"In Defense of E.T. on Atari." In our first article, we attempt to clear up the myriad misconceptions that surround the infamous 1982 release, and determine who is truly to blame for Atari's sad fate.

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.

  • zod000@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    5·
    1 day ago

    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.

    • MajorHavoc@programming.devEnglish
      2·
      3 hours ago

      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.

      • zod000@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        1·
        2 hours ago

        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 :)