PixlBit

I can't totally remember if I played E.T. or not, but I vaguely remember his head going up and down on his neck. After watching this playthrough below, I see his head goes up when he levitates out of a pit. So maybe I did play it. I certainly didn't play it long though.

That High Score docu showed that Howard Scott Warshaw had even less time to make that game than I thought. It's amazing it functions at all. 

It's weird, but I don't remember the crash at all. I just remember starting to play Wizardry on PC instead of consoles after '83. 

Honestly I don't remember the crash either.  I just remember getting a lot of games for my Atari 5200 really cheap.

I don't remember the crash either. But I do remember the arrival of the NES being a big deal. 

For me it was all about the arrival of a Apple IIc in my house at about the same time.  

I don't remember playing the E.T. game when it came out, but then, I didn't have an Atari 2600 until much later.  And even if I did, I probably wouldn't have gotten this game.  Mainly because I actually didn't like the E.T. movie that much.  It was too long and drawn out and E.T. looked ugly like a rotisserie chicken and not huggable and cute like Gizmo or ALF.  Plus I was mad that they hyped up Reese's Pieces for the movie, and when I FINALLY got to taste them, I was very disappointed.  Peanut Butter M&Ms are what Reese's Pieces should've been.

Once I did play E.T., I had no idea what I was doing, but once you read the instructions it becomes a little more clear.  But even then it wasn't much more fun.  Atari 2600 games were mostly pick up and play kind of affairs, so the ones that you had to read the instructions to really know what to do were kind of rare and most were not worth playing.

There is one Atari 2600 game that is complicated enough that you have to read the instructions, but it's defintely worth it.  The game is called Pressure Cooker and it's by Activision and it's my favorite 2600 game. I highly recommend you play it if you get a chance.

Reese's Pieces got promoted because Mars refused to allow product placement of M&Ms in the movie. Hershey was much more willing to play ball. 

Yeah I knew about that, but Reese's Pieces are still not that great.

Reese's Pieces are some of my least favorite candies but Reese's cups are some of my most favorite. 

Same here!  And I don't even like candy for the most part!  So if you know I like Reese's Cups, you know they have to be good.

ha ha, he DOES look like a rotisserie chicken. I liked the movie, but it does have some scary and sad parts. Not a normal kid's movie. 

Pac-Man ironically contributed to the crash as much as E.T. did. At 7 million plus copies sold, Pac-Man would have been a blockbuster success back in the day... if Atari hadn't overmanufactured Pac-Man cartridges to the point where there were more copies of Pac-Man in existence than there were 2600s in homes. A lot of those ended up getting a New Mexico burial, too.  Nor did Mystique's "Swedish Erotica" games, which included Custer's Revenge, help the reputation of video games any. Oklahoma City actually banned Custer's Revenge from being sold within city limits.

A lot of Nintendo's practices on the NES were them being very protective of what they considered to be a still-fragile market. The whole "no more than five games per publisher per year" thing. Even Super Mario Bros 2 was a product of Nintendo of America feeling that the brutally hard "Lost Levels" would give Mario games a reputation for being punishing and unfair that they didn't want. Interesting trivia: By now we all know that SMB 2 started out as Doki Doki Panic, but not many people know that Doki Doki Panic in turn started out as... a Mario game. 

Anyway, my best friend at the time had an Atari 2600 Jr, those skinny black-and-silver 2600s that Atari made late in the system's life-cycle, and he had E.T. That game sucked. However, I had the 8-bit Atari E.T. game which was a little closer to the movie, where you started out as Elliott trying to find pieces for E.T.'s "phone," then had to get to the landing site as E.T. When you completed the Elliott part of the game, you got this scratchy digitized voice saying "E.T. PHONE HOME."

I wouldn't mind a modern E.T. game. That could be really cool. I remember when I was a kid, there was a children's book about E.T. on his home planet. Really dazzled my imagination. 

I watched a documentary all about the guy who made this and them digging the game up in New Mexico to prove the legend true and it was weirdly inspiring. He seemed to move on from it ok. 

yeah, it's been almost forty years, so I guess he made his peace with it. Must have been hard at the time though. 

The funny thing about this game is when I started buying carts to collect I wanted a copy of this game but could never find one. Heck I think in that Netflix doc I am up to the point where they discuss this game (I'm still on the first episode).

I wish I still had my Atari carts from when I was a kid. They were so solid, not flimsy at all. 

That game was ass. So was Raiders of the Lost Ark. My brother and I put up with a lot of lousy game experiences in the Atari 2600 era. 

Ha ha. Me too.