E.T. Returns Postmortem(ish) Part 1

Why make a game about a 40 year old Atari 2600 game that everyone hates?

Hear me out on this one.  First, let’s go back in time to the late 1980s.  Arcades were floundering but still kicking, home computers were becoming an actual thing, the ‘82/’83 videogame crash had came and went, and the NES was the talk of the playground.  Little elementary school me desperately wanted… no… NEEDED a videogame system.  So for months I spent weekends working at my Grampa’s family owned laundromat pulling weeds, cleaning lint traps, and filling soda machines until I had saved a whopping $35.  I took that fat wad of cash down to my local Prange Way bargain store and purchased a magnificent, glorious NINTENDO ENTERTAINMENT SYSTEM!  Well… actually… no.  A NES cost about $150-$200 at that time.  Way out of my price range.  However, I COULD afford a deeply discounted and well past its prime Atari 2600 Jr.  Hey, it played videogames.  What was the difference?



Of course, the Atari 2600 Jr. didn’t come with any games.  However, Christmas was fast approaching and with Atari games selling in discount aisles for under 10 bucks, I had a good shot at getting a handful of games over the holidays.  My plan worked.  That Christmas I got my first ever actual bona fide videogames!  And, yes, I remember them well.  Pitfall!, Asteroids, Defender, Star Raiders, and Yars’ Revenge (the greatest Atari 2600 game ever made, but that’s an essay for another day).



But there was one more game that arrived that Christmas.  My dear Grandma and Grampa got me E.T.  Presented in a gorgeous silver box with captivatingly stoic cover art, the game looked like it was surely spectacular!  


Now as a kid in the ‘80s, E.T. was just another game.  There wasn’t an internet full of gaming know-it-alls blasting me with “worst game ever” this or “landfill” that.  I read the instructions, fired up the game, and played.  And let me tell you, I played the hell out of that game.  I puzzled over the strange new mechanics, I worked through the numerous gameplay variations, I speedran it and wrote down best times in my high score notebook, and I scoured every corner of the game looking for secrets.  Yeah, the pits were a bit annoying at first, but once you got the hang of them, they were easy peasy.  In a lot of ways, E.T. was unlike any game I had played: the randomized locations of phone pieces made each game different, the powerup zone mechanic was odd and interesting, and the lack of weapons or attacks created a different sort of tone that I hadn’t seen before.

From that Christmas on, I spent the next 20 years amassing a fairly biggish game collection.  After the 2600, I got an NES… then an Intellivision… and a 5200… a 7800… a ColecoVision, Genesis, Master System, Vectrex, SNES, Sega Saturn, Atari 400, Astrocade, Channel F, GameBoy, Sega CD, Microvision, PSX, etc. etc.  At my collecting peak, I had over 1,000 unique games (and this is before the digital era so we’re talking carts and CD-ROMs).  Videogames had become integral and beloved part of my life.  My affair with videogames steered me directly into a career in software engineering and eventually into game design and game development itself.  So, yeah, that Atari 2600 and that first handful of games were DEEPLY impactful on the trajectory of my life.  Thanks Grandma and Grampa!

During that time the World Wide Web became a thing, game collecting exploded, and people actually started researching and writing about game history.  And, of course, we know what became the lay version of E.T.’s role in the 1982/1983 home videogame crash: E.T. was the worst game ever, and it single-handedly destroyed the industry by being such an unforgivable, rotten turd.  Now, I’m not going to go into a big defense here, but I will make two points.

ONE: the videogame crash was a complicated and nuanced event that was certainly not caused by a single game.  If you want to learn more about what actually happened, then I recommend looking into some of Alex Smith’s modern research on videogame history.  In fact, a couple of recent episodes of his They Create Worlds podcast talk extensively about what was happening at Atari and the distribution problems that were central to the crash (check out Atari’s Distribution Nightmare or Atari’s Sinking Ship).

TWO: E.T. is by no means a masterpiece, but if you claim it is "the worst game ever", then you're maybe being a little intellectually dishonest or possibly you just haven’t played many retro or classic games outside of the Pac-Mans and Centipedes.  There's nothing wrong with that.  But if you have some time, I recommend digging into the library of games on the Atari 2600 and giving them a spin.  Is E.T. worse than Amidar or Basic Math or any game by Mythicon or Data Age or Mystique?  Fire up an Odyssey 2, or play some Astrocade titles, or spend a few hours emulating DOS shareware games.  E.T. is definitely NOT the worst game ever.  In fact, I think it's a decent game for its time.  However, E.T. is a game that was based on a MASSIVE movie hit and had similarly MASSIVE expectations that, by most standards, it did NOT reach.  And the pits are dumb.

So where the heck are we?  Let's get this story moving and fast forward to the pandemic.  I’m now a grizzled, veteran software engineer and game developer sitting at home worrying about sterilizing my bananas and searching Amazon for N95 masks.  Like the rest of us, I also suddenly have lots of free-time.  So outside of trying to hike every trail in the Bay Area, I decided to use that time to wrap up old game dev projects.  I dug in my heels, launched Unity, and started finishing or updating old game jam and weekend dev projects.  I have a backlog of dozens of goofy little games that I’ve made over the years (some ok games, lots of terrible games) and one-by-one I wrapped them up and tossed them up on itch.io. 

And, of course, that takes us back to E.T.  I have long wanted to remix or remake E.T. for the Atari 2600. I have a deep emotional attachment to that game and hate how it’s been maligned over the years.  I just feel it deserves better.  I've often claimed that E.T. failed because it was a weird, wandering adventure game while it SHOULD have been an action game centered around the bike chase from the movie.  Then there could be an incredible moment where E.T. and Elliott soar across the moonlit sky!  That whole sequence is just meant to be a game, right?


So I set up some design parameters (use original 2600 resolution, only use original art from the game other than adding some additional UI and bike sprites) and started prototyping my super amazing E.T. bike chase game!!  And… it sucked.  It was totally dumb and not interesting.  Oops.

Instead I worked on some other games and kept brainstorming around an E.T. game.  And then I played Vampire Survivors this past winter.  And I loved it.  It’s an amazing game.  Please go buy Vampire Survivors.  Anyway, one evening I was playing a round of Vampire Survivors, and I thought, "Man, it would be silly if you played as E.T. fighting off hordes of Atari characters!  Oh, wait, I should make that game."  

So I did make that game - it’s E.T Returns.  You play as a jealous E.T., and you've returned to planet Earth to extract revenge on the Atari heroes whose games are championed as classics while your game is mostly thought of as landfill fodder.  It's a horde shooter with tons of power-ups and unlockables, and it features a cast of classic gaming all-stars (who you get to shoot in the face).  In many ways it's a remix of the original - you still collect phone pieces and candy, there's still pits (but now you use them as an attack), and the annoying scientists and FBI agents are still lurking around.  But I also folded in over a dozen other 2600 games and twisted it into a chaotic, fast-paced action game.  

I originally wanted to make E.T. Returns in one month, but that turned into about 4 months.  My real-life schedule has been heavy this year so I’ve only been able to work on it during weekends and evenings.  That's fine - I got it done.  There's some stuff I like about the game, and some stuff I wish I had done a little differently.  That said, this postmortem(ish) will be told in 4 parts ("ish" because I will likely update the game) where I will discuss some of my thinking around art, attack patterns, and balancing.  Thanks for reading, and I'll see you in part 2.  Onward!