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

121 pointsendtwist20 comments

I loved E.T. when I was a kid and actually managed to finish it. I never got the hate. My guess is that I only saw the movie much later and so had absolutely no expectation whatsoever.

To me, it was just another Atari 2600 game. In fact, after racking my brain for hours on games like Swordquest[1], and almost injuring myself and destroying my controllers playing Decathlon[2], E.T. was nothing. Recognizable characters! A quest that made sense! Challenging controls, not inhuman controls!

After seeing Atari: Game Over [3] I now think this game is significant, not for its reputation but for the story behind it. It is a great case study.

All my admiration to Howard Scott Warshaw[4] for his career as a game developer, what he went through after the E.T. debacle, and finding his way out in the aftermath.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swordquest [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Activision_Decathlon [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MT_msVoRAg [4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_Scott_Warshaw

I loved E.T. but just because it was a mysterious game, and as a kid this increased my interest. Also, in E.T. you could spend a lot of time playing the game while in any other game you loose after certain level of difficulty.

Only after I got access to Internet I discovered why the game was so mysterious. Indeed it was boring.

Here here! My brothers and I played this quite a bit and I never understood the hate. I don't recall all the details about the game play other than that you had to go around finding little dots that corresponded to Reese's Pieces and that it wasn't too hard to beat the game (which is a good thing for a kid who's not a serious gamer).

I think it's hard for people who came late to the Atari 2600 to understand the hate, but for those whose introduction to the 2600 was games like Adventure and Missle Command, it was very much a letdown. I remember it very clearly. My friends and I gave it a chance but after about a day or so began ridiculing it mercilessly.

I actually thought the game was terrible as a kid. You were constantly falling into pit. I had so many better games for my 2600 that I couldn't justify spending time playing a game I thought was sub par in comparison to the others I owned.

Man. I've been staring at my screen for a few hours trying to understand some modern webrtc shenanigans. Then I read these crazy fools (with love!) disassembling and reverse engineering like this and it makes me just feel like an idiot.

Kudos guys. This is the weirdest labor of love, but you're awesome.

don't sell yourself short. I used to crack and patch 6502 and i have messed around with webrtc. IMHO they can be equally maddening.

dis-assembling without source code can turn you into a pretty good debugger though.

disassembling on old systems like this, while still a feat, is not as hard as people often think I find, because the assembly practically is the source code

This is awesome. But what's this I see?

    [Y] Hacker News  new | threads | comments ...
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    2. ^ Autopsy: Lessons From Failed Startups ...
         356 points ...
    3. ^ Fixing E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial for the Atari 2600...
         32 points ...

You guys make me so, so sad, some days. :(

It's interesting that still there's no decent 6502 disassembler for 2600 code. You'd think it'd be a lot easier to write one in Python than it was in 6502 assembler for your Commodore 64.

13 vs 5 hours ago

> It's interesting that still there's no decent 6502 disassembler for 2600 code.

Have you tried Stella and DiStella? 2600 oriented 6502 emulator, debugger, disassembler etc.

No! I only know Stella as an emulator; didn't realize it also had a useful disassembler.

It has been posted a few times. Most popular: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6994180 (138 points, 521 days ago, 12 comments) (And you have to multiply the points by x1.5 or x2.0 to compensate the increase of users.)

> why it is hated then and today?

because it is a grinding game that only managed to exist today because of online iterations.

it is single player World of warcraft.

As a proud owner of this game since my grandmother shelled out god knows how much for what was bound to be the hottest video game for christmas 1982, it's not the grind. Seriously, since when did grinding ever doom a video game? It's that it's completely random. The map is randomly generated, and whenever you transition between screens, there's a very real chance that you will immediately fall down a well, and thus lose power, and thus become that much closer to death. On levels higher than the first (which is relatively easy, if not long.) The speed and frequency of the scientist and FBI agent carrying you back to town makes it unplayable. Seriously. It's unplayable. I thought so when I was 5, and I still thought so when I was 35.

Best title screen for the 2600 bar none.

going from one screen to another over and over to get candy = grinding

I don't understand your comment on multiple levels. First, I didn't say there wasn't grinding, my points were: 1) The mechanics of the game wasn't the problem, it was the implementation of them. 2) Grinding has never doomed a game. It may be annoying, but many popular games -- including ALL RPGs -- feature grinding at their core.

Second, with respect to E.T., if you're spending your time eating Reese's Pieces, you're doing it wrong. The candy has nothing to do with completing the game. Furthermore, the game can be completed without going out of your way to collect these at all.

Third, eating RPs isn't not grinding. Grinding is when the game effectively pauses because the player can't advance past some point because the player is underpowered for the new enemies, and overpowered when compared to the old enemies. It's a balance issue, that gets passed off as "fun". See Pokemon. See Final Fantasy. See every RPG ever made.

Repetitive game mechanics doesn't doom games. Every party based RPG since Bard's Tale has features the same Fight-Fight-Fight-Parry-Parry-Parry verb. 90% of all attack turns in these games comes down to that same attack plan. Hell, these games even configure their controls so that this is accomplished by just hitting the default button six times in a row. And yet, these games are beloved by millions.

Some of those defects are hilarious - "Ship Shouldn't Crush Elliott" stands out in particular :)

This is relly cool. In a way I feel like you're changing part of my past for the better. Its weird.

Yes, they remind me of the people behind the dolphin emulator. They are working to make old games better than they've been on the original console. For example they added support

- to have 60fps in games that had only 30fps on the console,

- to load custom high definition textures,

- to play games at higher resolutions (1080p and beyond vs 720p) and

- to have stereoscopy in games.

And that without access to source code, mind you! Their work is amazing.

Source and recommended read: https://dolphin-emu.org/blog/series

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