ET: The Extra Terrestrial

[Gendo Ikari]

The article says E.T. Phone Home was released in 1986 but the title screen says 1983. Beside this, a really interesting and in-depth article. The game is still bad, even worse in light of how it fails on its potential - be it because short development time, hardware con straints or plain bad design decisions - but not the worst because it tried, it was (and still is) different.

[rjjones]

Hello,

I'm the author of the article.  I've lurked here before, but only just got account to respond to a few posts with questions.

First, thank you for all the comments.  I really do appreciate them. 

-@gendo Ikari:
E.T. Phone Home was in development in 1983 at Atari.  Many Atari games have their development dates rather than release dates.  A good example is Warlords.  Carla Menisky did the home version for the 2600, and the arcade guys liked it so much that they did a port to the arcades (a first maybe?) but for years people thought the arcade game came out first, because it has 1980 (MCMLXXX) as the copyright date rather than the actual release date.

-jorpho:
Sorry, I may go back and do some of the later games and Texas Instruments games in the future.  You (or anyone else) are quite welcome to write them up if you'd like.  The reason I included E.T. Phone Home but not the other games is ETPH and ETTE were both developed at Atari during the same time period.  They're closely related in a way the other ET games (even the totally legit ones) are not.

-Narushima:
The answer for this is a bit messy.  I found sales numbers and production numbers for the games on the graph in interviews.  There doesn't seem to be any hard source of sales info from that period.  ET's numbers in particular come from interviews with former Atari CEO, Ray Kassar.  He said that Atari made five million ET carts and had ~3.5 million sent back to their Houston facility as "defective".  The Houston facility is the distribution warehouse that dumped games into the Alamogordo land fill.

You can find some words from Kassar in Master of the Game and Atari Inc: Business is Fun.  I'll a scan from an old newspaper article about the dumping.

Thanks again,
- Robert

Attachments:

[Narushima]

Thanks for the details.

[retrorogue]

Nice article, some errata though:

1) It's Yars' not Yar's.

2) Atari did not demand the time frame, Spielberg did. In fact the contract and time frame was forced on them by Warner Chairman Steve Ross, who had negotiated the contract with Spielberg at a party at his house in the Hamptons over the weekend. Ross had been trying to woo Spielberg over to Warner and this was yet another deal done to make working with Warner more attractive.

3) Howard never said Star Castle was impossible to do, what he said was it would suck (given the limited ROM storage at the time for creating a game and the joystick control scheme).

4) Any notion that E.T. is responsible for the crash (which seems to get thrown out a lot) is of course silly. (This isn't errata, just fleshing out your point on this further). First, the crash started in '82 and not '83, after Atari's December 7 announcement that it's earnings were far less than originally predicted. The announcement sent shock waves throughout the industry and caused massive stock losses across the board throughout the rest of the month, resulting in layoffs the next month and companies leaving the industry in droves the rest of that year. The problems that lead to the losses had already exploded that Summer of '82, when E.T. was just getting started. In fact E.T. was just released a week before the report, making it impossible to have caused anything.