Of course they put E.T. in New Mexico

The news that the landfill of Atari’s E.T. games is going to be excavated swept through the internet. This makes me doubly excited that I still have my copy and I’m considering using it an an anchor point for a “play bad games” day in my intro game design course in the fall. Particularly having also found this really cool review of the games flaws and fixes for them. It starts from the position that the game is actually fairly good, and even groundbreaking, except for a few flaws or misunderstandings about the game (such as, that it is an easy kids game to pick up, as compared to a highly challenging quest-based game) that need to be addressed. Plus you get a nice detailed explanation of why E.T. keeps falling in the darn wells all the time, and an inside look at the problem of modifying space-restricted code (there is lots of talk of finding 12 bytes here and 9 bytes there to sneak in the desired changes).