Video games

[moonwise]

When I was a kid, I had an Atari. I didn't have too many games for it, but my parents would get me a new game as a gift from time to time. It seems that they had a knack for picking some winners. Not only did I have a copy of E. T., which is widely considered one of the worst and most disastrous games ever made, but I also had a copy of Journey Escape, which was featured in this Mental Floss list of the 10 Most Bizarre Games Ever Made. As I had no idea who the band Journey was at the time I got the cart, and the gameplay was completely mystifying, this was not one of my favorites.

All I can say is that the games in question must have been on sale.

Comments

[pantswarrior]

I never saw why E.T. got such a bad rap - there were other games for the Atari that made just as little sense. At least in E.T. I had some idea what I was supposed to be doing. With the Superman game, I was just flying through screen after screen at random without a clue if I was supposed to be doing something.

Of course, almost all our Atari games were bought used and had no booklet or anything... maybe with a booklet, that game made sense, but E.T. still didn't.

[arafel.livejournal.com]

The gameplay for E.T. wasN't bad for an Atari game - of the two games I mention, Journey Escape was definitely worse - but it seems that the excessive hype doomed it to failure.

I could never figure out what the goal was in Pitfall. It seemed that you just ran out of time after a while.

[lady-ganesh.livejournal.com]

I think a lot of the E.T. phenomenon was the huge, huge number of games they thought they were going to sell. IIRC, it would've had to outsell the top Atari game threefold...and it sucked.

[arafel.livejournal.com]

Agreed - so many copies were produced that Atari more or less set themselves up to fail. The game would have had to be better than Super Mario Brothers to break even, and it wasn't.