E.T. phones it in for Christmas 1982


'Twas the night before Christmas, and all through the land, children were tucked in their beds, but they didn't understand. Their sugar plum dreams of E.T. games would be dashed, by Sunnyvale fiends out to grab parents' cash. Santa's sleigh was loaded down with 2.6 million E.T. the Extraterrestrial cartridges for the Atari 2600 as it taxied onto the runway at the North Pole. Those silver boxes were the last thing kids saw in their minds before falling asleep, and the first thing they would search for under the tree by morn. But no one could have imagined the best movie of the year would become one of the worst games of all time.

There's nothing unusual about a movie-licensed game being a disappointment. Some of the greatest films of all time - Back to the Future, Total Recall, Mad Max, and even Star Wars - have been turned into bum games. But E.T. joined the 2600's Raiders of the Lost Ark cartridge in a special circle of Hell, reserved for games that are nothing more and nothing less than a complete and total cluster**** of design.

Both games find the player guiding a decently-rendered depiction of our favorite alien or archaeologist from one moderately interesting screen to the next in any of four directions. Nothing can be accomplished. There are no instructions. Buttons are pushed. Joysticks are pointed in every direction. And after several aimless minutes of - not gameplay, but simply hand exercise and wasted eyestrain, Indy takes a Hail Mary leap of faith off a cliff into oblivion, and E.T. falls into one of those massive pits that are ubiquitous in the residential neighborhoods in the hills west of Los Angeles. 

There was no internet. There wasn't even a glossy strategy guide to buy. One simply, slowly, and horrifyingly began to realize they had been royally screwed by Atari. And when one thought of all the other games they could have gotten instead, games they could have actually played over the Christmas vacation from school, the tears began to flow. 

After a summer and fall spent chasing whatever E.T. merchandise slowly and fitfully arrived on store shelves from the blockbuster Hollywood hadn't expected, the game was supposed to be the sure thing. Steven Spielberg was involved directly with the game's development. The game designer had created the slick masterpiece Yar's Revenge. What could possibly go wrong? There might be boring Atari games. But until Raiders and E.T. there hadn't been unfinished, unplayable, bug ridden games that didn't function.

It was a cruel joke, a digital middle finger to every child who’d ever believed in the magic of Christmas. A baffling, maddening descent into a digital purgatory of green squares and bizarre, inescapable wells that acted like some kind of cosmic black hole for your sanity. A $35 paperweight that became the punchline to an industry-wide joke that would echo for decades. The returns came in like a tidal wave. God love you if you lived in the part of the country where stores actually accepted returns of opened video games!

The mythology of millions of E.T. cartridges being buried by Atari in the desert only underscores the shifty tactics of greedy video game oligarchs. What does actually happen to unsold games that aren't blockbusters? Like unwanted books, movies, and toys, rather than drop the price to liquidate the inventory, manufacturers remove them from sale, leaving consumers at the mercy of third-party resellers at marked up prices. Wait, that shrink-wrapped game, that crisp 1980s mass market paperback movie novelization, that factory-sealed game system or toy, numbering millions of unsold, factory-fresh units, are now suddenly available only as a dirty used item, or for $5000 sealed? 

Sure, Jan.









Location: Sunnyvale, CA, USA

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