E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial

E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial came out in 1982 for the Atari 2600 and remains one of the most dissected releases in the industry's history. Atari secured the film licence very late in the year, leaving only a few weeks of development before the Christmas season, an extraordinarily short schedule even for a console of that generation.

The result reflects that. The player moves across a handful of screens, collects the pieces needed to assemble a communication device and avoids characters who take those pieces away. The most notorious element is the pits: the hero drops into them repeatedly and climbing out costs time and energy, which ruined the experience for many players because the rules were never made clear on screen.

The game became shorthand for an overheated market that collapsed in North America in 1983. Unsold stock was buried at a landfill in New Mexico, a story widely treated as folklore until the cartridges were genuinely excavated in 2014, which is why the title keeps appearing in histories of the era.

Note that our record lists a text-based perspective, which does not match a graphical single-player game viewed from above. The year, the hardware and Atari's own authorship are the documented parts.

Modern assessments are gentler than the 1980s press was. The game is often read as an ambitious attempt at exploration and objectives that never received the time it needed to explain its own rules to the player.

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