There are bad video games, and then there’s E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial for the Atari 2600. This isn’t just a disappointing licensed title or a forgettable cash grab, this is the game that became synonymous with video game industry failure, a cautionary tale so legendary that its physical copies were literally buried in a New Mexico landfill.
Yes, you read that correctly. When a game is so catastrophically terrible that the solution involves heavy machinery and a desert grave, you know you’re dealing with something special.
Released in 1982 by Atari, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial represents the perfect storm of corporate greed, impossible deadlines, and game design so confusing that players needed a manual just to understand why they were falling into pits for the eight-hundredth time. It’s a masterclass in how to take one of the most beloved films of all time and transform it into an experience that makes players want to phone home and beg for extraction.
Steven Spielberg’s E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial was the highest-grossing film of 1982, a heartwarming tale of friendship that touched millions. Naturally, Atari CEO Ray Kassar saw dollar signs and secured the gaming rights for a reported $20-25 million, an astronomical sum at the time, and one that would haunt the company like a ghost in the machine.
But here’s where the story takes its first tumble into one of E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial’s infamous pits: Atari wanted the game ready for the 1982 Christmas shopping season, giving designer Howard Scott Warshaw approximately five weeks to create it.
Five weeks. For context, that’s barely enough time to design a competent game even with modern tools, let alone on the notoriously limited Atari 2600 hardware. But Warshaw was no slouch, he’d previously created the well-regarded Raiders of the Lost Ark and Yars’ Revenge for Atari. If anyone could pull off this miracle, surely it was him. Spoiler alert: miracles require more than five weeks.
Playing E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial is like being trapped in a fever dream designed by someone who’d only had the movie described to them secondhand while they were thinking about something else. You control E.T., the lovable alien who just wants to construct a device to contact his spaceship and go home. Simple enough, right? Wrong. So magnificently, bewilderingly wrong.
The game takes place across several wraparound screens representing different areas. Your mission involves collecting three pieces of an interplanetary telephone scattered throughout these zones while managing E.T.’s energy level and avoiding government agents and scientists. Here’s where E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial reveals its true nature as interactive torment: the pits.
Oh, the pits. These green-screened holes dot the landscape like landmines, and E.T. falls into them with the gravitational inevitability of a black hole. The game seems to have been designed by someone who really, really hated the concept of horizontal movement. Walk left? Pit. Walk right? Believe it or not, also pit.
The majority of your time playing E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial isn’t spent on exciting alien adventures but rather levitating out of holes, depleting your energy, and immediately falling into another one. It’s like watching someone try to walk across a room covered in open diapers, except instead of being funny, it’s happening to you and it lasts for hours.
The levitation mechanic that allows E.T. to escape these geological prisons drains his energy, which must be replenished by collecting Reese’s Pieces (yes, the product placement made it into the game). But here’s the kicker: the phone pieces you need to collect are often found in the pits. So E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial actively punishes you for both falling into pits and for deliberately entering them to complete your objective. It’s lose-lose game design, a Catch-22 programmed in assembly code.
The control scheme in E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial feels like it was designed to test your patience rather than provide entertainment. Moving E.T. is sluggish, and the game’s detection zones are so poorly defined that you’ll often fall into pits when you appear to be nowhere near them. The game requires constant use of the Atari joystick button to activate E.T.’s various abilities, levitation, calling Elliott, eating candy, which means you’re fumbling with the manual to remember which combination of positioning and button-pressing triggers which action.
The invisibility of item locations unless you’re in specific zones with your neck extended creates a gameplay loop of wandering, extending your neck, falling into a pit, levitating out, wandering, extending your neck, and falling into another pit. E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial somehow managed to make exploration tedious and frustrating simultaneously, a feat that should earn some kind of achievement for negative synergy.
To be fair to the game, the Atari 2600 was never a graphical powerhouse. Games on the system required imagination to fill in the considerable gaps between what was on screen and what was supposedly being represented. But even by 1982 standards, this game looks sparse. E.T. himself is rendered as a brown, vaguely humanoid collection of pixels that shuffles across featureless screens divided into color-coded zones. The “pits” are just slightly darker green rectangles. The government agents and scientists are primitive stick figures.
The audio fares slightly better, with the game featuring a tinny approximation of John Williams’ iconic film score during the title screen. However, in-game audio consists primarily of repetitive beeps and bloops that grow annoying after the first five minutes. The sound of E.T. falling into a pit (which you’ll hear approximately seven thousand times during a playthrough of E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial) becomes an audio trigger for existential despair.
Perhaps the most baffling aspect of E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial is its unnecessary complexity. Howard Scott Warshaw, working under impossible time constraints, apparently decided that what kids wanted from their E.T. game was a multilayered experience with invisible items, zone-specific abilities, FBI agents who could steal your phone pieces, and a time limit creating constant pressure. What kids actually wanted was to help E.T. eat Reese’s Pieces and maybe fly on a bicycle. Instead, they got a game that required reading a dense instruction manual to understand even basic mechanics.
The game features multiple symbols representing different actions, question marks for calling Elliott, icons for Reese’s Pieces, teleporter zones, and the pieces of the phone. But E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial provides no in-game explanation of these systems! Players had to learn through trial and error that standing in certain spots and pressing the button while facing specific directions would trigger specific outcomes. For children used to the straightforward “move and shoot” dynamics of games like Space Invaders, this was hard work.
Atari manufactured somewhere between four and five million copies of E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, expecting the game to be a massive hit based on the film’s success. They made one of the classic blunders: assuming that brand recognition alone could sell a product regardless of quality. While initial sales were decent (the game did sell over a million copies) returns flooded back in unprecedented numbers. Parents who had purchased the game as a Christmas gift discovered their children either couldn’t understand it or actively hated playing it.
January probably saw the highest number of kids doing dishes and mowing the lawns as an escape from this nightmare.
The failure of E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial contributed significantly to the North American video game crash of 1983, an industry-wide collapse that saw video game revenue drop by 97% between 1983 and 1985. The market had become oversaturated with low-quality titles, and E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial became the poster child for this crisis.
My uncle Craig was part of this chaos too, under immense deadlines as a game developer and him and his colleagues forced to release games well before they were ready in a desperate hope the business would make enough coin to fund the next one.
When an industry crashes so hard that it nearly kills console gaming in an entire continent, and people specifically cite your game as a prime example of why, you’ve achieved infamy.
For decades, the story circulated that Atari, faced with millions of unsold cartridges, buried them in a landfill in Alamogordo, New Mexico. It seemed too perfect to be true, a terrible game literally buried in the desert like toxic waste.
Many dismissed it as an urban legend. But in 2014, a documentary crew excavated the site and discovered it was absolutely true. They pulled up cartridges of E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial along with other Atari games, cementing the title’s place in history. The game wasn’t just bad; it was “bury it in the desert and hope nobody remembers” bad.
The landfill discovery transformed E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial from merely a terrible game into a mythological symbol of corporate hubris. Those unearthed cartridges now sit in museums and private collections, bizarre artifacts from gaming’s growing pains. Some of the recovered copies of E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial sold for hundreds of dollars to collectors, proving that there’s a market for anything if enough time passes and the story is weird enough.
Here is one that sold for $128
Here’s where we need a moment of fairness. Is E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial truly the worst video game ever made? Objectively, probably not. There have been games with worse controls, more broken mechanics, and more offensive content. Games like Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing are arguably less functional. But E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial occupies a unique position in gaming infamy because of the combination of factors: massive corporate investment, a beloved license, catastrophic commercial failure, and yes, that landfill.
The game represents a perfect storm of everything that could go wrong. It’s not the worst game ever made, but it might be the most important bad game ever made. E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial taught the industry crucial lessons about development time, quality control, and the dangers of prioritizing marketing over actual game design. Every time a modern publisher delays a game to “get it right,” there’s a little bit of E.T. influence in that decision.
Howard Scott Warshaw himself has become philosophical about his creation’s legacy. He’s given talks about the game, acknowledging its flaws while defending the circumstances of its creation. In interviews, he’s noted that he did manage to create a complete, functioning game in five weeks, which is genuinely impressive even if the result was deeply flawed.
The real villains of the E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial story weren’t the developers working impossible hours under impossible deadlines, they were the executives who created those conditions in the first place.
E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial changed video games, just not in the way anyone intended. It became shorthand for licensed game disasters, for corporate mismanagement, and for the importance of development time. The phrase “the next E.T.” became industry terminology for a potential catastrophic failure. Game developers tell their children scary stories about E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial on dark and stormy nights.
The game also inadvertently taught players to be critical consumers. Before the game, many assumed that major licenses and major publishers guaranteed quality. After, consumers learned to wait for reviews, to be skeptical of marketing hype, and to understand that even the biggest brands could release garbage. In a weird way, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial empowered gaming criticism as a necessary consumer protection service.
E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial for the Atari 2600 remains a legendary disaster, a cautionary tale programmed in ones and zeros. It’s a game where the primary activity is falling into pits and climbing out of them, a metaphor so on-the-nose for its own quality that it almost seems intentional. It took one of cinema’s most magical stories about connection and wonder and transformed it into an exercise in frustration that made players want to disconnect their consoles and wonder why they bothered.
But here’s the thing about E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial: we’re still talking about it over forty years later. Bad games usually fade into obscurity, forgotten by everyone except the unfortunate few who played them. E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial achieved immortality through its failure, becoming more famous for being terrible than most games become for being great. It’s been documented, excavated, analyzed, and dissected. It changed an industry.
So perhaps E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial succeeded after all, just in the most backwards way imaginable. It wanted to be remembered, and it is. It wanted to impact gaming history, and it did. It wanted to be buried and forgotten, and instead it became a legend. Not every game can claim to have literally risen from a landfill to take its place in the pantheon of gaming history.
Just don’t actually try to play it. Trust me on this one. Some pits aren’t worth falling into.
Stay tuned for more weird and wonderful content on Monro Cloud.
Howdy folks, my name is Ben, a veteran in the ICT space with over 15 years of comprehensive experience. I have worked in the health sector, many private companies, managed service providers and in Defense. I am now passing on my years of experience and education to my readers.
