ROFL. Adding to the irony: in the E.T. video game commercial for Atari, the kid and his mom go, "Bye E.T. ..." (http://www.vimeo.com/clip=11749)

They apparently knew E.T. would only do well at the box office.

And I thought you were kidding about the 'burying in desert' thing. I just stumbled across this:

The news media sensationalized both the halcyon days of 1980 and the problems of 1982-83. In particular, the story of Atari burying tons of E.T. cartridges in a New Mexico landfill accelerated the change from The Video Game Boom is Boundless! headlines to The Video Game Boom is Over! proclamations.

Pretty interesting video game history read: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_crash_of_1983

Well, to be fair to the programmer of E.T. (Howard Scott Warshaw), he was given an incredibly short and unrealisitic timeframe in which to complete the game. Atari just wanted something - anything - they could stick on the shelves for Christmas that year.

In their arrogance, Atari thought that even if the game sucked, it would still sell simply because it was E.T. (One of the execs was quoted as saying: "If I put sh** in a box, it would still sell.") They were wrong.

Luckily, TRON games of the time didn't suffer a similar fate. But now it seems the situation has reversed . . . sort of. The TRON 20th Anniversary DVD was supposed to have sold very well, while the latest games did not. More irony.

KiaPurity Wrote:I'd say Tron 2.0 (pc) and Tron 2.0 Killer App (gbasp) were really good... but I'm hearing that the x-box version was the poor one... right?

My feelings toward the PC version are obvious, so I won't even talk about it.

For the GBA version, I have to admit that I didn't give it a fair shake when I wrote my initial impressions way back when, here on Tron-Sector. I played it some more later, and changed my mind. It's a good game. If only those hacking puzzles weren't so devious . . . heh.

For the Xbox version, I still haven't played the Multiplayer part of it. I don't feel like shelling out the $40 or so for Xbox Live, considering Killer App is even more of a ghost town online than the PC version is. And the game won't let you explore the Multiplayer maps by yourself.

But based on my impressions of the Single Player part . . . I really wanted to like Killer App. But I just can't recommend it. It's not very good. So many little things are wrong in the Single Player part. Bugs, sound effects missing, some NPCs and conversations missing, long load times, some puzzles made too easy, and the list goes on. Also, my copy is one of those that generates a load error after you play it for a while.

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E.T. for Atari

I've read many places on the net about how it was supposed to be this great game from Atari, but basically sucked. I can't believe everyone felt this way about it... I mean I loved the game. Well, as much as anyone could love an Atari game - they were all very basic, shallow, simple, etc. But (in most cases) they were also very fun.

I remember getting E.T. I watched it being played for a while, and then I got to play it. I rather enjoyed it. Again, for an Atari game, it wasn't bad. And getting stuck in the pit, well that was very easy to get out of - you had to exit the pit via going down (once back on the top map view) and not the top. If you tried to exit via the top, you'd fall back in over and over and over and over.

Anyway, I enjoyed the game and played it often.

My biggest Atari disappointment was Pac Man. It looked... well, it just looked stupid, period. I remember asking myself how Atari could do such an awful job with it. As stupid as it looked, from the graphics, to the sound, I still played it often. It was the only way to play "Pac Man" at home at the time. From time to time, I even play it on an emulator today, just to relive a little bit of childhood Atari fun. But me and all my friends were in agreement back in the day - Atari really did a poor job with that one.

But E.T. - I never got why people were so disappointed with it. For an Atari game, I thought it was all right. It was one of the few adventure-type games available too. There weren't many of those back in the day. Of course, the most loved adventure game was probably "Adventure". But that's another story.

It's funny how some arcade ports on the 2600 were just terrible (Pac Man, Donkey Kong, Defender)

And some were just AWESOME (Joust, Ms. Pac Man, Missle Command, Warlords)

From what I understand the final Pac Man that was released was only a prototype that the programmer did as a VERY early demo. The powers that be needed something right then and there and ran with it, behind the programmers back. Talk about embarrasing. Can you imagine someone doing that with YOUR prototype code and then someone thinking that was the extent of your programming skills?

Boingo_Buzzard Wrote:From what I understand the final Pac Man that was released was only a prototype that the programmer did as a VERY early demo. The powers that be needed something right then and there and ran with it, behind the programmers back. Talk about embarrasing.

I don't think he minded much, in the end. He was the first programmer to collect huge royalties from video game sales. Pac Man for the 2600 practically made him a millionaire.

If the 2600 version of Pac Man had bombed (like it should have), then I'm sure it would have been a different story . . .