E.T. Is not the worst game ever and is not responsible for the video game crash.

Started by pxlbluejay, September 02, 2019, 09:18:41 pm

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pxlbluejay

Seriously. I'm not trying to defend my guilty pleasure of playing E.T.. Some people complain how E.T. looks like a green deformed giraffe. The E.T. from the game looks hell a lot more realistic than the so called "dragons" in Adventure. The gameplay is a bit too hard for the regular 8 year old back in 1982, and the pits can be a bit annoying when you keep falling back in as you levitate out, but you'll learn how to avoid that as you play the game. And speaking of hard games, Swordquest, anyone? Given that Warshaw had only 5 weeks to program the game, the thing is surprisingly complicated and is like a "real game". Non-retro gamers think that the graphics are way too chunky, but I personally think that E.T. reached the maximum graphic capabilities of the 2600. They are not thinking that the game was made almost 40 years ago. By 1982, there were so many terrible games other than E.T., that it's hard to pinpoint the exact game that caused the crash. But I still don't understand why people didn't like E.T. back then and why Atari when into bankruptcy because of the game. And also, I doubt that any more than half the people claiming that E.T. is a bad game actually played and won a game of E.T. before. Either they played for 5 minuted and thought the game was impossible to beat, or they never even touched an Atari joystick. Sorry about posting this on a Nintendo based forum... But AtariAge recently had a similar thread and I had enough of listening to people who say E.T. is bad.
Super Mario Bros., The Legend of Zelda. The NES and the Famicom themselves. These are well known after more than 30 years after their releases. I highly doubt that Fortnite, PUBG, or any other modern-day game will be as well known in 2050.

UglyJoe

Agree.  It's fairly ambitious for a 2600 game.  It has plenty of flaws, but doesn't deserve to be at the top/bottom of so many lists.

It's a pretty classic commercial flop, though, and at a rough time in industry history.  It's unfair to say it caused the video game crash, but I think it would also be disingenuous to not mention it at all when talking about the crash.

boye

It's essentially an attempt at a Zelda-like game in 1982. Its ambition combined with the tight deadline and low ROM space killed it.
Can't find the FDSLoadr PC program? Get it here. It took me way too long to find.

portnoyd

Funny, I always got the impression from AA that they were the few that shared OP's opinion. Maybe it was people on Digital Press?

The reason the videogames crashed is the same reason why the dot com bubble burst in 1999. Everyone jumped on the bandwagon irrationally with only a concern to ride the wave instead of doing something meaningful with it. No specific game caused it, it was just too much mediocre to bad stuff being pumped out.

ET was just a casualty of it and then pop culture latched onto it being the root cause because of the landfill thing.

Yelir

Quote from: portnoyd on October 13, 2019, 06:37:20 am
Funny, I always got the impression from AA that they were the few that shared OP's opinion. Maybe it was people on Digital Press?

The reason the videogames crashed is the same reason why the dot com bubble burst in 1999. Everyone jumped on the bandwagon irrationally with only a concern to ride the wave instead of doing something meaningful with it. No specific game caused it, it was just too much mediocre to bad stuff being pumped out.

ET was just a casualty of it and then pop culture latched onto it being the root cause because of the landfill thing.

Never thought I'd see your username around these parts. Are you still active on either of those boards? :mario:

portnoyd

Quote from: Yelir on October 13, 2019, 08:57:25 pmNever thought I'd see your username around these parts. Are you still active on either of those boards? :mario:


I never really posted on AA, but I haven't been back to DP as the guy running it banned me. He's kind of a dope and took what was left of the site with it so it is what it is. Otherwise, I've largely kept to myself so to answer your question, no, lol.