Finished watching ATARI: Game Over Documentary on Apple TV last week. While I found it interesting that even after 30 years that there is such interest in whether Atari did or didnt dump thousands of ET cartridges in a landfill. This especially from gamers who werent born at the time.
I suppose that its hard to understand why anyone even the mighty ATARI would want to dump millions of dollars worth of goods. As these days, there are endless opportunities for such goods to find a discount shelf somewhere. Even collectors on eBay but times were very different in the mid-1980s then storing warehouses full of unsaleable items cost real money.
But the discussion around whether Atari did or didnt bury ET by the thousands is a secondary story to the one that seems to haunt ET the game. The question has to be Was ET for the Atari 2600 the worst game ever?.
Having been a game player since the late 1979 and having played hundreds of games produced during those years on just about every console and early home computer. I find it hard to believe that ET is simply the worst game ever, the one that brought down the home console industry and as such feel that Howard Scott Warshaw has been the industries scapegoat.
When you consider that he designed, wrote, debugged and got it out the door in the smallest of time frames it’s simply amazing.
Atari 2600 ET cartridge
Screenshots
I feel that most who have said it’s the worst game have never played ET, and if they have they have only played it in recent years and comparing it to a library of new games. To these people, I suggest that you sit down with a real Atari 2600, or emulator and play a large section of games from that time and then tell me that this is simply the worst game ever.
DVD
Scott Howard Warshaw produced a great four part documentary on Atari a few years back called Once Upon Atari where he attempts successfully to describe what it was like back in the early 1980s at the biggest video game company. Plenty of interviews and many classic game designers and well worth getting a copy.