Howard spent much of his time working for Atari, by his own admission, high as as a kite. His legacy as a programmer should be that he was a man dedicated to pushing the medium forward through conceptualizing then-unseen mechanics. The short development cycle was an incredibly risky and stupid gamble to take, and internally within Atari there was some degree of worry about the deadline.
In fairness, partial blame is due to Howard, who assured everyone that not only could he finish the game in time, but that it would be an incredibly ambitious game in its own right. To this end, Howard was flown out to pitch the game concept directly to Steven Spielberg himself, who was tuned in to the game industry to some degree. However, due to time limitations, these steps were skipped entirely, leaving us with… Well, the game we got, I suppose.
The first thing a player in would do with their new Atari game would be to read the accompanying instruction manual. In the case of E. More on that later. The manual opens with a cute introduction to the game written by E.
By holding it down, you sprint. By pressing it from within a pit, you begin to levitate your way out of it. The trick lies in finding out where the hotspots are, and being able to run to them without running into the baddies or inadvertently falling into a pit.
Much has been said about the pits in E. Why not instead of creating individual screens for every pit, allocate more screens to the overworld, and have all the phone pieces appear there? Assuming, of course, that you read the instruction manual. This gives you plenty of time to decide whether you want to escape left or right, and the opportunity to do so. Admittedly, this is not the most intuitive mechanic, and there are times where you will inevitably hold up for a moment too long and fall back down into a pit.
When all you have is an eight-way joystick and a single button, how complex can things possibly get? But Howard Scott Warshaw had a very forward-thinking design philosophy, and crammed as many of his ideas as he could into his game cartridges.
His aforementioned Raiders of the Lost Ark game went so far as to require the use of two controllers for a single player, with the second controller acting as an inventory select! The road to the end goal is far more direct and simple, making it a far more achievable one.
The image of E. The graphics for the other characters are passable as well, and the symbols that identify the context actions are quickly understandable. Speaking of, the forest is probably the single most frustrating screen in the game, more so than any of the pits. To actually be rescued, you have to be standing in another randomized spot on the forest screen, as the ship will pass you by if you happen to be standing outside of that spot. The problem is, the enemy AI is relentless in attacking you during this waiting period, and will do their best to chase you around and possibly drag you away from the landing zone.
You can combat them by finding the hotspot which sends them back to their bases on the bottom screen, but this is only a temporary reprieve, and it does cost precious energy to scare them off not to mention, requiring you to walk away from the landing zone. Oddly, the left difficulty switch on the console toggles one more condition for the ship landing: Whether or not Elliot is allowed to be on-screen when the ship touches down.
Neither of these processes take a particularly long time luckily, and so it almost takes a deliberate effort to have Elliot present in the forest at the moment the rescue ship arrives.
All that being said, the challenge and level of difficulty provided by the game is close enough to where it should be. The agent and the scientist, for much of a pain in the ass as they can be, definitely serve as a much-needed hazard for players to overcome. If anything, they could have been made to drain energy from E. In summation, E. In hindsight, the mechanic was half-baked, and could have potentially worked better by having tapping the button cycle through the list of available actions and holding the button to perform them.
At least it was more sensible than using two controllers at once, I guess. It should also be noted that despite its relative complexity for a game, there were certainly other games seeing release at the time which were moving game mechanics forward in far more meaningful ways. Still, Howard was on the right track to refining his formula for impressive Atari games.
You can be the judge of that for yourself. This would, in fact, earn it the not-too-shabby distinction of being one of the best-selling titles of all time.
In actuality, it was… Well, actually, it was pretty mixed as it turns out. There were certainly those who found fault in the game, most tending to criticize it for lack of difficulty, of all things. So, why and how the hell did Atari fill a landfill with E. Just under 2 million copies sold is a very respectable number.
The number of cartridges actually produced for E. Pac-Man on was as successful as it was because consumers were naive enough to expect that the port would be at least comparable to the arcade game they had already collectively dumped billions of quarters into, and because they theoretically knew what game they would be getting on their Atari.
But a movie tie-in should not have been presumed to be a guaranteed seller, like a home console port of an already-proven arcade game would more potentially be. In fairness, Atari was more or less forced to produce the number of cartridges they did, because selling any less than the whole 5 million would mean a massive loss for them. As successful as E. But they did, and so they paid the price for it. That price, by the way, happened to include having to buy back copies of their own game from retailers when they failed to sell; an added expense they were not used to or prepared for.
You see, with copies of E. To be totally honest, the burial aspect of E. But I for one would love to know exactly what drove them to stake all their futures on one game, and then proceed to give it far less attention and resources than an investment like that should warrant? The investment in E. His replacement, one James J. It was Atari who had most to do with the industry boom as well as with its subsequent crash in the states.
The short-sightedness and incompetence in handling E. Perhaps most damningly, despite their numerous innovations in the games market and their pioneering approach, their early success made them too self-confident to continue innovating. By using this website, you agree with the storing of cookies in your computer unless you disable them in your Internet browser settings.
All games Advanced Search. The Extra-Terrestrial - Atari English Czech. Atari joystick:. Joystick control:. Player Help :. This Atari game is emulated by JavaScript only. Other platforms:. Game info:.
Game title:. Atari Author released :. Atari, Inc. Howard Scott Warshaw, Jerome Domurat. Game manual:. File size:. Game size:. Recommended emulator:. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:. For fans and collectors:. Find this game on video server YouTube. Buy original game or Atari console on Amazon.
Videogame Console:. Recommended Game Controllers:. You can control this game easily by using the keyboard of your PC see the table next to the game. Available online emulators:. The Extra-Terrestrial are summarized in the following table:.
USB gamepad. Without ads. Java applet. Similar games:. Secret Quest.
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