Brainstorm an E.T. that Could've Sold 5 Million

[knievel1]

Watching Netflix's "High Score" & the part we've all seen about the rushed E.T. project & Spielberg asking "Can't you make it more like Pac-Man?"

 

Maybe Steven was right, not asking for a copycat muncher but something more arcade-like? 

What if the Activision team never left & Megamania had become E.T.? 

Or if Howard had turned his idea for Yars' Revenge into E.T. instead?

 

Laser Blast? Dark Caverns? 

Juno First? Pitfall 2?

Some sort of Gorf? 

 

What might've worked? 

That'd be the grand challenge in 21st century programming, huh? 

Create the ET that might've sold as Atari projected.....

 

 

[Asaki]

Well I mean the market was already tanking, I don't think any form of E.T. was going to save that sinking ship. Maybe if it had a Pentium processor inside and sophisticated 3D graphics

[pacman000]

The basic game was headed in the right direction: an action-adventure game, where you collect objects & use special powers. It sounds like something for the NES. 
 

Problem is, Warshall didn’t have enough time to polish it. And I’m afraid any ET game would’ve had the same problem.

 

Still...

 

Maybe a side scroller, with the flying bike? In it players dodge things while trying to get ET to the ship.

[roadrunner]

Buy ET and get a free pack of bubble gum 

[+GoldLeader]

That was cool seeing it on High Score...I like HSW's viewpoint at the time...

 

If he had the time,  I'd say do something along the lines of Adventure;   Collect items, avoid enemies,... You could have mazes and houses, maybe keys, plus find Reese's Pieces in some areas to gain life, but then (building off of pacman000's idea) give it a flying bike section to reach an ending,  ideally complete with a UFO taking off right at the very end. 

 

?  ☎️  ?

 

 

[keithbk]

I think the only other option for E.T. would be to make it a side-scroller game where you guide E.T. through a variety of scenes that resemble the movie. I'm talking something like the Smurfs "Rescue from Gargamel's Castle" game...

 

Otherwise, if you do it like Pac-Man, you simply have E.T. going through eating Reese's pieces (instead of nameless dots) while avoiding the FBI and scientists (instead of ghosts) in endless maze cycles... boring.

 

 

Edited September 22, 2020 by keithbk

[+cvga]

Something like Pigs in Space where there are 3 different screens and each one of them could have represented a scene in the movie would have worked well. You could have the flying bike scene, a scene to collect reese's pieces and phone parts, and a third scene lol.

[zzip]

13 hours ago, knievel1 said:

Watching Netflix's "High Score" & the part we've all seen about the rushed E.T. project & Spielberg asking "Can't you make it more like Pac-Man?"

 

Maybe Steven was right, not asking for a copycat muncher but something more arcade-like? 

What if the Activision team never left & Megamania had become E.T.? 

Or if Howard had turned his idea for Yars' Revenge into E.T. instead?

 

Laser Blast? Dark Caverns? 

Juno First? Pitfall 2?

Some sort of Gorf? 

 

What might've worked? 

That'd be the grand challenge in 21st century programming, huh? 

Create the ET that might've sold as Atari projected.....

 

 

It's not much of an action movie, so it's hard to see how it makes a good arcade game..  unless you turn the bicycle chase sequence into a game.   if you run over enough reeses pieces you can fly against the moon and escape.

 

But really I don't think the game is bad.   Make the pits less sensitive or turn them into bushes (search the bushes for parts).   Maybe instead of 4 screens of pits/bushes,  have some screens representing the house, and some representing the yard, and you have to search both areas.   Maybe add some on-screen text telling you what you are looking for, and put a name next to the icons, so that the game is easier to figure out without the manual.

 

But ET was the biggest movie of the year, and any game with the ET name should have sold much better than it did no matter how good or bad it was--  Parent's buying it for Christmas.   The fact that it didn't sell that well I think was a sign of fatigue in the industry.

[keithbk]

I think the ET map would have been BETTER if the pits never extended to the edge of the map, but getting used to their locations when traveling is not really a problem. I know there is a hack that altered the pits.

 

I get the edge sensitivity issue of the pits (when levitating your way out); newbies keep falling in over and over, but it's not that difficult to manage once you understand what is happening. The game just happens to have a couple of unforgiving elements that make it frustrating, but I regularly beat it as a kid, so I was never disappointed with it.

 

Was it exciting and fun to play? Not really, but it did look VERY good for an Atari game.

Edited September 22, 2020 by keithbk

[scrummy]

I agree with the large side scroller like Pitfall.  Instead of swinging over pits,  you could fly on your bike with ET over obstacles.  Collect all the telecommunication pieces. 

 

Escape the shadowy government figures with guns disguised as walkie talkies on levels that work like a reverse Keystone cops, with them chasing you through a large version of Eliot's house. 

 

The game really would have needed to be something special. HSW was on the right track.

 

In a perfect world, the aliens would have come down and acted as a father figure for those kids and restored a balanced energy to the house but it was the beginning of the mass culture wide-spread patriarchy is evil movement and Spielberg was doing his part.  One day balance will be restored to the force and open minded people will understand complementary dualistic forces (yin/yang) and their importance to life, but only if you help ET make one very important interdimensional phone call and destroy the materialists grip on our throats.

 

 

Edited September 22, 2020 by scrummy

[Lost Monkey]

I think the game would have been better if you got to use all the special powers shown or hinted at in the film:

 

Levitation, empathy, healing and penis breath.

[+cvga]

4 hours ago, Lost Monkey said:

I think the game would have been better if you got to use all the special powers shown or hinted at in the film:

 

Levitation, empathy, healing and penis breath.

I'm thinking I may have watched a slightly different version ?

[+Stephen]

14 minutes ago, cvga said:

I'm thinking I may have watched a slightly different version ?

"It's not a goblin CVGA"

[scrummy]

17 hours ago, cvga said:

I'm thinking I may have watched a slightly different version ?

 

[knievel1]

Woulda been cool to see HSW get the time to turn ET into a proper next-level Adventure style game. 

Or is that what he tried to do with Raiders?

Raiders, Swordquest, neither were fun as the original Adventure. 

[CommodoreDecker]

Had the cartridge more ROM space available and maybe double the development time from 5 weeks or whatever it was... what was HSW thinking at the time and what did he have to drop to fit what remained into the cartridge?

 

(ET as it stands is till above average, especially for 1983, I play it more often than numerous games...  HSW was ahead of his time with his games, and pushing the 2600 as much as humanly possible and it shows.)

[CommodoreDecker]

On 9/23/2020 at 2:09 PM, scrummy said:

 

 

In an age when such raunchy comedy movies and television shows that had 20- and 30-somethings playing children (e.g. "Porky's", "90210"), they scored a winner with the person that dressed up as a little girl (though she flubbed one line as she was parroting everything her older brother was saying...) Also,  mommy's reaction there was priceless. But of all the movie scenes to be put into a possible video game release...

 

Then again, "Porky's" became an actual ET game, complete with allusion to that shower scene, I'm sure they could have made a dinner scene where - despite the actual words not being said - ET could go around the house pinching candy parts and sausages as a bonus round...

 

(okay, "90210" wasn't an intentional comedy but who didn't laugh when finding out that, oops, the teens are old enough to be parents of the next generation?)

 

 

Edited September 25, 2020 by CommodoreDecker

[davyK]

Making the pit collision detection more intuitive would have helped enormously.

 

I believe there is a hack of the game that implements that? You only fall into the pit if the bottom or sides of the ET character touch the sides. 

[zzip]

On 9/24/2020 at 7:30 PM, knievel1 said:

Woulda been cool to see HSW get the time to turn ET into a proper next-level Adventure style game. 

Or is that what he tried to do with Raiders?

Raiders, Swordquest, neither were fun as the original Adventure. 

I actually like Raiders more than Adventure, except for the fact that it needs two joysticks.   I wanted to see more games like it, but the Swordquest games were awful!

[keithbk]

3 hours ago, zzip said:

I actually like Raiders more than Adventure, except for the fact that it needs two joysticks.   I wanted to see more games like it, but the Swordquest games were awful!

I enjoyed Raiders a lot, but the parachuting at the end was so unforgiving, I always got fed up when I made a mistake with that part (especially after playing for hours).

 

The Swordquest games are just pointless.

[zzip]

1 minute ago, keithbk said:

I enjoyed Raiders a lot, but the parachuting at the end was so unforgiving, I always got fed up when I made a mistake with that part (especially after playing for hours).

 The trick seems to be catching the parachute on the tree limb and sliding in.   I'd say I make it 7 times out of 10.   I always bring an extra parachute just in case :)

[Freeway]

On 9/29/2020 at 5:55 PM, keithbk said:

I enjoyed Raiders a lot, but the parachuting at the end was so unforgiving, I always got fed up when I made a mistake with that part (especially after playing for hours).

 

The Swordquest games are just pointless.

Tried that countless times and never could complete the game at the time (I never knew whether to land on the branch or try to get under it). Despite that I thought it was an incredible game, as good as Adventure. The graphics in Raiders of course were a lot better.

Edited October 7, 2020 by Freeway

[zzip]

14 hours ago, Freeway said:

Tried that countless times and never could complete the game at the time (I never knew whether to land on the branch or try to get under it). Despite that I thought it was an incredible game, as good as Adventure. The graphics in Raiders of course were a lot better.

Under it.   The ideal position is Indy is under the branch, and the top of the parachute is just above the branch,  and you will slide right in to the cave opening beneath it.

[Freeway]

Thanks zzip. I hadn't played Raiders since 1983, but just recently bought a Raiders cart for my 2600Jr which I got in the late 90's from Dixons (and has been stored away for many years). I'll keep trying, I have a PC emulator of course but it would be so much more satisfying to complete it on original hardware..

[Cynicaster]

I was thinking a game kind of like BC's Quest For Tires would be cool.  Make it ET trying to get somewhere while dodging hazards and picking up candies for bonus and/or powerups.  Or, make it Elliot on his bike with the ability to pick up ET in the front basket and get extra powers like longer jumps, etc.

 

It's been talked about to death, but given that the timeline was so aggressive for developing the game, you have to admire HSW's ambition for trying to dream up an original game concept for ET.  It would have been much safer and probably quicker to just re-skin some already-existing game concept, such as maze, space shooter, or any of those others mentioned.  

 

"But how would that have anything to do with the movie?" It was an era where most video games didn't even attempt to make sense, so why should an ET game be taken to task for an arbitrary or even nonsensical premise?