We all have our idiosyncracies and one of mine is video game history. I pride my generation as the one to truly enjoy with wonder every iteration, from Pong to Atari, etc. I have dozens of classic consoles and I love playing them, as do others. My brother has several coin-ops, but I'm not there, and I dont think I ever will. For those unaware, history states there was a massive crash in 1983 with Atari. Most blame it on E.T. I recall this game. It sucked. But it was one of those odd first gen games that had an ending rather than a high score. And this was before Nintendo Power or the internet. You found out secrets on the schoolbus. But, looking back, the game wasn't awful, especially due to Atari forcing it out so quickly. Had there been ideas of how to win, it could've been... decent? I also played Raiders of the Lost Ark on Atari, and it was also very cryptic, but we as kids figured it out. E.T. was a game you didn't care to figure out. But here's the deal: There was never a video game crash. Atari 2600 died, but between that & Nintendo we all either had friends or parents who had an Apple II or a Commadore. And, believe it or not, this was the golden age of gaming because everything was pirated so all you had to do was buy a sleeve of floppy disks for $10 and you could copy your friend's entire library. Back to E.T. This game is bad, but there are FAR worse games out there and, if you give this a chance, it plays well for a guy who had such a short time frame to develop it. Any other game thoughts?
Never had Atari. My dad bought Intellivision for the "better" sports games... Was pretty fun...but always felt like a bit of a letdown since Atari had most of the market and better game titles.
I had the Atari 2600 and the ET game. It was crap, but we kept playing it for different reasons: 1. Video games weren't as cheap and readily available as they are now. If we bought a game, it was our intent to give it a good chance. 2. It was really challenging in a stupid way.... (or, perhaps it was really stupid in a challenging way) 3. There was no internet. Playing the Atari was the fun thing to do at the time, and we had played all our other Atari games til we were sick of 'em. I really enjoyed Raiders of the Lost Ark. It definitely was weird, but after we got the hang of it, the game play was fun. Also, because it was cryptic, we had to do as much research as we could to figure it out (read Atari Age magazine!). Pitfall II was the very best, though. No other Atari 2600 game could hold a candle to it.
Does anybody remember the "Adult" line of Atari games? There was one called Custer's Revenge and Beat 'Em & Eat 'Em. It's funny looking back that there was a market for dirty video games that consisted of pixelated squares.
I spent most of my time on the 2600 playing Adventure. There was also an amazing game on the Intelevision called Silent Service, or something like that. It was submarines vs. destroyers. Baseball and football were also pretty fun on the Intelevision.
Jeff sidelines as a game developer and he said ET is the worst game ever and anyone that says differently must be drunk.
I'm not going to say Fatty drinks too much but at his last doctor's visit there was an olive in his urine sample. Heyoooo....
My 5yo loves adventure. It came pre-installed on a multigame arcade cabinet I bought called Legends Ultimate.
Had no clue. Looked it up and this is the summary of the game according to wiki: "Custer's Revenge is an adult sex video game produced by Mystique for the Atari 2600, first released on September 23, 1982. The game gained significant notoriety due to its goal being to rape a Native American woman." LOL WUT? Didnt believe it and then searched gameplay Dont know about yall, but I am very aroused. Might even beat it on a zoom meeting.
When I was a kid we all knew that this game existed but never knew anyone who actually had one. I saw it on youtube decades later. Still never played it.
Everybody knew about it without anybody ever seeing it. It was a word-of-mouth kid grapevine, ala 2 Live Crew cassettes later in the 80's. Leisure Suit Larry was another one, right?, or that could be much later or totally different.
We were all playing 2 live Crew in 8th Grade with Walkmans. A buddy of mine at UT had Larry on his computer in 1991. That game was fun in how difficult it was to find out what to type in to get the proper response. I'd love to play that game again.
I have beaten ET a few times. It is not a good game, but had they had more time, it had potential. It was not well made and the programming was clunky but the concept wasn't bad. You can play atari games on OpenEmu. IN fact just about every atari game ever made including Custers and a few knockoffs can be loaded in 600kb of space. Adventure is probably my favorite Atari game. My son and I were talking about it yesterday, in reference to Ready Player One where the IOI guy is playing it and it takes him nearly forever to beat it. Ridiculous for someone that is supposed to be an expert.
I was born in 1984, so I don't have any personal experience of The Crash. It was real. Was it solely caused by E.T. and was it as destructive as it's often made out to be? Probably both of those are exaggerations. Nintendo released the NES in 1985, so it wasn't a long crash before the video game renaissance hit. But Nintendo intentionally released the North American NES to look like a home theater appliance and not a video game system. They figured they needed to avoid the bad reputation of video games from the crash, at least in the N.A. market. As for the game, I've never played it. However, I have watched (and, full disclosure, contributed to the funding campaign of) the Angry Video Game Nerd Movie, which is entirely about the E.T. game. At the very end, the Nerd actually finally reviews the most infamous game of all time. Paraphrasing his conclusions: "It's not great, but it's not terrible. It's nowhere near as bad as it's made out to be, especially given the impossible time frame the single programmer had to develop it." It's a surprisingly positive review compared to what everyone is expecting of him, which is easily the biggest twist of the movie and the history of AVGN in general.
Not entirely on-topic, but maybe not off-topic : I had the Atari 2600 and could only afford like 1 game. Combat came with it and I managed to get Star Voyager (which was horrible). I wanted Pitfall, but ended up just borrowing it from a friend. Anyway, I just learned the other day, that was was Jack Black in the Pitfall commercial (yes, I'm probably late to this) :
