I don’t remember E.T. making a big impression on my life in 1982. I never saw the movie back then, and a couple of years ago watched half of it before falling asleep in front of the telly. I guess you had to be there when it was first released?
Ireland in the 1980s was a country in recession. I certainly knew nobody with a 2600 console so we were spared the abomination that was the official game of the movie. While we had some sort of Pong clone in the early ’80s we moved away to “proper” computers like the Speccy and C64 after that.
Nonetheless, it was an important game. It helped bring about the collapse of Atari and the video game market in the US!
99% Invisible just featured an episode by podcast Sidedoor about E.T. The Videogame and it’s enthralling. You can hear all about how bad it was, the story of it’s development from game developer Howard Scott Warshaw, and finally to his reaction that people are still obsessed with the game all these years later.