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.
I’ve spent some unfortunate time with both, and can confirm. Superman 64 is worse by a pretty large margin.
E.T. is genuinely playable, after a needlessly awful learning curve. Superman 64 still continues to suck even for (shudder) players who have put in the necessary time to learn to play it.
Edit: As others have said before: E.T. is a decent game, it’s just a lousy choice for an E.T. tie-in.
Fans of a beloved highly polished film masterpiece about gentle communication and wide eyed exploration discovered the Atari game was a nearly unfinished punishing high stress race against a merciless clock - which frequently abruptly ended any aspiration a player had of discovering anything beyond the same pit they fell into many times before.
I still disagree that it was a decent game, it perhaps could have been if given more time (it was famously made in less than 6 weeks), but building this frustratiing POS on the biggest movie of the day made it a kick in the balls to every excited kid, myself included.
That’s a fair point. I enjoyed the game later out of curiosity - but it wasn’t a “this is your only Christmas gift” kick in the gut, for me.
The only good side of E.T. is that it kick started the implosion of Atari which lead to me getting many games super cheap in the following years. There was a local store Zayre, which later changed the name to Ames, that constantly had Atari games on heavy sales. After the NES released, I picked up a bunch of games for $5 each. Of course, it was hard to enjoy them knowing the NES existed and I didn’t have one yet :)