Fixing E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial for the Atari 2600 (2013) | Hacker News Reader

Fixing E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial for the Atari 2600 (2013)

neocomputer.org

130 pointsCharlesW41 comments

Wow. Bravo! This is such an impressive effort. As one of the very first home consoles, the venerable Atari 2600 is brutally difficult to program. Everything from ROM to RAM to CPU cycles is in painfully short supply and the requirement to continually keep 'racing the beam' is a harsh master.

My first computer, the Radio Shack TRS-80 Color Computer, came out only a couple years later but even with only 4K of RAM and a sub-1 Mhz CPU, was still much more civilized to program in assembler than a 2600.

I spent hours playing E.T. with friends as a kid. We noticed something unusual about the game compared to other Atari 2600 titles—it came with a relatively large manual [1]. We were used to simply turning on a game and immediately moving or shooting, relying on pure reflex rather than needing instructions. I remember the falling problem as an annoying thing but not the most annoying: trying to understand the game at first. It is critical to highlight that E.T., the movie, was a huge success, and there were many products related to that. It is important to highlight that there was a lot of pressure to put this game in the market [2].

[1] https://archive.org/details/E.T._The_Extra-Terrestrial_1982_...

[2] https://www.npr.org/2017/05/31/530235165/total-failure-the-w...

On top of that Atari had a very rushed schedule from concept to shipping out the door for cartridge was usually 4 weeks. Longer if it was really special.

Likewise, I played for hours and actually enjoyed it. I also really loved Adventure, Superman and similar.

That second linked article (npr.org) is a really interesting read about E.T.'s programmer and his experience during and after making the game, although the story ends a bit abruptly. TLDR; he loved being a rockstar programmer for Atari and was paid millions, but had to move on and find a career/life afterwards. Spoiler alert: he went on to become a SV therapist, helping others with similar experiences. Somehow, the whole thing feels prescient for a lot of current-day devs on the eve of "The Great AI dev takeover".

On his perspective around the game itself, a couple of quotes of particular interest:

"There's a difference between frustration and disorientation," he says. "Video games are all about frustration. It's OK to frustrate a user. In fact, it's important to frustrate a user. But you don't want to disorient the user."

Also, this resonates:

"Spielberg looks at me and he goes, 'Couldn't you just do something like Pac-Man?'"

I remember playing the game with an older family member looking on. As was apparently the case with Spielberg, his eyes absolutely glazed over. But, he got a real kick out of watching me play Space Invaders and laughed out loud as the aliens sped up.

So, the gameplay itself was the biggest complaint about the game. There's a YT video that gets more into the gameplay issues, with matching visuals. [0]

In any case, it's insane that he went from concept to finished game in only 5 weeks.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uj7iICS64iI

Adventure was captivating.

I remember the hard part being trying to remember what all the symbols did. They were hard to remember.

The game was pretty fun once you figured it out, though. And it was brutally difficult on the highest levels. I don't know if I ever beat it with both the FBI and scientist on.

The pits were annoying and definitely a fatal flaw, but really the problem was just that the game was more complicated than an Atari 2600 could really pull off.

I had no idea the Atari 2600 was a 6502 (actually 6507) machine until I saw the A9 (load accumulator) instructions in the machine code snippets on this article, despite having an Atari 2600 as a kid. A9 is burned into my head from sixth form electronics, where we would have to manually convert assembly to hex and key it into the boards we used.

me too, A9 is burned into my head (wrote some machine language on 6502 w/o an assembler).

Looking at the hex reminded me of Cypher looking at the glyphs.

I suppose it's expected since the article was 2013,

but is there a video available comparing original to patched?

EDIT: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=23qeQa0exe0&ab_channel=Retro...

The author doesn't mention it, but many people who never played E.T. read articles in videogame magazines about this game was amongst the things that killed the videogame industry in the 80s. (Oh, see dang's post for tons of related links)

It only killed a small part of the video game industry (consoles) in a specific country (USA) and only for a couple of years. IMO this crash is given way too much importance for what it actually is.

Didn't the Indiana Jones game have similar quirks? Maybe I'm just misremembering my lack of skills playing the game as a kid, but I have vague memories of Indy being blamed for similar things. Maybe not to the point of burying the games in a dump bad.

As far as I understand, the "ET for Atari was so bad it killed the games industry" is kind of an exaggeration/misrepresentation. Which should probably be assumed from how simple the explanation is despite all the questions it brings - you can find plenty of people who had the game as a kid but not many that will recall it being so bad they never wanted to touch their Atari again.

Someone can find some real sources, but I read an article a while back explaining that - from what I recall - what really killed the industry was supply issue that got out of hand. When the Atari started to take off, they didn't have the production capacity to keep up with orders stores were putting in. Stores were being sent about x% of the size of order they requested, so the stores started putting in much bigger order requests to get the amount of stock to actually fulfill demand for their store. Because of this, Atari figured there was way more demand than there was in reality, so once they finally scaled up production they were suddenly able to fulfill the giant order requests stores were putting in, which was way more than they could actually sell. Suddenly stores were overloaded with Atari cartridges, and putting them into bargain bins just to get rid of stock. From there, it seemed like the home console thing was just a fad that came and went. ET just happened to be the big game Atari was pumping out units of because of their overestimation of demand.

> From there, it seemed like the home console thing was just a fad that came and went

lol. boy, is that an idea that didn't age well. I was too young to know about all of the business side of Atari, but I do know that me and everyone else like me never touched their 2600 after getting an NES. In my house, we went with the NES instead of the Atart 5200. We did get an Atari 7800 instead of the SNES, but I'm pretty sure that my dad decided on the 7800 because of the 2600 compatibility where the 5200 was not.

The rumor had it they thought the movie tie-in would be such a hit that they produced more ET cartridges than there were 2600 consoles in existence.

Supply chain whiplash sounds credible too though.

My vague recollection is that coin-op was never quite the same after the crash, and you also stopped seeing as many coin-op machines in unlikely places. There was a fad element.

> they produced more ET cartridges than there were 2600 consoles in existence.

in this manner, you only have to manufacture the game one time instead of having to order a second manufacturing run later since it was assumed Atari was going to keep making more consoles. it was quite the "cunning plan". the rest of the world was just not on the same page of their play book. i'm guessing MBAs were involved

Supply and command Ricky Make billions of sheets of paper, eventually demand for pens will go up.. right?

There were a lot of bad games for the 2600. ET because it was pushed hard became the poster, but there were a lot of other bad games at the time. Many were another variation of the theme with nothing else going for them once you have played one pac man clone you have played them all.

ET did get a bad rap because of the bugs and it really wasn't fun. However the idea itself was sound and if they had spent another year in development (which would have been too late for many reasons, see above and other discussion) it probably would have been a fun game everyone remembers as a classic for how good it was - instead of one everyone remembers it for the bugs.

So many bad games that they (Atari) buried approximately 700,000 cartidges in the desert: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_video_game_burial

There's a recent homebrew for the 2600 called "Burying ET" about this very thing. Amusing. https://florentdeloison.itch.io/burying-et

> However the idea itself was sound and if they had spent another year in development (which would have been too late for many reasons, see above and other discussion)

I don't think any games were in development for a year at that point in time. Probably another month, maybe two, would be within the realm of possibility, but not a whole year. Unless maybe it got shelved and then reactivated later.

That is itself one of the problems of the day.

One problem was also that the 2600, hardware-wise, had run its course. Some of the other contemporary consoles were a bit better, but most of them were well below the arcade games of the day.

Yes, there are some impressive things being made with the continuing efforts of hobbyists today, but under the resources and commercial pressures of the time, the 2600 wasn't going to produce a stream of new and exciting hits.

There's a demake of Super Mario for the 2600, but it's clearly blockier and clunkier than the day-1 NES launch title, and it took decades of hobbyist effort to get even there.

I wonder if Atari didn't really know how to deal with the idea of an upgrade. Most home goods don't require a sudden upgrade to play popular new content (colour TV was intentionally compatible with black-and-white sets, and even hi-fi had a long transition period where you could get new albums in LP/tape/8-track/CD), so even if the 5200 had not been awkward, it would have been difficult to get the right mix of manufacturing, new game development, and backporting to smoothly transition.

The 7800 would probably have competed very well with the NES if they had launched at the same time-- backwards compatibility would have offered a placeholder as the 7800-native library was built out-- just give people a voucher for a stack of free bargain-bin games in the box.

I think a lot of the modern criticism towards E.T. the game comes from AVGN who was often using it in his skits as a game that shall not be named. But when he finally reviewed the game part of the AVGN movie, he admits that the game isn't that bad for its time and that it's similar to Indiana Jones game which was awesome for the time it was released.

"E.T. is not green. I'm really surprised that this isn't a common complaint. We'll fix that as well."

ET isn't green in the movie. Why would this be a common complaint?

I think the complaint is that he is green in the game, where he should be brown.

I think I might know the "why" to the question, which is that I think they might have been worried that a small percentage of people would be using a black and white TV and brown might not be enough of a contrast.

The B&W switch on the 2600 sets a register that can be read at runtime allowing for color changes that better support black and white TVs. Howard Scott Warshaw famously had only 5 weeks to complete the entire game, so supporting that feature probably didn't make the cut.

NTSC color artifacts may be a factor too, but not sure. I know green and red aren't too happy next to each other. Making ET an actual brown shade may have gotten too close to that red-green conflict.

This reminds me of those bug reports that say "Button is green" and you're not sure if "Button is green" is the desired or undesired behavior.

As a game dev who's been learning ASM recently this was very fun to read through. Wish there was a compiled ROM I could try, but I guess I have to do it myself!

I'm not really into this space but he lists some bin files in the Downloads section. Is this not the compiled ROM you're seeking?

For what it's worth, I was able to simply rename the ET_Fixed_Final.bin file to ET_Fixed_Final.a26 (which might not even be necessary) and drop it into the ROM folder of my Atari 2600 emulator (running via https://knulli.org/ on my Anbernic RG40XXV). It booted up just fine.

Craziness. Strong work!

Related. Others?

Fixing E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial for the Atari 2600 (2013) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23199521 - May 2020 (11 comments)

Fixing E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial for the Atari 2600 (2013) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9668734 - June 2015 (20 comments)

Fixing E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial for the Atari 2600 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6994180 - Jan 2014 (12 comments)

Edit: Also related. Also others?

The making of E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, the “worst” video game - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21828725 - Dec 2019 (49 comments)

An anthropological dispatch from the landfill dig to unearth Atari’s E.T. (2014) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17870402 - Aug 2018 (2 comments)

The man who made 'the worst video game in history' - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11148093 - Feb 2016 (209 comments)

E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982) Atari 2600 Source Code - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7679503 - May 2014 (2 comments)

Long-Buried E.T. Cartridges Unearthed - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7654240 - April 2014 (1 comment)

E.T. cartridges found in infamous Atari landfill - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7652473 - April 2014 (46 comments)

Landfill search for 'E.T.' Atari video game is halted - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7444644 - March 2014 (6 comments)

Hacking E.T. for the Atari 2600 using a hex editor - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5502356 - April 2013 (1 comment)

Hacking E.T. for the Atari 2600 to make it better - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5470446 - March 2013 (1 comment)

What is considered to be the worst video game ever? This one is. - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=528256 - March 2009 (3 comments)

> With a few simple changes

For certain values of simple.

Now do Pac-Man.

Google for atari 2600 pacman 4k

There's a couple of really good versions of pac-man. My favourite is this one. It's an 8k game, unlike the original, but it's worth it for the sound.

https://forums.atariage.com/topic/229152-new-pacman-for-atar...

(2013)

Added above. Thanks!

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