Is the game really evil and vile? (nm)
"Oh wow, good Nyborg"-Heavy Metal.
Bluntly said... NO.
I'm sure you have heard all the haters say this is the worst video game ever created. Interesting, considering those critics grew with the NES and were taught to naturally hate anything inferior to their current gen systems (properly portrayed by Sega and Nintendo's aggressive marketing campaigns). It's true E.T. was rushed and completed in merely six weeks but people continue to miss the finer points up to this day: the game actually incorporates elements from the film (Musical Theme, Elliott, Scientists, FBI, candy, phone pieces, spaceship, forest, etc.) and executes them well... OH NO! Did I say WELL? AAAARRRGGGHHH!!!!!... not!
The 'dreaded' wells E.T. fell in and explored during the adventure are possibly THE reason so many people satanize this game and dub it unplayable. Those people probably fell into one and never were able to step out, that's why they pan it so much! The trauma... the hate...
I still play the game via emulation and it's so ludicrously easy to complete it makes all the whiners cry and call it a piece of crap, either because it looks old, or because it's TOO hard for them. And dear God... the staff at GamePro magazine dared to compare this 1982 game with Spiderman 2 (2004) for the PS2. Now that's stupid.
And perhaps in 20 years, people will say Halo 3 and GTA are a bunch of ugly crap compared to the games they'll have then... and it will, again, be stupid.
I'm an old guy (37) who grew with the Atari 2600. Only by living in the golden era of Atari (and I mean when there was no NES) can you really appreciate and understand these early classics. Nuff said.
All the "Haters" hate anything under current gen? Then why are Space Invaders and Bererk still considered classic?
Im 13 and I can hate movies. Deal with it!
The other day, I was telling my brother about an old Atari 2600 that I'd recently bought and the subject of E.T. and it's subsequent reputation came up.
Back in the early eighties, we played the game frequently and found it somewhat ambitious and moderately enjoyable, as did a lot of the kids we knew growing up. In early 1983, it seemed like everybody had a copy and although there were better games, nobody seemed to complain about this one being that much worse. Everyone we knew liked the fact that you can actually win it!
Where did the hatred come from?
The current consensus, in my opinion, isn't so much based on bad graphics (C'mon, it's Atari!) or any alleged difficulty of the game. I think it's more cynical than that.
Many, if not most, of the hipper-than-thou journalists, bloggers and Youtube "stars" (not to mention snarky 13-year-olds) who consider themselves the gatekeepers of pop culture, are at heart, elitist snobs, obsessed with irony and with an obsessive hatred of things they consider "too sentimental", which is probably the reason why the character of E.T. isn't quite the icon it was thirty years ago.
Couple that with the fact that too many of these critics are too young to remember ever playing the game and are preaching to people even younger than themselves, it leads to a herd mentality and an extreme lack of context. Imagine living in a world where this was the latest game, comparable only to the ones released before it.
It probably won't be long before the irony gene in hipsters begins to kick in and the pendulum swings the other way.