Saturday, December 20, 2008

E.T. Atari 2600 How To Beat Home Videogames

Is this the worst game ever made? Did this game, and others like it such as the atrocious 2600 port of Pac Man, bring about the collapse of the home videogame console industry in 1983-84? Or was the collapse just an illusionary product of a misinformed media? I actually remember playing my cousins 2600 quite fondly, but then the next year it was replaced by a Colecovision, and then the ubiquitous NES. Was Atari just mismanaged into failure, or did they simply not produce the hardware and software necessary to compete with Nintendo's hardware scrolling and Miyamoto's masterpiece, Super Mario Brothers? We're talking about it in the IGN Retro forums.

3 comments:

Chronic said...

ET was far, far from being the worst Atari 2600 game. The problem was it was extremely high profile, ET was the biggest movie anyone had ever seen, it was a cultural phenomena, and Atari printed 5 million copies of the cartridge before 5 million 2600s were ever sold. The game had a development time of 6 weeks. It was a recipie for disaster. It just was one of a series of extremely poor decisions Atari made in regards to its business that made it fail, but ET was the largest and most publicized mistake they made.

Despite dozens of other high quality games being made and selling well for the 2600 during the crash timeframe of 83-84, the general public perception was that home videogames were a fad and not here to stay. This was reinforced by a flood of poor ports and games like Pac Man and ET - even though the quality titles were there, the biggest name AAA ports were bombs, no matter how many copies they sold, they were bombs because people took them home and felt ripped off. Having 6 million copies of an atrocious port of Pac Man on the market did not help the 2600's image, despite the fact that the console was capable of much better games.

The fact is there was a public perception of a videogame crash, whether that actually happened or not is more of an academic discussion than a rewriting of history, as history will remember the Great USA Videogame Crash of 83 forever and ever.

Did Nintendo save the home console industry? Or is that just a myth? Did it never really die? Would Sega have come to America a few years later anyway? Why wasnt Atari ever able to replicate the smashing success of the 2600? No matter how you look at it, its a very interesting discussion.

md galaxy said...

I stopped watching at 1:53 due to extreme pain and bleeding eyes. That was the worst game i have ever seen... EVER.

Anonymous said...

I remember playing ET at a friend's house, when it came out, and being perplexed as to what you were supposed to do. I still recall the ennui this game occasioned in me. Ack!