E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial Review

Howard Scott Warshaw takes the license in late July and a deadline that leaves just over five weeks to write an original game in assembly for a machine with a few kilobytes to spend. What he builds is not a maze or a shooter, which is what everyone else was shipping that year, but an open search: wander six screens, hunt three phone pieces, dodge a scientist and an agent, call the ship.

As a design idea for 1982 that is ahead of the room, and the technical feat of getting it onto a cartridge in that window is the reason one axis here sits well above the rest. As a thing to hold, it collapses on a single detail. The screens are full of wells, the wells are hard to read against the background and easy to walk into, and levitating out of one drops you straight back in as often as not, so play becomes a loop of falling and climbing that the game never explains.

Nothing on the cartridge teaches the rules; the manual is doing work the design should have done. The sprite work is clear and the screens are distinct, which is more credit than the reputation allows. The commercial story is the famous half, with a landfill in New Mexico that turned out to hold exactly what people said it held. The design failure is smaller and sadder: one illegible hazard, repeated everywhere, with no time left to fix it.