It’s a good game! It’s misunderstood!
Or so I remembered reading many years ago (almost ten, as it happens).
When trying to find this article, I couldn’t do it because search is incredibly broken now, but with a little help I found it. So here it is.
No sane person thinks that Indiana Jones is the best game on the Atari 2600. It was a confusing mess of a game that no one understood. Funny enough, I still have both E.T. and Indiana Jones carts and they still work. You can’t kill pure evil.
It wasn’t so bad if you were a young kid in the 80s. Least my experience. Like what, I supposed to kill the shield of yars revenge again? Well that was more fun but still, needed variety.
That said would I play it again? Fuck no. Course I wouldn’t frost my hair tips again either, or willingly wear neon either.
I think I made it clear I was a kid in the 80s and yes it was very bad. It was the worst game I owned on the Atari and that was the opinion of all of my friends. Of course, I didn’t expect it to be famously bad, and didn’t hear about all of that until the mid 90s with people talking about it on the internet which has blown it out of proportion. It was almost certainly not even the truly worst game on the Atari, but it was the worst and most frustrating game that I played. I’d play Yars Revenge over it any day and I don’t even particularly care for Yars Revenge as it did get very old after a while (2600 games were generally not known for their depth).
As a side note, everyone always focuses on the worst games for Atari, usually E.T., but I mostly try not to think about those. Late in the Atari life, it got some surprisingly decent games that based on the early stuff, you would think impossible on the system. It got very decent ports of Mario Bros and Commando. It got an excellent (for the time) pinball game Midnight Magic, it had a decent wrestling game Title Match Pro Wrestling. These are the games we should be talking about, fuck E.T. forever.