The Greatest Video Game Flop in History,ET The Extraterrestrial goes down in history as one of the g

The Greatest Video Game Flop in History,ET The Extraterrestrial goes down in history as one of the greatest movies of all time.  Released in 1982, ET The Extraterrestrial out grossed Star Wars, and held the record for the highest grossing film in history until the release of Jurassic Park in 1993.  More importantly, ET would cement a legacy as a cultural icon among films.  Ironically, the video games developed from the movie would be one worst video games in history, and the worst commercial video game failure in history.Shortly after the ET movie became a hit, Atari purchased the rights to use the movie for a handsome $25 million dollars.  Like all other merchandisers and manufacturers of the time, Atari was looking to score on the popularity of the ET movie.  Atari set the goal that the ET video game would be released in time for the 1982 Christmas season.  Unfortunately, that only gave the programmers, developers, and manufacturers less than 5 weeks to create and produce the game.  Atari spent millions marketing the game, hyping it to the point that gamers and ET fans expected something made of solid gold.  Instead what they got was a turd.Hastily put together in 5 weeks, ET featured terrible graphics (even by 1982 standards), difficult and overly repetitive gameplay, and a monotonous theme.  As the player, you play ET, dropped off in the middle of a neutral semi 3D screen.  Your goal is to travel between various screens and find three pieces of an interplanetary telephone to “phone home”.  Each of the various screens is pretty much the same, with a light green background with dark green pits.  In fact pretty much 95% of the game is made from those two shades of green.  Falling into a pit is extremely easy, in fact due to game glitches you can fall into a pit without even touching the dark green parts of the screen.  Getting out of a pit is difficult, and one must levitate out. Most gamers found that when they were able to escape from a pit, due to glitches ET typically fell right back in, forcing you to try again. Did I mention that the three phone pieces are hidden in the pits?  So yes, ending up trapped in a pit is unavoidable.As you travel from screen to screen FBI agents will try to track you down, if they catch you they will take you to a “jail”, and confiscate your phone pieces.  Thus you are forced to start your search all over again.  At the bottom of the screen is your energy level.  With every step you take your energy decreases, until eventually you will die.  Thus ET must accomplish the mission of finding the three phones without expending too much energy.  When I played the game way back in my Atari days, I was never able to find all three phone pieces.  But according to those who have succeeded at the impossible.  A spaceship lands to pick you up, except the spaceship is located randomly on one of the dozens of screens, which you of course must find.ET featured no scoring system, you are awarded no points.  So what happens if you are talented enough to find the spaceship and “go home”.  The game starts over again, this time with everything randomized.  That’s right, there really is no point to the game, it just goes over and over again.Atari manufactured 5 million copies of the game, of which only 1.5 million sold.  Of those 1.5 million sold, ¼ to ½ were returned to the company for a refund. Originally, the game was to be retailed for a whopping $49.95, in the end it was discounted to less than a dollar.Sales of ET amounted to a total of $25 million.  Keep in mind, Atari spent $25 million just for rights to ET, then spent millions more on marketing, development, manufacturing, and other expenses.  When all was said and done, ET resulted in a $100 million loss for Atari.  The flop that was ET helped contribute to one of the worst years of the video game industry, called the Great Video Game Crash of 1983.  In that year, Atari posted a $500 million loss and was within a hairsbreadth of falling into bankruptcy.  Even at severely discounted prices, Atari could never unload their stock of ET video games.  Thus, in 1983 they buried their surplus video games in a landfill near Alamogordo, New Mexico.Today, ET the video game is a common feature of “worst video games ever” top tens, typically ranked anywhere from 5th to 1st place.  -- source link

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