There's a long and torrid story about ET on the Atari that echoes out throughout the years of gaming. Ok back in 1983 when Atari was king of the consoles, business was not managed well. People complain about all the "shovelware" on the Wii but no, it doesn't compare to the absolute info dump of half assed Atari games. Basically every company out there was making games out of anything. There was the Chuck Wagon Dog Food Game "Chase the Chuck Wagon" where you guided a dog through a maze to the chuck wagon, there was a god awful port of Pac Man that apparently was a beta that some how got released as a final product (much like Sonic 06) not to mention "Atari Porn" yep. Don't believe me, go look through the AVGN archive. The problem with so many games out there was there was no quality control. If a company wanted to make an Atari game, they could and they didn't have to share a cut with Atari unlike now where a third party makes a game, they have to share a cut with the console makers. Bad games piled up in bargain bins and since there were no magazines or webistes with reviews, no one knew what was worth the price.

All this is important to understand why ET stands as the golden turd of bad games. When ET came out in theaters and was the massive iconic hit it was, Atari paid Speilburg an obscene amount to get the liscence then gave the dev team only six weeks to make a game in time for Christmas. And so convinced was Atari that this game was going to be their savior of their slumping sales that they produced more copies of the game than Atari 2600 units in circulation with the idea that the game would sell consoles.

Almost anyone who owned an Atari has said game and the story is the same: the game sucks. You are supposed to manuver ET around the landscape collecting parts for a phone to "phone home" but there are government agents wandering around trying to catch you and more deadly, the pits you repeately fall into. Since limits of hardware meant you had to go from one screen to the next, you had no way to tell when you'd fall in a pit until it was too late. To get out of the pit, you'd make ET stretch his neck and levitate out but all too often you'd levitate out to the edge only to fall down again and again.

Needless to say the game didn't move consoles, Atari lost tons of money and supposedly one night they loaded up all unsold carts into a truck and buried them out in the New Mexico desert. Thus, this was the great video game crash of 1984 and it wasn't until Nintendo showed up in 1985 that gaming returned to the public once more.

And here's a nice youtube video for your viewing pleasure: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhGm2D3aOZ0

People have begged the AVGN to do an ep on this game but he flat out refuses but hey he did Superman 64, the second worst game of all time. Am I right?