Should’ve Stayed Buried
This Sunday, a production crew working on a documentary for Microsoft’s Xbox TV initiative went ahead and dug up that New Mexico landfill that was thought to be the resting place of a bunch of E.T. for Atari cartridges. As it turns out, yes, there were many copies of E.T. in that landfill, although not as many as the “urban legends” might have led us to believe. Due to the timing of its release—right before the so-called video game crash of 1983—and its association with the Atari graveyard story, E.T. has built up a reputation as one of the worst games of its era. Of course, there were tons of other equally terrible games to come out back then. minya gave us the oft-cited example of Pac-Man for the Atari, and fauxcault elaborated on why it was both a letdown and something of a technical marvel:
The dots that Pac-Man ate were definitely dashes, and in general the 2600 version is reviled for being a piss-poor adaptation of the arcade original, especially compared to the adaptation of Ms. Pac-Mac, which by 2600 standards wasn’t bad.
Part of the problem was the significant downgrade in memory from the arcade version to the 2600 port. The 2600 version used a cheaper cartridge with even less memory than was available for cartridges at the time, and the arcade version had about four times more. The dots became dashes because that way the same sprite could be used for both them and the walls of the maze, using up less of that limited memory.
The problem was exacerbated by the rushed production schedule. Both Pac-Man and E.T. were rushed during development to meet the holiday season the years that they were released for the 2600 (1981 and 1982, respectively). Pac-Man was developed in only four months. E.T. was developed in only six weeks.
Greyhound had some problems with Police Quest, an old adventure game where you had to type specific commands to make your character do anything. And Dirtbike Milksteaks took this talk to the next level, regaling us with tales of text parser debauchery:
I don’t think it speaks to the badness of the game so much as it does to the badness of my sister and me as children, but we used to spend hours typing obscene commands into Hugo’s House Of Horrors. “Break that,” we’d tell Hugo. “Put that in your butthole,” we’d tell Hugo. I know this sounds lonely and sad, but this was around the time that Beavis & Butthead held reign over American culture, and our fandom extended to our daily activities, our boring daily activities. So we’d while away the hours in front of the family Tandy doing dumb shit like telling Hugo to fart really hard because at certain times of day that was all we could do to amuse ourselves. What I took away from all this was that Hugo had a very limited reserve of stock responses to these kinds of commands.
“How very uncouth!” was the response to anything profane.
“Same to you, loser!” was the response for insults.
“You should curb your violent tendencies” was the response to anything, you know, violent.