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RE: Did you actually own E.T. for Atari? I did!
I owned this game. It is definitely not a great game but i don't think it is anywhere near the worst ever made. It's actually pretty impressive for the time given the very short development cycle. The real problem wasn't that the game was horrible but that Atari marketed it as if it were going to be the best game ever and produced an absurd number of copies. This was emblematic of the "strategy" of Atari at this time and a major reason for the crash that followed. Despite the simplistic graphics of the Atari 2600, some of the games are still fun to play. It's just that a lot of them (including E.T.) aren't.
When you keep in mind that it was one guy with a very strict and short timeline and the fact that the 2600 couldn't actually do very much, yes, it is impressive. You are correct though, the advertising of the game and all the hype surrounding it lead to its downfall far more so than it being a bad game. Now Pac Man on the other hand, was an Atari embarrassment. That was just plain awful in every way.
😮 I know my memory sucks, but that was one of my favourite games on the Atari. Along with Q*bert.
well, that is certainly an unexpected response. You might be the only one!
I would've been very young. And will have migrated from Pong or whatever basic system that was on so anything in colour will have been fun to me 🙂 I think that might have been around the time I had a ZX Spectrum 48k. I miss these simpler times.