http://www.cnet.com/news/found-ataris-e-t-games-dug-up-from-new-mexico-landfill/
I had one of those games as a kid. It definitely was the worst game I ever played. I never could figure out how to keep E.T. from falling down in a pit. I think mine is still buried somewhere in my parents' basement, however, and not in the landfill.
We had an Intellivision, but we were able to play Atari games on it via a component called the System Changer. My brother still has it, along with all the cartridges; he sent me a picture to prove he hooked it up earlier this year (picture showed him playing Intellivision Bump n Jump in his current apartment).
I don't know whether E.T. was the worst game ever because I've never played Custer's Revenge or Beat 'Em and 'Eat Em (look those up on Wikipedia if you've never heard of them).
They came out with a lot of games based on the most popular movies or whatever, and kids would get wildly excited that they were going to live the experience of that movie on their television screen. Instead, those games were usually among the more disappointing ones out there.
I never played ET, but "Raiders of the Lost Ark" was the most inscrutably complicated mess I ever played on Atari. It kept our attention for a while because there were lots of different parts to it, a relatively new phenomenon in those days, but I don't think I knew anyone who ever bothered to finish the damn thing because it just reached a point where it didn't make any sense. It had so many levels of movie-specific logic that didn't fit into those squared-off graphics.
Quote from: Pete from Boston on April 28, 2014, 08:24:47 AM
I never played ET, but "Raiders of the Lost Ark" was the most inscrutably complicated mess I ever played on Atari. It kept our attention for a while because there were lots of different parts to it, a relatively new phenomenon in those days, but I don't think I knew anyone who ever bothered to finish the damn thing because it just reached a point where it didn't make any sense. It so many levels of movie-specific logic that didn't fit into those squared-off graphics.
Same here...there were a few things you could do in Ark. ET was just puzzling to play; although from the standpoint of an eight-year-old, anything other than the rather obvious in a 2600 game would bore me quickly. If it wasn't easily explainable in the instructions, and the gameplay wasn't intuitive, I would imagine most players would bore of it except on rainy days.
It kind of lays the rumors to rest, something I'd heard as an urban legend about twenty years ago. I've had a soft spot for Atari's VGS, so I wouldn't exactly call it "corporate shame"...what else were they going to do with a few million remaindered cartridges that nobody wanted? To be honest, Atari was spreading themselves rather thin by this point (their port PacMan was really wishy-washy and dull).
It's also interesting to see that some things from our semi-recent past are still archaeologically discoverable. I would have figured items like this would be pulverized and incinerated nowadays, such that almost nobody can find them many decades or centuries from now.
iPhone
"Raiders Of The Lost Ark" had a feature to show how well you did. The top level was illustrated in the manual but no matter what I never could get that last little bit out of it.
Back then we had Atari, Intellivision, Colecovision and Commodore 64 for our play systems. They sure were a ton of fun! They were also expensive when new. I paid $300 in 80's dollars for the Intellivision when it first came out. At least tech got cheaper and better as time passed.
Good times indeed!
Rick