MrCunningham
Member
E.T. is not the worst game by a long shot.
E.T. isn't even the worst Atari 2600 game and it wasn't the game that single handily crashed the console industry in north America. In 1982 really bad ports of games like Pac-Man and the flood of terrible third party titles were already souring the Atari 2600 fan base really badly. E.T.'s high profile nature was the final nail in the coffin for the 2600, but things were already going south before this.
But with that said, it is still hard to deny the impact that E.T. had on the industry. It really was one of the first games with a huge marketing budget thrown behind it, and the large number of people who bought it ended up being frustrated with it.
If this was still the same game without the E.T. license attached to it, it would be no where near as infamous or hated as it became. From a game play point of view, it was actually cleverly designed given how many limitations Howard Scott Warshaw had to work with. The scoring system is pretty unique for the game. I would never rank it as one of my favorite 2600 games though. It was just kinda... ehh.
But I remember having a copy of ET for the 2600 as a kid, and back then I had no idea how to play it at all. It was a weird ass game staring ET where you fall down pits, and fly back up them. My 5 or 6 year old brain just couldn't comprehend how to play it. I had more fun with Pac-Man on the 2600, even though that was a really shit port. My parents even had Adventure for the 2600, and that was even less cryptic than ET without an instruction book.
The people expecting Big Rigs, how old are you?
If we are comparing Big Rigs with ET... ET actually has defined goals,obstacles, and a functional scoring system with some depth to it that can add some replay value to the game. Big Rigs was a completely unfinished game that was shoveled into a box to make some money. It doesn't even really function as a game.