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

[zzip]

23 hours ago, Cynicaster said:

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.  

I've long said that E.T. is basically the same game as Haunted House-  find the 3 pieces of the object and escape, while avoiding the "spooks"  :)

[KevKelley]

Just saw this post and thought it was cool. Nice little exercise.

 

Personally I like the direction the original took but I can see the desire to make a Pac Man clone. I would think it would be neat to combine the two ideas, like Blueprint meets Pac-Man. Maybe some elements of Venture thrown in there.

[retroeight]

On 9/21/2020 at 9:32 PM, Asaki said:

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

I love this reply....

 

There are just some games that are hard to do on the Atari 2600

 

I feel the question should be, "What if he had more time?"

 

Lloyd

[Asaki]

3 hours ago, retroeight said:

There are just some games that are hard to do on the Atari 2600

I'm not saying ET was hard to do, I'm just saying that releasing a game with some mind-blowing technology inside might've saved the 2600 (although I realize my example would've cost far too much for any sane person to purchase).

 

But yeah, giving him more time to do the game would've been nice.

[+5-11under]

On 9/21/2020 at 9:06 PM, knievel1 said:

Some sort of Gorf?

I would have gone with this. A few small simple minigames, either playable one at a time, or in series like Gorf... something Pac-ish with ET collecting candies, a shooting game (not sure of the connection - maybe people trying to catch ET - gotta watch the movie again, I guess), a bit of bicycle racing, and maybe something else (depending on space available). Nothing too complicated, but hopefully still fun for wide variety of people. Kids mode for the young ones, tournament mode for the more experienced gamers.

 

Edit: having minigames allows better chance of having more people involved in the project - one for each minigame, and one or two to put it all together.

 

/I never really liked arcade Gorf, but plenty of other people did - I preferred the smooth moving Phoenix.

[Crazy Climber]

Yeah, something simple probably would have been better...it was such a huge franchise that no matter what the game was "ET" would sell. Something along the lines of Snoopy/redbaron...good graphics, solid gameplay but nothing very deep. Easy to play, easy to forget, you know...

[high voltage]

I think at the time a 5 million seller was out of the question, the market wasn't that huge.

 

HSW, all of his games (3) sold a million each, in those days that was lots.

[retroeight]

The "issue" was that E.T. was aimed at kids for the most part. So it would have to be somewhat easy. no?

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4 hours ago, high voltage said:

I think at the time a 5 million seller was out of the question, the market wasn't that huge.

I think Atari believed that the draw of the E.T. IP would be so huge that they would sell millions of consoles just to play the game,  that's why they produced so many carts

[7800Knight]

Spielberg's original idea of having it a maze game was a good start.  But an outright Pacman clone might have been worse that what we got; everyone was doing "me too" Pacman clones.

 

Maybe if it were something like the arcade game Blueprint.

[christo930]

On 9/21/2020 at 9:06 PM, 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.....

 

 

ET was a disaster waiting to happen.  A different timeline with a successful (and fun) ET would have only encouraged them.  We would simply be talking about a different game from a different movie or TV show.  IIRC, they had more copies of ET than there were 2600s installed.  Maybe a "killer app" might have helped, but I doubt it.   It would have had to be better than any other Atari game ever released in the whole library. They would have needed a 1:1 owner to buyer ratio plus new sales of hardware. That was never going to happen.

 

The whole industry was riddled with problems and these problems were structural.  Not only were there problems with the console and game market, those problems were amplified by having a bunch of different and incompatible computer formats.

 

ET was always going to happen and the industry shake-out was always going to happen. It was a bubble.