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[Mihos]

I liked E.T.

worst game ever?
It wasn't even the worst game that came out on the 2600 that year.. (PacMan I would say was much worse)

 

[Gulz1992]

Lol, people who say ET is the worst video game ever have clearly not heard of Action 52. It had pretty much the exact same mindset behind it that Atari had with ET and it also had quite a bit of money invested into it. But whereas Atari hired a very skilled game designer to make a single game in one month, the guy behind Action 52 hired a few college students and had them make 52 games in 3 months under sweatshop-like conditions. And unlike ET, which at the very least was functional, nearly every single game in Action 52 was an unplayable (figuratively and literally) glitch-filled disaster. ET and Big Rigs don't even come close to most of the games in that collection.

 

[eyeball_kid]

ET is a boring game, with a ton of money spent on it, that had expectations around it. That's what makes it the most "important" bad game, even if it isn't really the worst. But that just goes without saying. A worst movies of all time list isn't packed with inane camcorder films made by children, it's stuff that someone spent at least some money on, with people attempting and failing to make something decently watchable.

By that metric, Pac-Man 2600 is arguably a much worse game. It is a horrible port of Namco's arcade version that somehow sucked all the life out of the original. And though it sold very well due to huge marketing pushes, they massively over-estimated demand. Though it is the best-selling Atari game at 7 million copies, they produced more copies of Pac-Man than 2600 consoles in existence and is pointed to as the start of the crash. E.T. just failed to stop the avalanche. Pac-Man Fever is really ground zero for the videogame crash, not E.T.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pac-Man_%281982_video_game%29

Pac-Man met with initial commercial success, selling 7 million copies and eventually becoming the best-selling Atari 2600 title. More than one million of those cartridges had been shipped in less than one month, helped by Atari's $1.5 million publicity campaign.[16] However, purchases soon slowed and, by summer 1982, unsold copies were still in large quantities.[2][5] Many buyers returned the games for refunds, and Atari was left with 5 million excess copies in addition to the returns.

In 1998, Next Generation magazine editors called it the "worst coin-op conversion of all time". [...] Ed Logg, a former lead designer at Atari, considered the development a rushed, "lousy" effort.

Poor critical reception made this game one of many decisions that led to Atari's report of a $536 million loss in 1983 and the division and sale of the company's Consumer Division in 1984.

On December 7, 1982, Kassar announced that Atari's revenue forecasts for 1982 were cut from a 50 percent increase over 1981 to a 15 percent increase.[5][26] Immediately following the announcement, Warner Communications' stock value dropped by around 35 percent—from $54 to $35—amounting to a loss of $1.3 billion in the company's market valuation.

^ Note that E.T. was released in December 1982, so you can see why Warner/Atari was putting all its chips on E.T. It was a hail mary pass that Atari hoped would carry its financials on a bicycle into the stratosphere. Surprise, a moody, rushed game where you run away, collect stuff, and repeatedly fall into pits didn't turn their fortunes around.