E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial was Atari’s game of Steven Spielberg’s 1982 film, made for the Atari 2600 in time for that Christmas. It went on sale in December at $39.95. Spielberg had asked for its programmer, Howard Scott Warshaw, and Warshaw had about five weeks to write it. Within four months Electronic Games was telling its readers: “Save your time and money. And if E.T. does call home, please don’t tell him about this.”
The game is now remembered less for itself than as the symbol of the 1983 video game crash, and above all for the cartridges Atari dumped in a New Mexico landfill. What was actually buried there turns out to be far less than the legend claims.
Five weeks
Warshaw had already written Yars’ Revenge and the 2600 Raiders of the Lost Ark, and he had met Spielberg while working on Raiders. He told Video Games in early 1983 that when he went to Los Angeles to show Spielberg Raiders at the beginning of July, he asked whether Spielberg was thinking about an E.T. game. Not long afterwards word came from the office of Atari’s president, Ray Kassar: “Spielberg wants you … fast!”
In 2000 Warshaw explained to ClassicGamer Magazine what “fast” meant. “It took them until the end of July to negotiate the deal, and they needed it for the Christmas market, which meant that it had to be done by the first of September. That left you with five weeks to do the whole game.” Most games then took at least four months, and Raiders had taken eight. No one else would take the job, he said, because the deadline was so short. He had a development system moved into his house, and his managers made sure he ate and slept occasionally. In the 1983 interview he had spoken of aiming for a November deadline.
He also recalled laying out his design for Spielberg (the landing zone, the buildings, the pits where E.T. finds the pieces of his phone) and Spielberg asking whether he could “do a maze thing”. Warshaw did not want to make a Pac-Man copy and call it E.T. “But, you know… it might have been better.”
What Atari paid for the rights was never published by Atari. Electronic Games wrote in April 1983 of “a reported 10 million dollars”; later accounts, drawing on 1983 press coverage, put the figure at $20–25 million. Electronic Fun reported that it was the largest single licence MCA had signed for the character, out of 50 or so products. Atari’s publicity made much of Spielberg’s part: an Atari spokesman, Ron Stringari, said Spielberg “was over here every week to help on the game”, Spielberg storyboarded the television advert, and he called the result “the first emotionally oriented video game ever produced”.
Playing it
The player is E.T., not Elliott. E.T.’s ship leaves him in a forest, and to go home he has to find the three pieces of his interplanetary telephone, call the ship and be back at the landing site when it arrives. The game has six screens: the forest, a town with Elliott’s house, the FBI building and the Institute of Science, and four more where the phone pieces lie at the bottom of pits, which the magazines of the day called wells.
A symbol at the top of the screen shows what kind of zone E.T. is standing in, and pressing the button uses its power: find a phone piece, send the scientist or the FBI agent away, call Elliott, or phone home. The FBI agent steals phone pieces, and the scientist takes E.T. away for observation, costing time. Every move uses energy. E.T. picks up Reese’s Pieces to eat for energy or save for later. Calling Elliott brings him out to take the sweets E.T. has gathered, scare off the pursuers and find missing phone parts, and when all seems hopeless Elliott runs out to revive him. To leave a pit, E.T. cranes his neck and levitates. Once the phone call is made, Video Games warned, there are only about 15 seconds to reach the landing site before the ship leaves without him.
Warshaw was proud that it was a game without violence. “Nobody gets killed and nobody kills. The worst that can happen is E.T. can get occasionally pickpocketed.”
The pits were the trouble. The screens are full of them, and each climb out costs energy. Warshaw himself said in 2000 that the only thing he was really disappointed about “was the way you fell into the wells a bit too much. If I could have tuned that down, it would have been better.”
Reviews
The first previews were friendly. Vidiot liked the way E.T. “stumbles around grotesquely-but-cutely”, though its preview copy came with photocopied instructions that left out what the power-zone symbols meant, the most important part of the game. In March 1983 Phil Wiswell of Video Games explained the zones patiently and concluded that “E.T. is really for kids (the littler ones)”.
Electronic Games, in April 1983, was scathing. The game “looks like it was turned out in about five weeks”, the graphics were crude, and it “consists entirely of falling into holes, fleeing government agents and following directional arrows indicated at the top of the screen”. The reviewer called it “an insult to arcaders”.
Sales, returns and the landfill
The game sold in large numbers at first. In September 1983 Video Games Player listed it fourth among the biggest hits of 1982, at 3 million cartridges, behind Pac-Man (7 million), Donkey Kong and Defender; it did not say whether those were sold or shipped. How many E.T. cartridges Atari made, and how many came back unsold, is reported very differently in later accounts, and none of the figures rests on a documented Atari number.
Unsold stock was part of what sank Atari in 1983. That September the company dumped surplus stock at the city landfill in Alamogordo, New Mexico: the New York Times reported 14 truckloads of discarded cartridges and computer equipment on 28 September 1983. The story grew into a legend that Atari had buried millions of E.T. cartridges. When a documentary crew and archaeologists dug at the site in April 2014, they recovered about 1,300 cartridges of dozens of different titles, E.T. among them. James Heller, the Atari manager who had organised the dumping, put the number buried at about 728,000. Warshaw was at the dig.
E.T. did not cause the crash. By early 1983 Video Games was already writing that adventure games such as Raiders of the Lost Ark and E.T., “despite their famous names, will never sell like a Pac-Man or Space Invaders”. The 1983 crash entry describes the wider collapse. But a famous licence, a rushed schedule and piles of unsold cartridges made the game the easiest way to tell the story, and Warshaw has lived with it since. “E.T. was a great effort,” he said in 2000, “but game players, they don’t care about the effort that went into a cart. They care about the game. I would’ve liked to have had more time to work on it.”
Sources
- Atari Age vol. 1 no. 4, November–December 1982: Atari Club order page (“arrives in December”, $39.95) and New Cartridge Report preview (the three phone pieces, Reese’s Pieces, the scientist and the FBI agent).
- Electronic Fun with Computers & Games vol. 1 no. 3, January 1983, p. 35: “Spielberg helps design new E.T. game”: Ron Stringari’s quotation, the commercial, Spielberg’s “first emotionally oriented video game”, the MCA licence, the price and the game’s elements.
- Video Games vol. 1 no. 5, February 1983, p. 34: Warshaw on meeting Spielberg in July, “Spielberg wants you … fast!”, the November deadline and “Nobody gets killed and nobody kills”.
- Video Games vol. 1 no. 6, March 1983: editorial on Warner’s earnings warning and games that “will never sell like a Pac-Man”; Phil Wiswell’s review, p. 69 (six scenes, the wells, zones, the 15 seconds, “really for kids”).
- Vidiot vol. 1 no. 2, February–March 1983: Kevin Christopher, “E.T. Phones Home for the Holidays”, preview with six screens, power zones and the missing instructions.
- Electronic Games vol. 1 no. 14, April 1983, pp. 37–38: review of E.T.
- Video Games Player vol. 2 no. 1, September 1983, p. 12: “Biggest 1982 hits”.
- ClassicGamer Magazine vol. 1 no. 2, Winter 2000, pp. 35–37, Darrin Powell’s interview with Howard Scott Warshaw: the schedule, “five weeks to do the whole game”, four months and eight months, the development system at home, the maze suggestion, the wells, “a great effort”.
- Wireframe issue 43, September 2020, pp. 46–47: Howard Scott Warshaw’s account of the 2014 Alamogordo dig.
- “Atari Parts Are Dumped”, The New York Times, 28 September 1983, as reported in later coverage (web, secondary).
- “E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (video game)”, Wikipedia (web, secondary): the later-reported $20–25 million licence fee, citing 1983 press coverage. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E.T._the_Extra-Terrestrial_(video_game)
- “Atari video game burial”, Wikipedia (web, secondary): the 2014 excavation, about 1,300 cartridges recovered, and James Heller’s figure of 728,000. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_video_game_burial