Timeline | 1982: E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial for Atari 2600

E.T. was a major hit in the movie theaters but a stinker on the Atari 2600

E.T. was taking the world by storm in 1982 and the rights to make a video game out of the IP were secured by Atari late in that year, despite the time Atari wanted a game out by Christmas and so in record time (something like 5 1/2 weeks which was an amazingly short period) Howard Scott Warshaw (a game designer at Atari) cranked out E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial. Atari was hopeful that the game would sell well due to the popularity of the movie and it did sell over a million copies, unfortunately the anticipation was that it would sell much more and was actually one of the biggest financial failures in video gaming ever.

A screenshot of E.T. on the Atari 2600

E.T. was an action-adventure game (in the vein of 'Adventure' and later games like 'The Legend of Zelda') in which the player took control of E.T. and tried to recreate the interstellar phone to 'phone home'. Unfortunately the graphics were barely legible, the gameplay was clunky and very little fun and the sound was terrible. The market was saturated after the 1982 holiday season and even though several good games came out in 1983 by the '83 holiday season the market had basically collapsed. E.T. has become a symbol of this 'Video Game Crash of 1983' and it was recently confirmed that Atari did in fact bury a large number of unsold cartridges of E.T. and other games in a landfill in New Mexico (reportedly 728,000 cartridges although there were many titles only some of which were E.T.).

Further Reading

Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E.T._the_Extra-Terrestrial_(video_game)