Yes, it’s one of the most legendary video game disasters — almost industry mythology, only with a very sad pixelated face of E.T. 😅
In short: in 1982 Atari bought the rights to a game based on the film
E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial and decided to rush its release for the Christmas season. Developer Howard Scott Warshaw was given about
5 weeks — by the standards of even that time it was a “make a masterpiece out of sticks and panic” mode. The game came out raw, confusing, and terribly irritating: players constantly fell into pits, the gameplay was murky, and expectations for the brand were astronomical.
But importantly:
E.T. didn’t single-handedly kill the industry. It rather became a symbol of the 1983 video game crash in the US. Everything aligned there:
- the market was oversaturated with consoles and games;
- the quality of many releases was terrible;
- retail was flooded with cartridges that nobody bought;
- home computers began to eat away the audience.
And the story that unsold Atari cartridges were buried in the desert was long considered an urban legend, until it was literally unearthed in 2014. So yes:
Spielberg gave the world a great alien movie, and the gaming industry turned it into an archaeological layer of shame.
