It sounds like you come from a family with great taste in games SLTE!
E.T. for the
Atari 2600 is a very rushed, flawed, and cryptic game--but it is far, far from being the worst game ever made as so many claim! (Although it does have one of the worst legacies as one of the final straws before the great home video game market crash and having
many of its returned and unsold cartridges buried in the desert!)
The main problems with
E.T. are essentially that people don't know how to actually play it, some of the pits are placed much too close to the screen's edge, and escaping from a pit is much too tedious with the odds of simply falling right back into it much too high. As the
YouTube video below shows, it's not that difficult or terrible of a game if you know what you're doing:
(I'm actually reminded of a better game on the
NES with the many of same problems as
E.T.: Deadly Towers! Just replace "pits" with "dungeons!")
If
Atari gave
E.T. programmer and developer Howard Scott Warshaw (the days when a game was made by a single person) more time, he could have most probably worked out the kinks and produced a better game!
In fact, there are fairly simple hacks available online to improve the game as is!
E.T. is hardly alone as a surprisingly cryptic and complex
Atari 2600 game either.
Raiders of the Lost Art and
Porky's also fall into the same category, and those were precisely the three games that I was thinking of earlier.
The
Atari 2600's library is also hardly alone when it comes to cryptic games with little information as to how to play. Just consider the
NES. People to this day still complain about how one is supposed to know that you're supposed to kneel by the cliff with the red orb to summon a warp tornado in
Simon's Quest! (And there's also a hacked version of that game where, among other things, the townsfolk give much better clues about what you're supposed to do!) And yet, at the same time: people never complain today about the equally cryptic and baffling moments in the classic
The Legend of Zelda: just think the first few of its players burning every bush in the game looking for that one dungeon entrance or figuring out how to navigate the lost woods! We pardon that today only because the game is popular and lauded, the answers to those questions are now well known, and the game's strengths greatly outnumber its flaws! And while
E.T. is a much worse game than those
NES examples, imagine how many fewer people would complain about it if just what the player is supposed to do are as well known!
