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.
ET was only slightly different in game play from what is argued to be the BEST game on the Atari 2600, Indiana Jones. It had some annoying things (the pits mostly) but was otherwise the same exact game as something people actually liked. It’s failure is actually kinda weird.
I had fun playing it in the mid 80s but I didn’t have a ton of games at the time either. Have a fond memory of it overall (maybe because I liked the movie), and still enjoying video games these days. Don’t think I played the Indiana Jones one to compare though.
I played E.T. relatively recently to remind myself what the fuss was about.
The game plays fine (with average Atari bugginess).
It just stands out as an early huge miss for a movie tie in. Almost nothing about the game feels like the movie, or is particularly anything a fan of the movie would seem likely to enjoy.
I say “almost” because the exploring kind of fits. The same exploring that is constantly frustratingly interrupted by pit falls.
It’s really not that bad of a game, though.
I do see what you’re saying but how I see it, and thinking of all the awful movie tie in games from NES era, ET felt better than average in theme. He had to find the phone pieces and avoid the government agents while wandering in the woods. Not too too different from the movie theme in overall thinking.
Now I’m not saying gameplay was good or anything but think of all the cheesy tie in movie games of the NES era, they’re all some random platformer which sometimes alluded to they had a movie name. Of course there were good ones but best ones I can think of were Duck Tales and Rescue Rangers, not tied to a specific movie or episode. Then you get your Back to the Future has little to do with the actual movie.
That’s a good point. E.T. was not alone in this, and had more to do with it’s movie that many games that followed.