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

ET was green in the game, I'm guessing, because Howard wrote it (completed it!) before the movie was released. The whole thing was on a punishing deadline, which is why it may seem rough and strange to lots of folks. Howard was tremendously proud of finishing a whole Atari 2600 game in just a few weeks; not a single other Atari programmer was willing to take on the challenge. In fact, Howard had to do it against management's wishes.

If you want to compare the original and the 'fixed' version, here they are running in the browser:

Original: https://archive.org/stream/atari_2600_e.t._-_the_extra-terre...

Fixed: http://jamesfriend.com.au/et2600/

Also recommended is "Racing the Beam" from MIT Press [1]. It is a terrific tour of Atari 2600 software development by examining several different games, including another Howard Scott Warshaw cart, Yar's Revenge.

[1] http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/racing-beam

Stuff like this is personally really cool, and is one of the reasons I learned to program in the first place/ still play with programming.

If you manage to complete it send it to angry video game nerd. His faith will be restored :)

I love reading reverse engineering and ancient game modding stories because it's like an extreme form of inheriting a messy, undocumented codebase.

This is insane in a good way :)

Makes me proud to be a nerd. :)

Nice job. It's fun to seem some creative hacking. You could flame bait the title by renaming it to "Why I stopped using E.T. and started using E.T." :-)

Did anyone have difficulty recognising 'E.T.' in any of the screenshots, particularly the first one? Or was it just me?

Well, it still sucks.