it was terrible as a kid... Very simply, it was not very intuitive as a child, I went back to other games and pretty much ignored it after. As an adult when I played it on a whim, it was more understandable because the manual(which has to be read), but it still kinda sucks, it is a short game that isn't really much fun so not very repeatable.
I just hated it because I couldn't get out of these pits even if my life depended on it.
I played this after buying it at a garage sale as a kid. I guess I didn't have enough patience to figure out the whole thing with the "zones" that do different things... with no documentation, and of course no internet to look up, it was totally annoying... and I remember just falling in a pit and not being able to get out. Over and over again.
I was one of those people unfortunate enough to play this game on the actual Atari console. I can't describe to you just how terrible the controls were, how unresponsive and cumbersome movement really was, and the gameplay was atrocious. Emulators can't in any way get across the pain and struggle of trying to get that little turd of an alien to move around. The entire game was an experience that I would not wish on anyone. But I also want everyone who is a game designer to play it just so that they can understand what NOT to do. Still, I'd rather play this than New World.
Thinks it is the first serious review of this game.
Most of the games made the last few years could be considered worse than this. Any EA game...
I used to have this game. I thought it was fun to do for a 20 min every month or so. Brings back so many happy memories.
Five worst games I played as a child: E.T. (Atari 2600), Deadly Towers (NES), Sword of Sodan (Genesis), China Warrior (Turbografx 16), Batman Returns (Atari Lynx), and that terrible hologram arcade game Time Traveler. Also, pretty much every LJN NES game was crap, especially their Back to the Future games.
best intro ever!
Yes, E.T. was Extra Terrible, the worst...
Fix the geometry connections are reversible, nerf the FBI agent so one touch doesn’t essentially make you need to restart the entire game and he can’t jump you from offscreen, and make pits less sensitive you’re less likely to fall into them from off screen or when coming up, and the game would be decent. Not a great game by any means, but at least above average for an Atari game.
If the people at the time didn't got a manual, explaining the game functions and power ups, then maybe that's the reason why the hate happened.
I think this is the main reason people were displeased. They said it was difficult but it's actually just extremely unintuitive.
Made me think about critics. They're the OG cancel culture.
So i landed on this part of the Joshverse, lets go
Saw the into with the giant phone and E.T...I'm in
Josh, just be legendary as usual, making history. Haha. I love this man
My grandparents had this game, I was only a little kid but man even then I thought this game was absolutely terrible
10:00 If you had arranged the 4 middle parts as ABCD from the left, the numbers underneath would say 3214. Easy to remember :)
That sound in the background when you talk about the name not being as important as the quality of the actual game?
Yeah, that's the ghost of Tom Clancy, crying.
I started to think this game didn't sound so bad half way through the explanation of the systems, and I think that's why people hated it back then. They didn't have a TH-cam, or a GameFaqs, or a Josh Dry Face to explain how to actually play the game.
They had the manual though?
@@mysteriousstranger5873 not always and alot of kids wouldn't or couldn't read/understand the manual.
@@SoulDevoured the parents could’ve read it, remember this was before games were powerful enough to have tutorials, so you had to read the manual for most games anyway
@@SoulDevoured nah. All games brought manuals. Heck, even by the time of the xbox360 / ps3 many games still had them. I miss manuals lol
@@Eleiem yeah not all games had manuals in the atari/NES area and you could often buy them from places without the manual. Like used game shops.
I thought you were gonna say "What? My phone sounds big?"
Had this as a kid. I got bored and fed up superfast and quit.
I had this as a kid - probably wasted at least half an hour on it. If only I'd had this guide....
For all the complaints the game at least had clear goals and some semblance of thought behind it. So much more effort was clearly put into this game compared to some of the utter crap we get in today's market. The game works and only had one bug you could find, which seems so surreal. It's not unusual for most modern games to come with bugs so bad it can't be finished, or entire sections of the game are cut off.
Pac-Man's port to the 2600 was far worse than this, because that was a port of a great game and the port was dire.
The fact they got Ms Pacman running and looking so much better is a testament to that.
The comedy is how many decades later and publishers still do this and go "What happened!?" you gave the dev team no time, and you made insane demands. Repeat again and again
Game journalists whining about a title because they suck at games, good job we’ve moved past that.
Yar's Revenge was one of my favorite games of the platform.
One quick thing, do you think you could create a playlist of thse retro reviews on Josh Strife Plays?
My mom loved this game as a kid and talked fondly of it
Yes, it is the worst. I played it. But the game is excellent at filling up holes in the ground. 18:46 Not all movie tie-in games are crap. There is the highly praised 'Mad Max.'
Why did you make me play this you utter monster.
Amazing review.
Sooo.. The map is a d6?
I heard a rumour that Atari f'd up and made more E.T cartridges than they had made consoles. Not just a few more cartridges.... but waaaay more cartridges and Atari had sold over 25 million 2600 consoles at that point.
The wikipedia page says "game sold 1.5 million units upon release, and over 2.6 million copies by the end of 1982. However, at least 669,000 copies were later returned in 1983, and between 2.5 and 3.5 million cartridges went unsold" which is ALOT but definitely not more cartridges than there were 2600s.
That's probably just an unfounded rumor because shitting on Atari for blundering that console generation is fun. People said video games were dead. That it was a fad. That it was just too much of a gimmicky and uncontrollable market. People said that Atari went bankrupt. That Atari singlehandedly destroyed the industry (which they were hardly the only ones that messed up and the gaming industry is obviously not destroyed.) That they would never make games again. There's alot of dramatics and exaggeration around the talk of that era.
I had heard the same rumor btw but given how silly many of the claims of that era were I always took it with a grain of salt.
If there were 30 million copies of E.T. you'd think that would have been dumped en mass in the NM pit. What else would they do with them?
@@SoulDevoured Oh no doubt they are probably exaggerated numbers, I just happened to have heard the rumour is all. Of the few sites I checked it seemed an equal split on those who believed it and those who didn't. Many claim _"millions of un-sold cartridges"_ I guess we'll never know the *true* figures, I'm sure Atari will never fess-up they put a decimal in the wrong place.
I rather play E.T than the new god of war....how could they do this to my boy kratos :(
I'm actually with you on that one. The new god of war is a good game, but its not a god of war game.
I tried it after this video, i knew this game existed before, but i didn't know there was such a vast dislike for it. it's an alright game, as Josh and the reviewers said it's dull yeah, but it's a functioning little game, nothing wrong with it per say. There are plenty of games coming out today that are a million times worse in terms of enjoyment and are barely functional
No cap, gonna find me playing this before your catch me playing call of duty
Gosh I love Josh
I miss the mad scientist or super tired teacher hairdo.
I HATED this game with a PASSION when I was a kid.
I can't tell where the pick up zone is exactly for the ship. I don't see a square or cross hair 😞
This was certainly not "primitive" for its time
It was a weird pitfall like game to me, most puzzling thing in general being really that back when i got the game i had not really watched or understood the film as i was still very young nor was there any kind of game manual or guide. Come to think of it, pretty sure my atari console and ET cartridge is less than 5m away from me collecting dust in a box above the clothes closet. And oh yh i can still dream the the enemy approaching sound as ET tudutudutudu that running midi sound actually is still kinda stuck in my brain.
Maybe it's time to create a playlist of disappointments of this world and put a clip of this video there
This game isn’t the “worst game ever”
It did what it wanted to do and it did it competently. This game is essentially undertale but for the Atari back in the 80s
That’s how much work this guy did. Alone.
Now is it as critically well received as undertale?
Hell no.
Not at all. But it plays solidly. It has graphics that are reminiscent. It has a decent song and sprites.
That’s… not “worst game ever”
Worst game ever is ride to hell retribution.
Most popular games of the era did not have an ending
What I learned from this video: Professional Reviewers have been bad at video games back in 1982 and nothing changed.
When it comes to movie tie ins, I believe there has been ONE game that broke the movie tie in curse. Chronicles of Riddick. But good thing video games got their revenge. Because video game tie in movies are usually just as flawed as products.
Goldeneye?
What kind of game is this?
A bad one! A lot of people have died.
Its the worst due only by the fact its named after a popular movies.
I mean, Maltesers are no laughing matter.
It's still a 2 out of 10 at best though. 1 out of 10 will be reserved for games that look as bad as this game, but don't even work at all. Any AAA game is automatically a 4 out of 10 because of the graphics and the fact that even with a lot of bugs, there are still some things to do.
My older brother had this game. Here could beat it consistently. I couldn't, bout in fairness in was 5 or 6
i played this once...
EVERY time i levitated out of a pit, i got STUCK and COULD NOT MOVE in the main screen, so there was NOTHING I could do but release the button and fall back in the pit.
thanks to careful use of the power zones, i only fell into 3 pits, but i got stuck that way at least FOUR times!
and that was at easy (mode 3) difficulty...
HareRaiser is worst, would like to see you do a vid on that, especially that rabbit hole around it
an game guid that i did not know i want
I understand that sex sells and all, but did they really need to include E.T.'s lil dingle pixel?
You could change the game mode?
people think ET killed atari, but that's not true. the god awful pacman port killed atari
I would argue that Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing is the worst game ever made.
Women not hypersexualized. I'll pass.