Just saw this on the Beeb:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-35560458

Its the programmer who developed the infamous ET game. Was quite interesting. Written in 5 weeks on his own, says a lot for the industry at that point, when you consider the hundreds of people, millions in budget, and years of work that goes into games nowadays.

Also, am taking bets on how long before we get a redux or enhanced version?

I think someone made a patch that fixes some of the worst issues with the game, and apparently the game is kind of fun with that patch, provided you know what's going on.

And, of course, if you want to watch a speedrun, there is one at:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BaCpyxnx2O8

E.T. for the Atari 2600 is actually a decent game and i enjoy playing it.

That whole "E.T. is the worst game ever" thing is just one of those stupid internet "myths" and IMO it's complete bullshit.
There are far worse games out there like Airlock for the Atari 2600.

I think the ET game is used only as a scapegoat and a patsy for the "collapse of videogames".

The real reason for the collapse was that consoles suck. If ET had appeared on IBM PC instead, everything would be fine now and we would all be happily living our lives, and GOG would be selling it as a true classic. It would have numerous sequels too, especially ET 2 getting lots of praise.

Indeed, and when you consider ti was done by just one person in 5 weeks, I mean no team to crush bugs, or check the game is fun, its quite a wonder really. Take some of the titles released today, a good example being DNForever, I mean surely someone at some point should ave just killed the project.

Nah, a wall of rights and licenses would prevent that from happening.

No. ET really was a terrible game. I played it when it came out. It was frustrating to a very high degree. There was no reward for dealing with the frustration. Gameplay was repititive. The concept was dumb. It was plain horrible.

And it doesn't get scapegoated in the sense of "one game caused all this collapse." The collapse had lots of causes, but ET was a higly promoted, highly bought, sucky game that made tons of people unhappy. Money was lost by the barrelful. So the failure of this game on such a grand scale was a tipping point moment for the collapse.

Not protesting that, but it being used as the face for "console collapse". It collapsed because the Atari 2600 was long in the tooth and always kinda crappy machine, with atrocious versions of even the simplest arcade games (Space Invaders? Asteroids? Pac Man? Zaxxon??? What the heck are those VCS ports, some kind of sick joke?). I'm sure if they ever ported Pong to Atari 2600, it was probably an unplayable mess with even worse graphics than the original game.

Atari had one relatively good game, River Raid. They should have kept just making several sequels to that instead of making any other games, which all sucked.

As for E.T., yeah I also played it back then on friend's Atari. We always felt kinda sorry for that guy, always selecting inferior gaming machines to what we others had. After Atari VCS he got a Sinclair Spectrum with a rubber keyboard, WTF? He never learned, nowadays he is probably using a Mac.

But that E.T., I become bored of the game in about 15 seconds or so. It seemed to be a rather pointless game, I didn't see any reason to try to play it much.

I also feel the whole collapse-thing was way exaggerated. I don't recall people playing on e.g. Commodore VIC-20 and C=64 noticing any kind of collapse. It seemed to be only some kind of Atari's personal demise, oh well, maybe they should have stopped making bad gaming systems. Atari Jaguar, getthefuckoutofhere.

It's interesting, but I would've liked more of his thoughts on the game and the game design itself.

He said it normally took him months though and that ET in particular was rushed. Even back then the suits were making game ruining decisions. "Activision in 1979 became the first third-party developer.[22] It was founded by Atari programmers who left the company because Atari did not allow credits to appear on the games and did not pay employees a royalty based on sales." - Royalties, huh? Nice try Activision.

"These strict licensing measures backfired somewhat after Nintendo was accused of trust behavior. In the longer run, however, many third-party publishers such as Electronic Arts actively supported competing consoles such as the Sega Genesis." - Lol. So EA doesn't like Nintendo, huh?

Interesting read. :>