ET the Extra Terrestrial

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Item Condition

Game + manual: the cartridge and its manual, no box. Look over the photos for 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 cartridge on the Atari 2600 carries a heavier legend than E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. After Atari landed the rights to Steven Spielberg's blockbuster, Howard Scott Warshaw, the designer behind Yars' Revenge and Raiders of the Lost Ark, was given roughly five weeks to design and program a game in time for Christmas 1982. What he built was surprisingly ambitious for the hardware: not a shooter or a maze chase, but a small open-ended adventure about a stranded alien trying to get home.

You guide E.T. across a handful of connected screens, searching the wells scattered through the landscape for three pieces of an interplanetary telephone. An icon at the top of the screen changes depending on where E.T. is standing and tells you which of his powers will work there, from levitating out of a well to sensing where a phone piece is hidden or calling Elliott for help. Every move drains his energy, Reese's Pieces wait to be collected, and scientists and FBI agents roam the map to slow you down. Assemble the phone, call home, and reach the landing site in time for the mothership.

The trouble was how easily players tumbled back into those wells, and how little of the design explained itself to anyone who skipped the rules. Atari had manufactured cartridges in enormous quantities, unsold stock piled up, and E.T. became shorthand for the North American video game crash of 1983, routinely named the worst game ever made. The story grew into myth with tales of cartridges buried in a New Mexico landfill, a legend confirmed in 2014 when an excavation in Alamogordo, filmed for the documentary Atari: Game Over, dug them back up.

Time has been kinder than the headlines. Players who sit down with the rules today often find a clever, if punishing, little adventure with ideas ahead of 1982, and Warshaw has spoken openly about its strange history in the decades since. Owning the cartridge means owning the most famous punchline in video game history and a physical piece of the industry's first collapse, and it is far more interesting to play than its reputation suggests.

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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