Fixing E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial for the Atari 2600

ET was green in the game, I'm guessing, because Howard wrote it (completed it!) before the movie was released. The whole thing was on a punishing deadline, which is why it may seem rough and strange to lots of folks. Howard was tremendously proud of finishing a whole Atari 2600 game in just a few weeks; not a single other Atari programmer was willing to take on the challenge. In fact, Howard had to do it against management's wishes.

Wow. Bravo! This is such an impressive effort. As one of the very first home consoles, the venerable Atari 2600 is brutally difficult to program. Everything from ROM to RAM to CPU cycles is in painfully short supply and the requirement to continually keep 'racing the beam' is a harsh master. My first computer, the Radio Shack TRS-80 Color Computer, came out only a couple years later but even with only 4K of RAM and a sub-1 Mhz CPU, was…

I loved E.T. when I was a kid and actually managed to finish it. I never got the hate. My guess is that I only saw the movie much later and so had absolutely no expectation whatsoever. To me, it was just another Atari 2600 game. In fact, after racking my brain for hours on games like Swordquest[1], and almost injuring myself and destroying my controllers playing Decathlon[2], E.T. was nothing. Recognizable characters! A quest that made sense! Challenging controls…

It's an old article (2013 as krallja notes) but I hadn't seen it before, and even without understanding the Atari 2600 op codes I enjoyed it. The game will forever live in infamy because it creates a compelling narrative along with folklore around carts buried in desert landfills. The small changes the author makes show that the game was salvageable given modern testing and had some ideas ahead of it's time.