Basically Atari, the then market leader, ended themselves with the ET video game, and buried the cartridges in the desert.
Nintendo revived the US console market by advertising the Famicom as a "entertainment system" (NES), complete with a robot buddy, just to appear to not be a games console:
View attachment 620861
But they had a strict 5 games per year per company limit on NES games. Publishers worked around that by starting shell companies and sub-labels. Konami for example launched "Ultra Games" in the USA, which for example published the first Metal Gear. In Europe it was Palcom Software.
To the shock of no one.
We had one of those shit ET games when I was a kid. It really showed how fast it was developed. Total garbage.
Still beat it!

From the elders who were there, was it just bad level design? I know it was a rush job by one developer and it wasn’t received well. But not sure what about it wasn’t fun, I guess.My only memory of the ET game was I was at a house as a kid and the kid who lived there asks if I want to play an Atari game, so I look through the small pile of games and say "how about ET?" and he responded "that game is stupid, pick another one". I think he eventually played it to show me how dumb it was and he was right - he fell into a pit as ET then it took forever to get out and he turned off the game lol


With all the marathon hate, this one flew under the radar
With all the marathon hate, this one flew under the radar
5 hour interview.