There’s no way you haven’t heard about E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial at some point during your life. In 1982, Steven Spielberg released E.T., and the movie rapidly rose to fame and became a global phenomenon. At that time, the video gaming company Atari was on the rise. The company saw the success of E.T. as a promising collaboration opportunity.
However, things turned for the worse in 1983 when the video game industry saw its biggest financial crash ever, and at the core of it was E.T. the Extra-Terresetial. The game was came to be known as the worst game of all time and nearly ended up destroying the entire gaming industry.
Why Did E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial Video Game Fail So Bad?
E.T.’s incredible success overlapped with the first video gaming boom, with the industry generating more than $3.2 billion in revenue in 1983. This success came right after the movie’s release. With Howard Scott Warshaw bringing a successful port of the popular Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lark Ark, Atari decided to collaborate with E.T. movie to bring a video game.
However, once Warshaw took on the project, Atari didn’t give him enough time to plan the development of the E.T. game. After meeting with Spielberg, Warsaw only had five weeks to develop the title and meet Atari’s surprising expectations for a holiday debut.
Warshaw took around ten months to make the popular Raiders game, and he initially thought that he’d get the same or more development to do justice to the E.T. movie in a game. The development crunch was real, and it’s the reason why E.T. couldn’t develop a proper direction, gameplay, features, and terrible mechanics. Obviously, the graphics weren’t good during that era.
Atari thought it had a major success under its belt and had millions of copies ready for the holiday season. However, once people started playing the title, they realized it lacked a soul. Thousands of stores rushed in to cancel their shipments of the title, which created a huge mess for Atari.
E.T.’s failure impacted not only Atari but also the whole gaming industry. Gamers at the time began to be more cautious of releases, and the industry suffered a crash. Although the revenues peaked in 1983, they dropped to just $100 million in the next two years, a drop of more than 96%.
The Problem of Rushed Games Still Plagues the Industry
It’s clear that even after Atari’s failure with the E.T. game and the devasting impact it had at the time, modern gaming developers still haven’t learned, and they keep releasing titles that are rushed and buggy. Over the last couple of years, we’ve seen titles such as Cyberpunk 2077 and Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3 being released in an absolutely horrendous state, which has led to many wondering why the industry is leaning towards this bad trend.
Modern games take a lot of time to develop and are very expensive to produce. Although gaming studios have money from their previous titles, a major part of that income is paid for previous investments. While developing new games, studios usually go into debt, which leads to shareholders forcing developers to release broken games with the hopes of “fixing ” them someday.
The problem of rushed games is fueled by the fact that players continue to buy them. There’s only one way to make a change, and that’s to stop buying such games and show gaming companies that we deserve better.
