ET for the TI-99/4A - more info?

[digdugnate]

I was browsing through the most excellent videogamehouse website on lunch today and was reading about a Frogger-clone for ET that was being developed:

 

"According to Patrick King (who programmed another E.T. game on the 99/4A while with Western Technologies) there may be a reason why E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial is so hard to find today or possibly never hit the market. According to him, "when Steven Spielberg walked into a room in Northern California and saw our line of E.T. 99/4A games on monitors running alongside the Atari 2600 E.T. game, he went ballistic & ordered the plug pulled on the Texas Instruments license and their 3 million dollar license fee refunded. We suspect this happened because we had used the full powers of the TI 9918 chip (same chip used in Colecovision system) to make our games really look great and the Atari 2600 game on the old Intel 6502 chip looked pretty sad by comparison. Common sense told him that the line of TI-99/4A games should NOT be better looking and more interesting that the market leader 2600 version."

 

http://www.videogamehouse.net/gamemain/cartsde/et/

 

Does this game exist at all outside of a ROM? I can't seem to find much info about it online.

[Airshack]

This is quite interesting. I'd imagine Pat King would know if there's any ROMs to the REAL ET game, not the Frogger re-brand.

[Bill Loguidice]

That story sounds a bit apocryphal. I wonder if the deal was simply pulled in deference to the Atari deal. After all, Atari released ET games on both console and computer, and there was certainly a larger install base on the Atari side, not to mention a larger payout for the license ($20 million+ versus $3 million).

[etownandy]

Pretty sure it only exists as a ROM. It was relatively unknown before the "Never Released Modules" series came about (there may have been mention of it in 99'er or Compute).

 

I'd say it's equally likely that it got shelved because it wasn't particularly good. Certainly nowhere near as good as Parker Bros' release of "Frogger." What are the geometric symbols (triangles, circles) in the "water" meant to be? And would ET really hop on the back of a frog? Or an owl? The splash screen, IMHO, was the best thing about the game.

 

When I played it, I was surprised that the speech didn't sound anything like ET or Elliot (I assume it was supposed to be the former, since one of the words it says is, "Ouch."). Given the number of voices we've heard coming out of the machine, surely they could have gotten closer. Maybe that was a finishing bit of polish that never got applied.

 

ET At Sea is pretty enjoyable, though.

Edited June 5, 2017 by etownandy

[PeBo]

There are just so many Frogger clones (even a few decent magazine type-ins), that turning the frog into ET is just same old same old.

 

To be fair though , having to get film-licence products to market quickly (in an era where game development time was already measured in weeks) didn't give game houses a lot of time to come up with original ideas for our fav little alien dude!

 

And while it too has some pretty weak links to ET, I have to agree that ET's Adventures at Sea is a great little educational game (kind of an an early Carmen Santiago).

[timofonic]

There are just so many Frogger clones (even a few decent magazine type-ins), that turning the frog into ET is just same old same old.

 

To be fair though , having to get film-licence products to market quickly (in an era where game development time was already measured in weeks) didn't give game houses a lot of time to come up with original ideas for our fav little alien dude!

 

And while it too has some pretty weak links to ET, I have to agree that ET's Adventures at Sea is a great little educational game (kind of an an early Carmen Santiago).

 

It's Carmen Sandiego. Carmen Santiago is the character of a "parody" game that teaches Dante's "Inferno".

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carmen_Sandiego_(video_game_series)#Where_in_Hell_is_Carmen_Santiago.3F

[PeBo]

 

It's Carmen Sandiego. Carmen Santiago is the character of a "parody" game that teaches Dante's "Inferno".

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carmen_Sandiego_(video_game_series)#Where_in_Hell_is_Carmen_Santiago.3F

I stand corrected (Hey I'm lucky I remember my own name most days!)

 

To be honest though, I'll probably end up there eventually, so a game that acts as a guide to Dante's Inferno would probably be more useful for me in the long run.