A Steven Spielberg classic has produced the worst video game in history

Since the once reliable superhero-genre cinema-goer has loosened his iron grip, Hollywood turns to video games as a source of blockbuster success and has seemed to work so far. Sure, we had historical types such as the biggest bomb from 2024, “Borderlands”, but after “Minecraft”, who claimed two of the largest treasurer of 2025 and “The Super Mario Bros. Movie”, becomes one of the 20 biggest films ever.

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Of course, things worked for a long time in the other side: Hollywood provided the IP and video game developers with the license their best. But for the most part it seemed as if it were difficult to adapt successful films into video games. There were so many terrible games based on successful films that fans mostly only accepted that such games were terrible.

But there is a game that remains really notorious when it comes to being such a big mistake that they could make a decent argument for what the following patient shows zero. This game is 2600 console for the Atari.

“Et the extra terrestrial” has become notorious since his 1982 debut, but is this reputation deserved? Well, it's complicated. The game designer responsible for “et”, Howard Scott Warshaw, spoke to NPR about his adaptation and explained that rushed development was partly to blame for the shameful reputation of the game. Warshaw actually worked on the very first video game adaptation of a film “Raiders of the Lost Ark”, which Spielberg apparently liked and loud Warshaw “was like a film” itself. Therefore, it seems that the director of Warshaw has personally requested that his next film “et the extra terrestrial” have a video game adaptation.

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The only problem was that Atari and Spielberg took some time to hammer the legal side of things. “Et” the film debuted in cinemas on June 11, 1982 and was immediately hugged. He became an immediate Spielbergian who maintains an almost perfect tomato score today. But it took until the end of July this year for Spielberg and Atari to achieve an agreement. Then the Atari CEO Warshaw contacted and commissioned him to make the game in just five weeks so that the company could publish it in time for the Christmas holidays. For some reason, the ambitious young developer agreed. “I don't know exactly what I was full at the time,” Warshaw told NPR. “But whatever it was, I was overcrowded with it and I believed that I could make it. I mean the hybris!”

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Warshaw designed the game for a point of action in the film, in which the title Alien collected parts to build a communicator that enables him to “make calls home”. According to the developer, Spielberg seemed to be overwhelmed when he saw a structure of the game for the first time and reacted with a GLIB: “Couldn't you just do something like Pac-Man?” While these words had clearly wounded, it turned out that Spielberg rightly had a different approach, since it turned out that “ET, the extra terrestrial” was not just a flop, but the gold standard for terrible film video games.

Wonder is the core of a good Steven Spielberg film, and “et” is a main example that perfectly captures the uninhibited miracle that we are able to feel as children and to encapsulate it in a warm story that is technically impressive. However, the video game could not only match the miracle of the film, but also quickly as the worst video game that was ever made (a reputation that it still has) and is one of the greatest commercial failures in the history of the video game. It did not help that Atari fell into difficult times at the time when “et” debut, which means that a narrative was formed that the game brought the video game industry to its knee. Of course this is not exactly, but it is anything but the only wrong element that plays in the troubled legacy of the game. After her release, an urban legend emerged that Atari had all buried all of her “ET” potatons not sold at a landfill. This turned out to be partially when the investigators found the buried cartridges in 2014, although only a few of the almost 800,000 games were “et” and it turned out that Atari had only buried the unused stock after his production work in Texas was closed.

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Nevertheless, the “ET” game would have no doubt about following Spielberg's “Pac Man” Mulation Idea. The adaptation is not often remembered, and it is not too difficult to understand why. Part of the problem was the way the game used a “wraparound” step, where users played on a screen as an extra terrestrial title before they have started to return where they started. The values ​​were also littered with small pits in which ET and very often it could. All of this is frustrating, but according to Warshaw it was at least partially the plan. “There is a difference between frustration and disorientation,” he told NPR. “Video games are all about frustration. It's okay to frustrate a user. In fact, it is important to frustrate a user. However, you do not want to disorse the user.”

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Unfortunately that did exactly that. Critics were not too impressed, but as Gamehistory emphasizes, the notorious reputation of the game is not entirely towards its actual quality or the tenor of contemporary reviews. The website actually collected several reviews from the period and found that critics were lukewarm in the worst case and at best neutral. Nevertheless, Softline readers chose the game as the second worst atari program in 1983, and modern critics were in the “ET”, which led to the worst video game adaptation of all time-the legendary “demolition” video game or the measurement-“video video game in this unpeased title” Gilligan's Island “was.