A Steven Spielberg Classic Gave Rise To The Worst Video Game In History

As the once-reliable superhero genre has loosened its iron grip on moviegoers, Hollywood is turning to video games as a source for blockbuster success, and so far it appears to be working. Sure, we've had historic duds such as the biggest bomb of 2024, "Borderlands," but in the wake of "Minecraft" claiming two of the biggest box office weekends of 2025 and "The Super Mario Bros. Movie" becoming one of the 20 biggest films ever, video games look to be the next IP ripe for plundering.

For a long time, of course, things mostly worked the other way: Hollywood would provide the IP and video game developers would do their best with the license. But for the most part, it seemed as though adapting successful films into video games was tough business. There have been so many awful games based on successful movies that fans mostly just accepted that such games were going to be awful.

But there is one game that remains truly infamous for being such an enormous blunder that you could make a decent argument for it constituting patient zero of the bad video game epidemic that followed. That game is "E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial" for the Atari 2600 console.

"E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial" has become infamous since its 1982 debut, but is that reputation deserved? Well, it's complicated. The game designer responsible for "E.T.," Howard Scott Warshaw, spoke to NPR about his adaptation, explaining that a rushed development was partly to blame for the game's ignominious reputation. Warshaw actually worked on the very first video game adaptation of a movie, "Raiders of the Lost Ark," which Spielberg evidently liked and, according to Warshaw, felt was "like watching a movie" itself. As such, it seems the director personally requested Warshaw make a video game adaptation of his next film, "E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial."

The only problem was that it took some time for Atari and Spielberg to hammer out the legal side of things. "E.T." the movie debuted in theaters on June 11, 1982, and was immediately embraced, becoming an instant Spielbergian classic that today maintains a near-perfect Rotten Tomatoes score. But it took until the end of July that year for Spielberg and Atari to reach an agreement. After this, the Atari CEO contacted Warshaw and tasked him with making the game in just five weeks so that the company could release it in time for the Christmas holidays. For whatever reason, the ambitious young developer agreed. "I don't know exactly what I was full of at the time," Warshaw told NPR. "But whatever it was, I was overflowing with it, and I believed I could pull it off. I mean, the hubris of it!"

Warshaw designed the game around a plot point in the movie wherein the titular alien gathered parts to build a communicator that would allow him to "phone home." According to the developer, Spielberg appeared underwhelmed when he first saw a build of the game, reacting with a glib, "Couldn't you just do something like Pac-Man?" While those words clearly wounded Warshaw, it turned out that Spielberg was right to suggest a different approach, as "E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial" turned out to be not just a flop but the gold standard of terrible movie video games.

Wonder is at the core of a good Steven Spielberg movie, and "E.T." is a prime example, perfectly capturing the unrestrained wonder that we're capable of feeling as children, and encapsulating it in a heartfelt story that is as technically impressive as it is touching. The video game, however, not only failed to match the wonder of the movie, it quickly became known as the worst video game ever made (a reputation it holds to this day) and is one of the biggest commercial failures in video game history. It didn't help that Atari fell on hard times right around the time "E.T." debuted, which means a narrative formed that the game single-handedly brought the video game industry to its knees. That is, of course, not accurate, but it's far from the only spurious element at play in the game's troubled legacy. Following its release, an urban legend sprang up that Atari buried all their unsold "E.T." cartridges in a landfill. This turned out to be partly true, when in 2014 investigators found the buried cartridges, though only some of the almost 800,000 games were "E.T." and it turned out that Atari was just burying unused stock after the closure of its Texas manufacturing plant.

Still, there's no doubt the "E.T." game would have benefitted from following Spielberg's "Pac Man" emulation idea. The adaptation is not remembered fondly, and it's not too hard to see why. Part of the problem was the way in which the game used a "wraparound" level design that saw users, playing as the titular extra-terrestrial, start on one screen before traveling through several others only to wind up back where they began. The levels were also dotted with little pits into which E.T. could, and very often did, plummet. All of which is frustrating, but according to Warshaw, that was at least partly the plan. "There's a difference between frustration and disorientation," he told NPR. "Video games are all about frustration. It's okay to frustrate a user. In fact, it's important to frustrate a user. But you don't want to disorient the user."

Sadly, that's exactly what "E.T." did. Critics weren't too impressed, but as Gamehistory points out, the game's notorious reputation isn't entirely indicative of its actual quality or the tenor of the contemporaneous reviews. The site actually gathered several reviews from the time period and found that critics were lukewarm at worst, and neutral at best. Still, Softline readers voted the game the second-worst Atari program of 1983 and modern critics have been much harsher on the "E.T." leading it to become known as the worst video game adaptation ever — though the legendarily bad "Demolition Man" video game or the mess that was the "Gilligan's Island" video game surely have strong claims to that unenviable title.