Best Games - E.T. Phone Home!
If you have any interest in the history of video games, or just pop history of the last half century, you know about the E.T. video game. You might have heard that it is terrible. One of the worst games ever made. Well, it isn’t and it wasn’t, but I’m not even writing about that game.
Actually, I will write about that game for a moment. I think it’s important. For context.
In 1982 Howard Scott Warshaw was given just over a month to design and create an E.T. video game for the atari 2600 so that it could be ready and in stores for Christmas of that year. The results were not great.
I don’t even hate that game as much as most people seem to. It plays fine, but it really could have used a round or two of testing, and maybe the opinions of some more developers, before being packaged into a cartridge and being sent out to die. The game is not as awful as everyone says it is, but having one person work on a brand new game for a month never was, or will be, enough people or time to create a good game.
Fortunately, the team working on the E.T. game for Atari’s line of 8-bit computers had slightly more time and slightly more people. Unfortunately, not that many Atari computers were out in the world. If people were going to buy an E.T. game to play at home, it was going to be the one on the 2600 console. And that really is a shame.
Launching only a few months later, E.T. Phone Home! Is, in sharp contrast, a very good game.
The objective of E.T. Phone Home! is what you might expect. As Elliott, you run around your suburban neighborhood and surrounding woods, collecting pieces of trash that E.T. will assemble into his long range phone. Umbrellas, coils of wire, forks, that sort of thing.
On easier levels you only have to collect a few of them. As you crank up the difficulty, you have to collect more parts and only certain colors will work. You can’t just substitute a red wire when E.T. needs the black one. I can tell you from personal experience, that makes the game much more difficult when you are playing it on a black and white TV as your monitor.
As Elliott, you have to avoid scientists and agents who will follow you and steal any parts you are carrying. You can run and hide around houses and trees, but it can be tricky to evade all of the people following you. You can also use your telepathic link to find out what parts E.T. still needs and what color they are, but that wastes some of your most precious resource, time.
Like in the movie, E.T. can’t live for very long on earth. His health is tracked by a few flowers. As you play each flower will wither and die. You can replenish a flower or two by collecting phone parts quickly, but there is no way to fully outrun the clock. E.T. is dying and the only way to save him is to get him back to his ship.
When you finally assemble the phone E.T. shows up on screen and speaks. A rare thing on 8-bit computers. He says his line, phones home, and now it’s a race to get to the ship before it leaves earth forever.
As E.T. you run your way through the houses and woods, get to the ship and win.
That’s it. That’s the whole game. It’s simple, but solid. Beating it on the hardest difficulty is truly challenging. It moves well, and the whole game only requires one joystick and one button. In a sea of actually terrible licensed games, of which the Atari 2600 E.T. game is not even the worst, E.T. Phone Home! stands out. It would be a good game even without the movie tie in.
I have included a couple of links here for further reading about this game, because I think that it’s well worth your time.
https://www.atarimania.com/game-atari-400-800-xl-xe-et-phone-home_1881.html
https://www.atari-computermuseum.de/rx8030.htm
Maybe it’s only nostalgia talking, but I played both the Atari 2600 E.T. and this one back in the 80s, and again just last night. E.T. Phone Home! is actually a good game, and it still plays very well.
I meant to only test it out to jog my memory, but I found myself playing it all the way through multiple times. It was properly enjoyable. Maybe even one of the Best Games.