Atari ET and the crash

[2600problems]

i understand why ET would be a scapegoat for the crash, the pits, the agents being pains in the ass and the landfill. now, i don't doubt the fact that the game can be difficult, or that it can be frustrating, but calling it the cause of the crash is pushing it. look at pac man or miner 2049er for the 2600, hell look at Donkey Kong or Daikatana. those games are 10 times WORSE than this one. 3 reasons:

 

1. graphics are good

2. Music is acceptable

3. despite the pits, its enjoyable. compared to pac man which is an eye searing, ear bleeding mess. (i have it, sadly)

 

thoughts?

[spacecadet]

I don't think anyone has called ET the cause of the crash. Some have called it an example of the kind of thing that led to the crash, but that's not the same thing. Nobody would blame a single game for taking the entire industry down.

[empsolo]

Well ET is a direct cause of the fall of Atari insofar as the boneheaded overpayment for the ET license from Spielberg as well as the tendency to over manufacture cartridges than retailers could possibly sell.

 

 

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[toiletunes]

Atarimania.com has an excellent database. If you search games by year, most years have a couple dozen games- 1983 has one hundred plus. The market was flooded, and it all came crashing down.

[high voltage]

[high voltage]

i understand why ET would be a scapegoat for the crash, the pits, the agents being pains in the ass and the landfill. now, i don't doubt the fact that the game can be difficult, or that it can be frustrating, but calling it the cause of the crash is pushing it. look at pac man or miner 2049er for the 2600, hell look at Donkey Kong or Daikatana. those games are 10 times WORSE than this one. 3 reasons:

 

1. graphics are good

2. Music is acceptable

3. despite the pits, its enjoyable. compared to pac man which is an eye searing, ear bleeding mess. (i have it, sadly)

 

thoughts?

 

 

(side note) wrong company name error due to printing error.

 

 

 

 

If a 12 year old girl can master ET, and NES fanboys don't that just goes to show how lame NES gameplayer were (are). Mind you, they weren't even around, all they heard was wrong information at some later time.

Edited June 3, 2017 by high voltage

[high voltage]

And look, do you have to post this (like again!!!), which has been discussed 100 millon times here on AA and other competent forums, please do a bit of research before posting some garbage about ET and crash for the squillionst time.........

Edited June 3, 2017 by high voltage

[Foxsolo2000]

And look, do you have to post this (like again!!!), which has been discussed 100 millon times here on AA and other competent forums, please do a bit of research before posting some garbage about ET and crash for the squillionst time.........

 

Totally agree with you on this. Sick to death of the same posts over and over again. Leave ET alone and please think of something new to discuss as this grew old a long time ago

[2600problems]

High Voltage, when i want to be criticized, i will say so. and garbage? this is a part of history. as for the millionth time? this is the first I've posted of it. go troll somewhere else

[toiletunes]

IBTS

(in before the Shatner)

[+nanochess]

Please no more ET discussion for a year at least.

[+nanochess]

UIPC

 

(Undecorously increasing post count)

 

Just kidding. Double accidental tap in phone screen.

[2600problems]

alright, fine. i didn't know it was old okay, cut me a damn break

[Torr]

alright, fine. i didn't know it was old okay, cut me a damn break

 

I'm Sorry, I wasn't aware of it being talked to death, I'm new to the site and excited about Atari is all.

 

^That would have been friendlier response. (and hopefully true)

 

We're (almost) all pretty nice here... but an attitude like that this early... hmmmm

[Video]

Et is complete, beatable, and fully functional. Its issue is WAY to many produced, and not very big or complex for the type of game it is, even for the era. Still its not the reason for Atari's or the game market collapse. That was market over saturation ,which it was part of, and low quality, which IMO it wasn't.

[zzip]

Why do people get so up in arms about topics?

 

If you don't want to talk about ET again, there's plenty of other threads on this board, why shut it down for the people who DO want to talk about it?

[zzip]

I don't think anyone has called ET the cause of the crash. Some have called it an example of the kind of thing that led to the crash, but that's not the same thing. Nobody would blame a single game for taking the entire industry down.

Plenty of people and journalists do repeat the claim that ET caused the crash though...

[+KaeruYojimbo]

Why do people get so up in arms about topics?

 

If you don't want to talk about ET again, there's plenty of other threads on this board, why shut it down for the people who DO want to talk about it?

Some people forget this. Like how people can forget that if a TV show offends them, they can turn off the television.

 

It also doesn't take long to find plenty of ET thread here though. When someone is new to something, it can be easy to forget in their enthusiasm that not everyone is new to it.

[BassGuitari]

We were all n00bs once, just wanting to know more, and part of "doing research" is, well, asking people about it*. No harm there. The grizzled veterans who don't feel like talking about it again can simply skip the thread, and the ones that want to engage are free to do so.

Nobody wins when censorship takes over.

(*Granted, there's a LOT more reference material available now than in, say, 2003, when I was a n00b asking about the Crash and Pac-Man and whatnot. Still, no need to get all hot and bothered by a new thread.)

I don't think anyone has called ET the cause of the crash.

Where have you been the last 20+ years?

[zzip]

Some people forget this. Like how people can forget that if a TV show offends them, they can turn off the television.

 

It also doesn't take long to find plenty of ET thread here though. When someone is new to something, it can be easy to forget in their enthusiasm that not everyone is new to it.

Everyday I come here, I skip maybe 80% of the threads because they simply don't interest me. I mean, I could go into them and post "Why all these Nintendo or TI 99/4a threads, this is an Atari board dammit!". But I don't do it because they interest people, and I can simply skip them. Nobody is forcing me to read them.

 

So I don't get why others feel the need to try to shut down topics. If you are sick of hearing about it, just skip it!

 

It can also make the n00b feel attacked and unwelcome

Edited June 5, 2017 by zzip

[2600problems]

thank you. tor, i'm sorry. zzip, sorry. maybe it was a mistake for me to post.

[zzip]

thank you. tor, i'm sorry. zzip, sorry. maybe it was a mistake for me to post.

Why are you apologizing to me, I was defending this thread?

[Bill Loguidice]

Humans seem to have a proclivity for wanting our history, like many other things, wrapped up into easily digestible, and overly simplified, bite-sized pieces. The ET/Pac-Man thing is a convenient short-hand that hopefully always leads to a greater discussion of the root causes of the Crash, including an immature industry that grew too fast with too many companies of dubious financial standing taking too large of a role. Naturally, that greater discussion rarely happens and most people, understandably, have only, at best, a casual interest in videogame history. That's why we get endless repeats of the same tired tropes.

[Mr SQL]

​

 

Totally agree with you on this. Sick to death of the same posts over and over again. Leave ET alone and please think of something new to discuss as this grew old a long time ago

Foxsolo,

Easy to play difficult to master ​is still a great formula for Atari Games and ET has this reversed because you must study the manual to play and then, it's not very challenging just complex.

 

ET is not a good yardstick by which to judge new games and even if you don't realize it you bring ET with you whenever you suggest new games should follow it's design - I'd like to see you actually beat Starfleet Simulation instead of dismissing the game as too simple.

 

You could use ET to critique all of my games except for a few I wrote in the 80's that went into the trashcan because they were some combination of too difficult to play and not challenging enough; you usually didn't see those releases except as Public Domain games.

 

[zzip]

Humans seem to have a proclivity for wanting our history, like many other things, wrapped up into easily digestible, and overly simplified, bite-sized pieces. The ET/Pac-Man thing is a convenient short-hand that hopefully always leads to a greater discussion of the root causes of the Crash, including an immature industry that grew too fast with too many companies of dubious financial standing taking too large of a role. Naturally, that greater discussion rarely happens and most people, understandably, have only, at best, a casual interest in videogame history. That's why we get endless repeats of the same tired tropes.

Someone told me once that he liked the idea that there was once a game so terrible that it destroyed the entire industry, so he chose to believe it over more reasonable explanations.

 

So basically ET has become literal mythology at this point