ET the Extra Terrestrial

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Packaging & contents:

Game only

The cartridge or disc on its own, cleaned and tested — no box or manual. Game condition guide →

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Item Condition

Game only: the cartridge in a protective holder, no box or manual. The photos are of this exact cartridge — look them over closely for its condition, packaging and details. Every cartridge's shell, label and board are checked for authenticity when it comes into the store, and it's tested before it's listed. It ships in a collector's bag or a hard plastic case.

Item Description

No game in video game history carries a bigger legend than E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. Built on one of the biggest movies of all time, rushed out for the 1982 holiday season and later blamed for helping trigger the North American video game crash, it became the subject of decades of stories, above all the tale of unsold Atari cartridges buried in a New Mexico landfill. When that site was excavated in 2014 for the documentary Atari: Game Over, copies of E.T. came out of the ground and the legend turned out to be true.

The game itself is more ambitious than its reputation suggests. Howard Scott Warshaw, who had already made Yars' Revenge and Raiders of the Lost Ark for the 2600, was given roughly five weeks to build it. You guide E.T. across a set of interconnected screens, searching the pits for the three pieces of his interplanetary telephone while a scientist and an FBI agent try to haul him away. Power zones change what E.T. can do from screen to screen, letting him warp, locate phone pieces or call Elliott for help, Reese's Pieces are scattered around to collect, and a steadily draining energy meter adds a survival layer that was unusual for the time.

Falling into those pits again and again became the game's best-known frustration, and critics have long ranked it among the worst games ever made. Yet Warshaw's story has been retold in documentaries and books, and plenty of players now come to E.T. with fresh curiosity, finding an open-ended adventure that was trying to do something different from the arcade shooters around it.

Few objects capture the rise and fall of early Atari as neatly. E.T. is a conversation piece, a time capsule from the height of Spielberg mania, and the one 2600 game nearly everyone has heard of, which is exactly why so many collectors want to own it.

Fast factsgame data via IGDB

Released: 1982
Publisher: Atari
Genre: Strategy, Adventure
Players: Single player

About the game

E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (also referred to simply as E.T.) is a 1982 adventure video game developed and published by Atari, Inc. for the Atari 2600 video game console. It is based on the film of the same name, and was designed by Howard Scott Warshaw. The objective of the game is to guide the eponymous character through various screens to collect three pieces of an interplanetary telephone that will allow him to contact his home planet. It is widely regarded as the worst game ever made and one of the major contributing factors to the near death of the video game industry in 1983.

Summary from the IGDB community database — the condition and contents of this listing are described above and in the photos.

Watch gameplayET the Extra Terrestrial on Atari 2600

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