Now that the dust has settled, what went wrong?

your abortion

>>714457325 (OP)
Too soon, Anon.

>>714457325 (OP)
5 weeks of dev time(too little), massively overinflated sales expectations. We have a different problem now: 5 years of dev time(too much), massively overinflated sales expectations. I hope the crash happens soon.

>>714459160
It sold 2 million copies (which is astronomical for the time), but they got a lot of returns.

>>714457325 (OP)
This might be my zoomer brain but weren't all Atari games pretty shit? I don't see how E.T. has such a bad rep

No one read the instructions.

>what went wrong
They shouldn't have put OP on the cover.

>>714459542
Play it. The 2600 had a decent port of Asteroids, and Berzerk was fun. A lot of the issues were hardware limitations fucking up ports, but you could kind of imagine the arcade game while playing.
E.T. was just
>find Reese's Pieces
>fall in hole
>maybe there's a piece there, but likely not
>extend neck sloooooooooooooooooowly to get out (which is retarded in itself)
>repeat
Occasionally you had a hunter chasing you, so you had to intentionally go in holes.

>>714459542
The best you'd see were those arcadey simple games that wouldve made their way to the nes like asteroids, space invaders, ms pacman, etc.
Anything more ambitious sucked

>>714459542
The Space Invaders port is unironically good.
Adventure's also fun. It's basically a proto-Zelda with an optional randomizer built in. I'd recommend it, especially since you can play it in a browser.
There were a lot of stinkers, though. E.T.'s not the worst of them, but it was the biggest financial flop.

>>714459542
Moon Patrol. Commando. Ms Pacman. Pitfall.
These are all classic 2600 games.
Play any of these, then play ET.

Pretty sure the shitty Pac-Man port did more damage to the industry than E.T.

This is now an Atari thread. I played the shit out of this game as a kid, never knew what the fuck I was supposed to do. Still don't.

>>714459542
Play Custer's revenge and youll see what boomers shat their pants at

>>714460324
You fight back against Armus.

>>714457325 (OP)
People who didn't read the manual
The pit glitch
Graphics lacking in color variation
NPCs that spawn onscreen too close to the player
Play the fixed version:
>In January 2013, programmer David Richardson released several unofficial fixes for the game.[77][78][79] Patches included the removal of pixel-perfect collision detection, which caused E.T. to fall into a pit every time his sprite touched a pit entry.[78]
>>714459346
Atari produced an absurd number of cartridges (probably because they paid so much for the license); even if it were a very good game it would have probably been a failure, because the market was full of barrels of games in clearance which were MUCH cheaper than the new games. Activision was producing incredible games, but only a few of them scraped past the 1 million mark. Atari ordered 4 million ET cartridges

>>714460357
>imagines that as something most people knew about
Those games were rare because you had to order them direct from the company (6 to 8 weeks for delivery shit). Most people back in the 80s knew what was available in stores.

Activision > Shitari

>>714460357
>Custers Revenge
You call yourself a boomer coomer?

It's a good game. Just not a good E.T. game.

>>714457325 (OP)
Way too complicated for a one-button Atari game. Not by modern standards, no, but for 1982 when most games were Pac Man, Frogger, or Kaboom where you did one thing for a score, it was bizarre and confusing.

It literally should have been a Pac man clone where you follow a trail of reese's pieces and then maybe a bike riding stage where you have to do the flying jump from the film and then the music plays. Easy, done.

>>714461315
>It's a good game. Just not a good E.T. game.
Aye, it's like the Atari version of The Legend of Zelda if you had to make it into an arcade-style game without combat

Friendly reminder that only one of these still works

>>714462168
And that's the one with the highest concurrent player count.

>>714457325 (OP)
Nintendo expanding to the west. If not for them, PC gaming would've won back then and there.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VrsZWT-0-IE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GwxJyb1G6kk
LETS GOOOOOOO!!!!
SHAKE THAT BOOTY BROTHAS AND SOUL SISTERS

>>714462728
I had to go check, but I knew that second one was from Dangun Feveron.

>>714457325 (OP)
>5 weeks of dev time
>literally only one dev
It was doomed to fail. If you watch the documentary it gets kind of sad because the dev was really trying to make an actual game not just shovelware slop, he just didn't have the time or resources.

>>714462521
>Nintendo expanding to the west.
They were fucked before that, with Atari Games splitting off into making arcade games (becoming Tengen), while Atari Corp being run by gigajew Jack Tramiel who sat on the 7800, which would've come out in 1984 if he didn't focus so much on computers.

>>714459542
Yars Revenge and River Raid were great