The “Other E.T. Games” Roundup

If you’re up on your “bad games” history, you’re likely already familiar with the reputation of E.T. the Extraterrestrial on the Atari 2600, and its contendership as one of the supposed worst games of all time. If you’ve additionally hung around this particular website for a while, you might also know that said game was the subject of our very first article, and that I personally don’t consider it to be all that bad a cartridge on its own. So, rather than recapping that tired old story about the industry crash and “Atari Shock” and whatnot, let’s just assume we’ve already got those bases covered?

It’s an incredible feat that the E.T. film franchise has remained sequel-free for nearly 38 years running, considering Hollywood’s penchant for follow-ups and rehashes. But while movie producers have thus far demonstrated restraint, the same could not be said of video game industry executives. Despite the notoriety surrounding that original Atari cartridge – with its [undue] reputation for nearly killing the whole format – developers and publishers just couldn’t help themselves but to try and milk E.T.’s grotesque teet for his sweet name recognition. Needless to say, none of those attempts have been particularly successful. But their existence does bring about a number of questions: Were the game’s developers all aware of the low bar they had to surpass? What other subjects and genres could these subsequent releases center around? And is it possible that somehow, within this small catalogue, there exists a game worse than the supposed “worst ever?”

In this round-up, I’ll be playing every E.T. title I can get my grubby little glowing fingers on, and determining which of them rate better or worse than the original 1982 release. The parameters I’m setting are that the games in question have to have been sold for money at some point  — or at the very least, intended to be. This gives me lee-way to cover a couple odd prototype titles, as well as some unlicensed releases that nonetheless attempted to profit off of the lucrative little alien. So, without further ado, let’s go and phone this one home.

E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial for TI-99/4A (Texas Instruments, 1982)

We get to start this chronological list** off on a fairly typical note: E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial for Texas Instruments’ TI-99/4A takes the property in the direction of a straight up Frogger clone. You’ll help E.T. cross a busy road and a river rapid in order to hitch a seat in Elliot’s bike basket — three times in a row, no less. From here, E.T. is able to make it back to his rescue ship, and the whole process starts over again. As far as Frogger clones for older computers go, I reckon it’s decent enough? It does pick some rather strange iconography for the floating platforms in the river zone – having you hope across frogs, dogs, and abstract shapes – but that’s not so much a complaint as it is a funny little quirk. What’s more fascinating about this cartridge / cassette is the debate as to whether or not it was even released.

The ROM file floating around online certainly seems to represent a fully completed game, but there’s no physical evidence of it having actually made it to retail. Research may lead one to discover a completely unverifiable story surrounding the game, as described on the “TI-99/4A Videogame House” webpage: According to supposed testimony by a programmer Patrick King, no less than Steven Spielberg himself killed the game’s release, after visiting a California games laboratory and seeing this game played alongside the 2600 cartridge. Somehow, Spielberg determined that “the line of TI-99/4A games should NOT be better looking and more interesting that the market leader 2600 version,” ordered it be cancelled on the spot, and authorized the refund of a $3 million license fee to TI for their trouble. Let’s just say I have my doubts as to the veracity of this tall tale, and would wager on a there being a far more mundane reason for its cancellation.

** At least, I’m making my best attempt at a chronologically-sorted list here, given that not every game on the list has detailed release date information. Cut me some slack if a few things turn out to be of order here?

E.T. in His Adventures at Sea for TI-99/4A (Texas Instruments / Looking Glass, 1982)

Astoundingly, Texas Instrument’s own homegrown E.T. game wasn’t the only one planned and canned for the TI-99/4A. In fact, there were at least three more being developed concurrently with one another, by a contracted studio operating under the banner of ‘Looking Glass Software’ (no relation to the System Shock / Thief developers). Unlike TI’s own bit of arcade apery, the Looking Glass trilogy was set to take a more “edutainment” slant, with gameplay intended to teach some lessons in geography to players. The games in this range were intended to follow the titling structure of ‘E.T. in His Adventures at ___’ — where the blank would be filled in as either ‘Land,’ ‘Air,’ or ‘Sea.’ Of these planned modules, only E.T. in His Adventures at Sea currently exists in a playable format. This prototype seems to come courtesy of Looking Glass programmer Hank Mishkoff; who held onto some of the company’s work disks for over a decade, and later provided them to TI-99/4A enthusiast / preservationist Charles Good.^[1]

As for the game itself: It seems to entail E.T. and Elliot going on some sort of sea-faring, continent-spanning adventure; where trivia questions await them at their every destination. In navigating from port to port, you must avoid hazards including errant thunderbolts, traveling tornados, and mobilized whirlpools — all increasing in number as the game proceeds, to the point where they actually slow the TI-99’s performance to an absolute crawl. I’m assuming that some sort of optimization pass was still pending prior to the game ultimately getting the ax? In any event, the answers to the trivia questions over the course of the game ultimately serve as hints to a final question, where you’re made to figure out your final destination from a field of multiple choices. Pick the right answer, and proceed to a minigame where you steer your vessel to E.T.’s mothership — serving as the proverbial “carrot at the end of the stick” to motivate younger players through the educational portion.

I reckon the balance struck here between the educational and entertainment portions of the game is pretty fair, and that E.T. in His Adventures at Sea might’ve made for a fondly-remembered bit of edutainment had children been able to play it. I also find the idea of an alternate universe for E.T. – where Elliot apparently captains a boat instead of a bicycle – quite amusing. All said and done, I’m glad I was able to experience this strange little curio for myself, and I’m happy to take up the duty of informing all y’all of its existence.

E.T. Phone Home! for Atari 400/800 (Atari, 1983)

We finally proceed to a game which actually managed to make it to shelves! E.T. Phone Home! feels something like an extrapolation on Howard Scott Warshaw’s original concept for Atari; seeing players navigate a self-contained slice of suburbia and forest, in search of randomly-scattered pieces to E.T.’s communicator. All the while, you’ll be dodging the authorities and keeping a close eye on the extraterrestrial’s energy level, which ticks slowly down toward a game-ending “hibernation” should it be depleted. The game also serves to test your memorization skills some, as bringing up the screen which reminds you of your still-missing components is explained as a “telepathic link” between you and your alien pal, and rapidly drains your shared energy. With difficulty settings affecting the number and diversity of parts you’ll be needing to collect, there’s a fair bit of challenge in store for those in search of it. As a change of pace here, you’ll begin by playing as Elliot, and switch to E.T. only after collecting the necessary communicator components. From there, it’s a race to the clearing in the forest, where your mothership awaits.

Turns out I don’t have much negative to say about this one: I think the whole game is pretty neat, actually! It’s got some appealing graphics, a design concept which effectively gamifies the plot of the film, and comes packed with some fair replay value. Sometimes the luck when it comes to where the communicator parts appear can be stacked pretty high against you, and the agents chasing you to steal away said parts can sometimes feel inescapable, but a round of gameplay is succinct enough (5-6 minutes?) that you won’t feel like you’ve burned too much time on a doomed run. I might recommend playing it with your volume turned down low, though; as the sound effects – including a bit of synthesized speech wherein E.T. declares his intent to “phone home” (????) – can certainly be a bit rough on the ears.

E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial for Commodore VIC-20 (H. Jans, 1983)

Another computer game bearing the generic “E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial” title. This time around though, it plays out as something like a proto-“endless runner” for Commodore’s VIC-20, as developed by a seeming one-time developer ‘H. Jans.’ At this current juncture, absolutely no information on the game exists beyond the ROM file and program credits, pointing to an unspecifiable 1983 release. Given the period from whence it supposedly came, I can imagine the game having been sold as some mail-order novelty, or distributed as part of larger cassette compilations of independently-developed programs. Sadly, we may never know for certain, as the creator’s name was never attached to any other VIC-20 titles.

Control E.T. as he hops over lasers and used syringes (?) while picking up a trail of Reese’s Pieces. Be rewarded by intermittent flashes of his goofy face drawn in red against a yellow backdrop. Pretty standard perpetually-scrolling fare, all said and done. The jump timing isn’t particularly lenient, and the gameplay loop gets quickly tiresome, but I’m not exactly inspired to crap all over the poor cassette for just that. The stand-out feature here is most certainly the two-tone portrait of our favorite alien pal, which will sear itself into your retinas with its flashing across the screen. The rendering also makes it seem as if his head’s been twisted around his neck as the result of a cartoony wind-up punch, or possession by Pazuzu. Must make swallowing those little candies hell on the poor guy’s throat.

E.T. for ZX Spectrum (Macronics / Nigel Stuart, 1983)

As another piece of unlicensed software by a one-man operation, the simply titled E.T. on ZX Spectrum rates as another fairly amateur effort. Past a particularly hideous depiction of the extra-terrestrial on the title screen, you’ll find gameplay divided across four selectable “phases”; consisting of two variations on a maze game, an open screen obstacle course, and a section where you control a spaceship through asteroids. All four phases are presented with small, simple graphics, and controlled by number keys 5 through 8 (or 1 and 0 in the case of the spaceship minigame) on the keyboard — with no support for joysticks included. Despite some awkward control, you’ll find that three of the four phases can easily be cleared in under 30 seconds, with only the second maze game (in which you have to clear a pre-hidden path through a screen full of trees) taking roughly two minutes to safely complete. All said and done, I don’t score this tape very highly, and would slot it well below the 2600 release.

What’s more interesting again are the circumstances behind the program’s retail releases, of which there were apparently several. First, it was apparently sold as a standalone cassette under the Macronics Systems label in 1983, before making its way onto a two-game compilation titled Cassette S3 (alongside a second game from the same developer called Seekey) that same year. Between 1984 and 1985, Sinclair Research’s distributor in Spain (Investronica S.A.) began selling a Spanish-language translated version of the E.T. game [among a range of other localized titles], before eventually tossing it into their own five-game compilation cassette simply called Pack 2. At the time of this writing though, only Investronica’s standalone version of the game is preserved. And so, if you’re looking to play this unofficial E.T. game as most likely developed by a teenaged British boy, the only way to do so is by playing a translated version redistributed by the hardware manufacturer’s Spanish business partner. I’m just a bit tickled by how convoluted this all wound up, is all.

E.T.X. the Extra-Terrestrial Xargon for ZX Spectrum (Abbex Electronics / David M. Webb, 1983)

Bit of a cheat this one, as it’s technically not a game about Spielberg’s specific extra-terrestrial. Rather, E.T.X. the Extra-Terrestrial Xargon serves as a bootleg conversion of the officially licensed 2600 title, starring the loveable ‘Xargon’ as our stand-in extra-terrestrial. With the game’s cassette inlay describing itself as “A Spectrum Classic,” and boasting a three month development period behind this “finest program on the market,” it’s clear to tell that publisher Abbex Electronics were fairly shameless in their promotion of copycat software. Developer David M. Webb had even previously contributed an equally shameless Pac-Man clone to the label by the name of ‘Spookyman,’ which you just can’t help but chuckle at. Whatever helped keep the lawyers off the scent, I suppose.

If you’re still getting over the shock of hearing that someone bothered to convert the supposedly reviled Atari cartridge for home computer format, you may further be surprised to hear that it actually improves on the established template in a few regards! For one thing, navigating out of pits is made easier by allowing you more room to reposition yourself back on the surface. It also feels as if you’re given more screen real estate to navigate within, though the potential to fall immediately into pits on crossing screens is still very common and fairly aggravating. Still, if you’re the sort to appreciate the eccentricities of the original Atari title (like I am), you may well get something out of nabbing the tape image off World of Spectrum and giving it a go. Oh, and it even features totally unnecessary bits of synthesized speech, including our adorable little Xargon exclaiming “OUCH” (????) every time he crash lands at the bottom of a hole. It may well be worth playing for that feature alone.

Go Go Home Monster for Atari 2600 (Home Vision / Gem International, 1983)

Yes, I realize I’m cheating again here with another game that doesn’t really star E.T.. Only this time around, the association is actually far more tenuous than the last, as E.T.’s entire involvement with the Atari 2600 title in question amounts to a bootleg depiction on some regions’ versions of the cartridge art!

UFI und sein gefährlicher Einsatz German cartridge art.

So, first release first: Judging from a ‘Home Vision’ logo that appears on every version of the game’s start screen, we can surmise them to be the original Belgian publishers of what they had titled Go Go Home Monster. From here, the trajectory likely lead to an “official” (?) German market re-release, now titled Alien’s Return and distributed by an ITT Family Games. It’s at this point that the game became a bootleg staple, and where it becomes impossible to track which versions of the game originate from who, where, and when. My best guess? At some point after (or maybe even before!) the ITT Family Games release, the game had been bootlegged for the German market under the new title of UFI und sein gefährlicher Einsatz, with the now-infamous box and cartridge art featuring E.T. and his “E.T go COME” banner. This art became the basis for at least four more subsequent bootleg releases across Germany, Taiwan, and North America; each with different titles including ‘E.T Go Home,’ ‘Col ‘N’,’ and ‘Das Raumschiff.’ The only commonalities at this point become the use of cartridge art featuring E.T., and the fact that the game program itself is still identical.

Now, as for the actual gameplay at the core of all this? It’s fine. Fairly standard stuff, where you navigate a single-screen maze to find the parts of your crash-landed ship. You make them appear on the map by stepping into rooms which can either activate the parts or spawn in enemies to pursue you, based on random chance. Collect the four parts in the proper order, and the stage will reset — having awarded you a sum of bonus points for your effort. Not quite as ambitious or entertaining as Howard Scott Warshaw’s effort for the same console, by my estimation.  But hey: Bootleggers must’ve seen something special in it, for how many different versions of it have ended up circulating!

E.T. Comes Back for Apple II (Alliance Software, 1984)

Of the unlicensed games we’ve looked at thus far, we haven’t really seen one go way off the rails as of yet. Why, you can almost imagine the likes of the VIC-20 and Spectrum releases being tweaked slightly, and getting sworn in as official E.T. titles! But where’s the fun in playing things safe? What I’m sure we’ve all been waiting to see is an unofficial E.T. game unafraid to go buck wild. Enter the Apple II, and Alliance Software’s graphic adventure E.T. Comes Back: Starring not just the titular extra-terrestrial, but some members of the Peanuts gang to boot. Good grief, y’all.

As graphic adventures go, E.T. Comes Back isn’t particularly ambitious: The game world consists entirely of a two-story house and surrounding yard, with only a small handful of items to grab and simple puzzles to solve. About the most difficult steps to figure out are getting out of the game’s starting room – which requires you to type “BREAK DOOR” in order to proceed – and figuring out which day of the week January 1st of 2001 would land on (which would’ve been a Monday, by the way). You’ll also have to learn to make a quick bee-line for the kitchen and grab a candy bar, in order to not have your game abruptly ended by an irritable sister Lucy Gertie. At this point, you may be wondering where E.T. actually appears in the game? Well, if you grab a geranium off a windowsill, and drop it off by the outdoor shed, it’s there where our alien friend makes his brief appearance. You then pick him up as if he’s just another item, before hopping in your brother’s car and driving off into the end of the game. This is seriously where the adventure comes to an end, with your driving interrupted by a sudden epilogue informing you that that you’ve sent E.T. back home. I reckon he must’ve gotten off at the nearest bus stop or something.

Given its flagrantly infringing nature and shockingly short length, it’s hard to believe that this was a product actually sold for money in any capacity. The fact that it required cracking is the clue that it was, though — likely as a mail-order item advertised in the back of some less reputable Apple magazines. Luckily, those same crackers at /*HI-ReS<>HIJACKERS*\ were also kind enough to include an accompanying walkthrough for the game; wherein they chide the developers for using Applesoft BASIC as their development tool, use “homosexual” as an insult, and make an incredibly distasteful joke about assaulting a pre-adolescent girl. Rad. In any event, E.T. Comes Back serves as the bookend to this era of home computer cash-ins — as well as any further official releases, for nearly the next 20 years. What a note to go out on.

Intermission

E.T. and the Search for Dragora, prototype PlayStation 2 screenshots.

In May of 2000, publisher NewKidCo picked up the video game rights to E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, in advance of the film’s upcoming 20th anniversary and theatrical re-release.^[2] With their already being in the business of publishing titles centered around a number of children’s programs – including Tom and Jerry, Sesame Street, and Dragon Tales – E.T. was a natural fit for their collection of licenses. They quickly set about commissioning games for damn near every platform under the sun; including both then-current fifth gen and upcoming sixth-gen consoles, as well as targeting the Game Boy Color and Advance. Of a planned nine titles though, only five would ultimately come to fruition. As it turns out, NewKidCo had bitten off a bit more than they could chew, and couldn’t afford to fund completion for the remaining four past a certain point.

By testimony of “The Pickford Bros” – a pair of brothers (John and Ste) both working as game developers – their studio Zed Two had been hired by NewKidCo to develop E.T. and the Cosmic Garden for PlayStation 2 and Game Boy Color, as well as ‘E.T. and the Search for Dragora’ across the sixth-gen consoles. Of those projects, they managed to finish the GBC version of Cosmic Garden (reviewed below), and apparently saw Search for Dragora nearly through to completion. It was at that point where NewKidCo “claimed they ran out of money and stopped paying,” while they still owed a whopping one million dollars to their contracted studio.^[3] Zed Two couldn’t afford to take the publisher to court, and subsequently couldn’t afford to continue operating as an independent company; leading to their acquisition by a company tied to the Tiger Gizmondo (!), and their ultimately shutting down in 2004.

If it’s of any consolation or serves as any sort of justice: NewKidCo followed Zed Two in closure shortly thereafter, come 2005. Before doing so, they had sold the E.T. games license off to Ubisoft (then ‘Ubi Soft’) earlier in 2002,** so that they could rush at least a couple of PC games out to capitalize on the 20th anniversary craze. Bear that turnaround time in mind when we get to those Ubi-published games, and how much money was potentially left on the table by NewKidCo failing to prioritize the games slated for the GameCube / PS2 / Xbox.

** You’ll find a copyright noting that the Ubisoft games are “Under license by NewKidCo Ltd.” on the games’ jewel cases, so I might not be precisely accurate in my statement here that NewKidCo “sold” the license to the larger publisher. The fact that they were also able to re-release Interplanetary Mission for Windows might also point to some sort of other cross-company, platform-dependent arrangement too nuanced to get into within the scope of this article.

E.T.: Digital Companion for Game Boy Color (NewKidCo / Powerhead Games, 2001)

NewKidCo began E.T.’s anniversary festivities a year early, beginning with their releasing one of those awful “digital organizer” / fake operating systems on Game Boy Color (along the lines of Austin Powers: Oh, Behave! and Welcome to My Underground Lair!). Do you reckon anyone ever legitimately used these cartridges for their pseudo-PDA functionalities?

Powerhead Games’ E.T.: Digital Companion – serving as the studio’s debut release – features a small assortment of additional minigames in order to justify its place on a handheld console. This includes a ‘Word Scramble’ with confusing letter movement, a pair-matching game with microscopic icons, one of those ‘Tile Puzzle’ games which no one actually enjoys, an E.T.-themed ‘Trivia Quiz,’ and a side-scrolling ‘Bicycle Race’ which suffers from the GBC lacking the horizontal resolution needed to see more than two virtual feet in front of you. As a last-ditch effort at driving daily engagement with the game, there’s also an included virtual pet named ‘Flopglopple,’ who you’re expected to raise like a low-rent Tamagotchi. Why not just have players care for an adoptable E.T.-type alien, where you can feed them Reeses Pieces by the pound and pour gallons of Coca-Cola down their elongated throats? I like to imagine that the aliens from Mac & Me are probably a similar species to E.T.’s, and that the little guys might like some soda pop to wash down those salty candies.

Look, there’s just no getting around the fact that game consoles don’t make for practical PDA devices, and that any cartridge marketing itself as one is wasting the bulk of its allocation on completely useless functionality. There’s only so much space left for whatever minigames a developer might bake into it, and it’s doubtful any combination of them is going to make the cartridge worth stuffing in your pocket in place of a dedicated game. But maybe I’m wrong: Maybe some kiddo out there really did use Digital Companion to keep track of their contacts and indulge in a daily tile puzzle on the bus ride to school. I genuinely hope someone got something out of this novelty cart, but the pessimist in me struggles to picture it.

E.T.: Escape from Planet Earth for Game Boy Color (NewKidCo / Saffire, 2001)

In staying on the same handheld, we move from a pointless PDA to a truly solid portable puzzler. E.T.: Escape from Planet Earth comes to us courtesy of Saffire Corporation, who were responsible for what I’m sure I’ve previously mentioned (probably somewhere in here) as being one of my favorite Game Boy games: 1998’s James Bond 007. While Escape from Planet Earth doesn’t quite meet those same lofty heights, it still makes for a fun bit of top-down puzzling, with what I’d guesstimate to be somewhere in the neighborhood of a hundred different screens to solve for. Admittedly, I didn’t play through the whole of the thing in prepping for this article; but I did wind up spending upwards of at least four hours on it, as I found myself continuing to have fun all the while.

An open map where you navigate by means of bicycle (complete with the ability to leap high into the air, over walls and other scenery) allows you to tackle puzzles in your own chosen order. Each puzzle screen contains an item to be collected and an exit to be navigated to; where the items you nab serve as currency for bartering with children in treehouses, who hold the parts to the communicator E.T. ultimately needs to build. Most stages see you exclusively controlling E.T., who can pick up power-ups tokens allowing him to freeze and walk across otherwise impassable floors, levitate objects, put enemies to sleep, and other miscellaneous magics. In doing so, you’ll circumnavigate and re-route roving enemies (mostly wildlife in the early stages), and open paths to the necessary objectives. Further stages allow you to swap control with Elliot, who can jump over tile-sized hurdles and additionally serve as a stopper as E.T. slips and slides across ice. It’s likely that there are further puzzle mechanics and power-ups which reveal themselves deeper into the game, but I’ve yet to play far enough to encounter them all.

My limited experience with longform puzzle games leaves me to compare Escape from Planet Earth’s gameplay to the likes of Adventures of Lolo — which, for whatever it’s worth, is probably my gold standard for puzzle games. I doubt E.T. ever quite reaches the same levels of difficulty / complexity that Lolo is eventually pitted against – seeing as Escape from Planet Earth is aimed more explicitly at a younger audience – but there were certainly a share of stages in my time with the game which required a snug thinking cap. And if you ever should find yourself getting frustrated with a particular stumper, you can shift your focus to how adorable E.T. looks in this particular outing! If I were scoring these games on E.T.’s cuteness factor alone, every game on the list so far would rate as a one out of five;** except for this one, which would cinch a perfect score.

** Okay, maybe the E.T. face that pops up in E.T. in His Adventures at Sea might bump that one up to a three out of five. But Escape from Planet Earth E.T. is still best E.T, bar none.

E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial for Game Boy Advance (NewKidCo / Fluid Studios, 2001)

It’s tough to be a kid. Between endless school days, nagging parents, and being physically unable to stay awake past nine o’clock PM; the least we as adults could do for them is make sure their video games are fun to play. In the sad case of the simply-titled E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial on Game Boy Advance, Fluid Studios completely failed in that regard. Despite attempting five different styles of gameplay across ten stages, I can’t honestly say a single approach even comes close to succeeding in its intended design.

Levels which see you on foot are played from top-down perspective, and typically require laborious amounts of item fetching across labyrinthian maps; all while dodging quickly chasing baddies, and contending with some of the slipperiest controls this side of an ice level. A poorly-explained puzzle wherein you build E.T.’s communicator does absolutely nothing in the way of explaining its solution, not even hinting at the incredibly specific order it expects you to assemble the components. Riding your bike through the city streets is as much a test of your patience as it is your abilities to button mash and acclimate to strangely-implemented tank-type steering. At the very least, these stages are still leagues better than a pair where you fly your bike through the night sky; where you’re expected to dodge an impossible number of obstacles being tossed at you, while at the same time attempting to parse extremely unclear object depth. A final level in which you land the spaceship come to pick up E.T. is a last, short gasp of fresh air, as it is mercifully brief and basic. That said, I can’t even imagine any kid making it to this point in the game, as all nine of the prior stages were so intensely frustrating so as to completely flummox me.

While E.T.’s game on GBA demonstrates sufficient technical proficiency by its developers, it also demonstrates a fundamental lack of understanding for the wants and needs of younger players. From the word go / the very first stage, expecting kids to dedicate upwards of thirty minutes to navigating a single level – scouring every nook and cranny of a needlessly complex map on a glorified scavenger hunt – is an unreasonably tall ask of them. And where the immediate reward for completing this stage is a second taking place within the same map, only now with the item-collecting aspect swapped out for dodging agents on your trail? It’s enough to make anyone groan on sight, especially an impatient kiddo. Fluid Studios demonstrate absolutely no concern or respect for players’ time with their take on E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, and I can only advise that no one give this game the time of day. This is the absolute bottom of the barrel, as far as I’m concerned.

E.T. and the Cosmic Garden for Game Boy Color (NewKidCo / Zed Two, 2002)

We return again to the GBC, with something like a late-bloomer — pardon the pun. E.T. and the Cosmic Garden represents what was meant to be the handheld companion to a larger console game, but ends up serving as the sole version of the game available due to the aforementioned circumstances between NewKidCo and Zed Two. Playing Cosmic Garden, it certainly feels like a watered-down version of something potentially grander. But alas, this is our whole lot: A basic gardening simulator, wherein you attempt to cultivate a collection of flower seeds for the purposes of cross-breeding, and filling out a log consisting of 63 variations.

In your pursuit of botanical knowledge, you’ll touch down on a small assortment of planets in order to sample their native flora. Each planet provides a small patch of dirt and rocks for you to work within, as well as a slow-moving space slug who will eat anything in his path (including your hard-grown crops). The winning approach will undoubtedly be to move your plants to a corner of the patch, block the slug from entry by moving rocks in the way, and focusing on attending to your small plot. Pop-ups will indicate when you need to water and fertilize your flowers — typically requiring you to do each on a once-per-minute basis. Keep them growing long enough, and a space bee will swoop in to pollinate them; at which point they will soon wither away, and hopefully leave a new seed in place. Alternatively, they might end up leaving nothing behind. It’s seemingly just as likely to go either way. At the very least, this whole process takes maybe four minutes to play out, so it’s not too much time wasted on a failed crop.

If that gameplay loops sounds to you like it might get old quick, I reckon you’d be right on the money. In figuring out just how simple it is to consistently and effectively manage the plants, I realized that I’d figured out the key to the entire game, and that all the rest of any time I’d be spending with it would amount to the same five or six steps being repeated ad infinitum. The only “challenge” comes from either memorizing or jotting down which plants you’ve cross-bred with which, and proceeding to fill out the rest of your log from there. Perhaps a more fully-realized console version would’ve required more active garden management, or maybe even real-time growth cycles to bear in mind? But again: This Game Boy cart is all we got.

E.T.: Interplanetary Mission for PlayStation and PC (NewKidCo / Digital Eclipse and Santa Cruz Games, 2002)

As the only home console game to surface during the NewKidCo period, Interplanetary Mission is made to bear a heavy load here. Serving as something like the flagship product in the line-up – the one with [ostensibly] the most production behind it – you might expect that it stands heads and shoulders above the rest of the pack. But while it certainly drives more complex visuals than the likes of its Game Boy brethren (big surprise), I’d still have to rate the game’s ambitions as pretty low, and its overall execution as a resounding “OK.” Interplanetary Mission delivers a totally serviceable puzzle platformer experience for the PlayStation (as well as with a Windows port), and doesn’t seem particularly interested in achieving any more than that.

Alongside Cosmic Garden, Interplanetary Mission is the only other game on this list which dares to dream outside of the confines of the film (I guess Digital Companion sort of technically counts too, maybe?), and sees E.T. on a trek across multiple different planets in search of exotic flora. In doing so, he also invariably ends up getting involved in the socio-political struggles of each world’s dominant species, leading to many diversions from his flower-hunting. Whether this amounts to him assembling a throne for the king of the planet, freeing prisoners in advance of revolt against a tyrannical monster, or planting bombs in order to dismantle a mechanical society’s primary power source; E.T. sure finds himself getting stuck in the middle of some heavy shit. Ultimately, the final planet you visit does end up being Earth, where you are required to build the intergalactic communication device and phone back home for pick-up. The fact that you see neither hair nor hide of Elliot in these final stages though certainly makes for an odd alternate continuity, where E.T. is effectively a master of guerrilla warfare and improvised tactics.

Gameplay consists of key and switch hunting across large yet linearly-routed maps, where you’re also made to dodge monsters and avoid environmental hazards. You’ll occasionally be called on to use E.T.’s telekinesis in order to move some objects around your surrounding radius, and you’re granted a ‘Heart Stun’ attack allowing you to eliminate some smaller enemies / briefly pause larger creatures; but the bulk of your actions really do just amount to running from point A to B, holding the R2 button all the while in order to force E.T. to flail his arms up in the air while sprinting. Given the game’s isometric perspective and sometimes awkward D-pad mapping, you may be tempted to control movement by means of analog stick, but this decision can haunt you in levels requiring you to walk straight lines across narrow paths. What’s perhaps most baffling about the design though is just how many enemies the game tosses at you, and how brutally the larger ones can eviscerate poor E.T. in just the blink of an eye. Without effective means to combat them and sometimes not enough dexterity to outrun them, your odds for survival feel particularly dismal at all times.

Featuring a campaign that should clock in at just around three or four hours to complete, and little else in the way of incentive to replay the game after that, Interplanetary Mission ends up feeling pretty well lacking. A few neat ideas here and there – including E.T.’s skin turning progressively more pale as his health lowers – don’t lay on quite enough charm to distract from the more glaring issues with the game’s balance and design. On a bit of a research-inspired tangent: With development credits split between both Digital Eclipse and a Santa Cruz Games, and some games databases crediting either one and not the other, I got to wondering which studios were involved in which aspects. Far as I can gather, Digital Eclipse seemed to take charge of art and production direction, while Santa Cruz were the ones to implement them and build the game proper. That’s an admittedly reductionist explanation of the roles here, but I’m not really sure it’s worth writing any more about this game just for the sake of better elaborating.

E.T.: Away from Home for PC (Ubi Soft / Lexis Numérique, 2002)

It is at this point where Ubisoft get their mitts fully grasped ‘round the E.T. license, and contracted a French studio Lexis Numérique to rush a pair of Windows titles to market. It’s worth mentioning that Lexis’ catalogue at this point consisted of just a handful prior PC / Mac adventure titles, with a heavy emphasis on multimedia aspects. It’s also worth noting that their E.T. games seemed to release completely under the radar, and have rarely merited any mention online in the eighteen years since — let alone inspiring any sort of effort to preserve them. And so, it came to pass that I had to track down a physical jewel case copy for Away from Home, and hack together a means of running it on my modern hardware. My efforts were rewarded by getting to play a thoroughly mediocre two-player virtual board game — by myself, in a darkened room, as I was left to sit and wonder how I wound up where I was.

Away from Home imagines Elliot and his sister Gertie’s quest to help get E.T. back home as them adhering to turn-taking, dice roll-determined movement around their homestead. In navigating the two floors of their house as two distinct boards – as well as a third outdoors, leading to E.T.’s mothership – your goal is to land on spaces which allow you to play minigames, where you play for the chance to collect parts for E.T.’s communicator. All these games are driven exclusively by mouse movement; including operating the buttons on a ‘Speak & Spell’ in order to fill in the missing letters of words, dropping a pile of dolls on top of E.T. in order to hide him from your mom, a dress-up game where you attempt to match crude hand-drawings depicting different outfits, and a particularly tedious series of tile-arranging puzzles inside a television. Some further excursions see you controlling top-down movement in darkened locations by means of pointer movement, which barely function and make you wish for simple arrow key control as an option. But at least the minigames serve as sweet diversion from a hell of dice rolls, where you’re likely to walk in circles around the spots you want to land on for the bulk of your play time. Don’t even get me started on the final board, where you need to push from behind E.T. along a path to the mothership, and where the little brown bastard occasionally decides to run off without you in undesirable directions / into the arms of a patrolling agent.

A few goofier design decisions serve to lighten up the mood at least a little bit. Constant ongoing narration by Elliot, Gertie, and E.T. gives way to some baffling line reads; including Gertie wondering if E.T. will die if he eats particular flavors of candy, constant compliments paid towards the player for being skilled “astronomers” / “botanists” / so forth, and child-oriented descriptions of the video game’s mechanics including what gauges are. All the while, you’ll have a constantly on-screen visual component displaying the characters’ talking heads, as well as E.T. contorting his face into some particularly painful grimaces. Of particular amusement is the fact that on completing the game, it pulls the classic move of closing out and returning you directly to desktop after the ending cinematic / credits roll — knowing full well that no child is about to dive into a second playthrough after ending a session. With a collection of over-long, wholy joyless minigames fit to make the worst of Mario Party feel like masterpieces of game design; Away from Home might well be one of the worst pieces of children’s interactive software I’ve ever played. At the same time: I can’t help but recommend it as a bizarre, utterly misguided curio of the early 2000s PC shovelware boom.

E.T.: Phone Home Adventure for PC (Ubi Soft / Lexis Numérique, 2002)

The second game from Lexis Numérique takes the form of a more traditional children’s point-and-click adventure, featuring simple navigation and a new suite of basic minigames to be played. The structure here at least serves to bring us closer in line with the film than its companion title; where older brother Michael now plays a role in proceedings, the scientist’s invasion of your home plays as a set piece, and you even get to mount an initial escape from the authorities by means of ambulance — something which no other game adaptation has thus far attempted to recreate. Of course, all this is presented in the form of minigames primarily testing pattern recognition, as part of what feels like a cynically-motivated move to appear as if the game is imparting some sort of educational value.

At this point, there’s little else to say about Phone Home Adventure that can’t also be said about Away from Home: With their sharing identical visual styles and similarly “inspired” voice acting, you come away with the impression that the two games could’ve just as easily been merged into one somehow — where the board game and point-and-click styles of presentation could have been a choice picked from a menu or something. It’d certainly make for a fairer value proposition, where each release individually barely contains an hour’s worth of gameplay. And without any minigames in Phone Home Adventure which I’d rate as particularly compelling or replayable, the whole package just winds up feeling particularly disposable. It’s another title where you can derive a few goofs from the character actions and ideas on how to gamify movie scenes, but it’s only gonna tickle you that first time through. At least Away from Home allows you to potentially torture a friend, giving it a little more in the way of depth. It’s fitting, in a way, that a game with “phone” in its title feels especially phoned in.

“We Could Grow up Together, E.T.”

Speaking of phones and phoning things in: The next officially licensed E.T. game would see itself released exclusively for Apple’s iPhones, as a part of celebrations for the film’s then-relevant 30th anniversary. The EA-published E.T.: The Green Planet plays as a management sim for the smartphone platform, and serves to bring the alien up to date with modern gaming conventions; including the likes of hours-long timers between actions, and microtransactions to expedite the processes. Exciting stuff! As it turns out, I can’t really tell y’all too much about the game, since I don’t have any sort of iOS device myself to try it on… which is just as well, since I don’t believe the game is actually even available for download anymore? State of mobile games in the 2010s, folks!

E.T. would wait another four years before deigning to appear in another game. This time around, though, I reckon he may have taken the hint that nobody is particularly eager to see him star in another one of his own dedicated titles. Instead, he features as a playable character in Lego Dimensions, complete with an accompanying Lego minifigure for the purposes of scanning into the game. His in-game world seems to encompass Elliot’s family home and various surrounding suburbia, as well as providing a glimpse inside his spaceship. Unfortunately – especially considering this whole game seems honestly pretty neat to me – I’m not currently able to invest in all the components necessary to fully assemble the “toys to life” experience, and so I can’t really cover this appearance in any depth either.

ADDENDUM (1/15/2020): Courtesy of a reader contribution from @DefenestrationP, we are now able to provide a bit of further context as to the Lego Dimensions E.T. content:

Lego Dimensions ‘E.T. Fun Pack’ minifigure, with ‘Phone Home’ accessory.

Released in 2015 and updated through to 2016, Dimensions contains similar mechanics to other LEGO games released around this time, only now with the additional functions of a “toys to life game.” Figures are scanned in with a special accessory, and provide the unusual distinction of the placement of the figure playing into certain puzzles. Each character has two or more unique abilities, plus some shared skills like building things, that they can use to interact with the world. Levels consist of a few discrete segments with optional tasks to earn minikits, and larger adventure worlds give you various tasks such as solving puzzles and helping people, with basically anything that can be considered a goal awarding gold bricks. The writing is generally light and comedic, with even the more serious moments having background gags and frequent nods to the history of the works featured. Unfortunately, the game didn’t perform as well as hoped: While most of the usual appeal of LEGO games is there, it was simply prohibitively expensive — even compared to over toys to life games, when considering a $100 price tag on the base game alone.

E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial was among the properties added in year two (of an originally planned three), and their inclusion was sold in the form of $15 physical ‘Fun Pack’ — containing E.T. themselves and a phone accessory [used to call in the iconic flying bike]. Although there’s no script-driven chapter associated with them, scanning them in unlocks their ‘Adventure World’ depicting the California suburbs and it’s surrounding woods and hills, as well as self-contained areas and a ‘Battle Arena’ (designed for a competitive side mode) based around the quarantine imposed during the film. With the LEGO games [and LEGO in general] being highly self-referential, you can expect to see lots of nods to the original film; such as E.T. being disguised by Elliot to fool cameras, having a knack for repairing machinery, and using their powers to do things that normally need magic. Their phone can be rebuilt to resemble how it looked after being modified in the film, as well as being made into a satellite. Even paratext to the films gets referenced; such as alluding to a character cut from the film, a mission to collect radios to replace the soldier’s weapons (referencing the 2002 re-release of the film), and even E.T. asking the ‘Gamer Kid’ character (a fan of 80’s games, who represents the assorted Midway arcade titles included) if their classic Atari cart is any good.

In general, the quality of E.T.’s content in Dimensions is fairly average for the game. It’s probably not worth getting into Dimensions for the E.T. content specifically, unless you’re seriously invested in the property. Even some of the other properties to not get any levels based on get more substance, such as Teen Titans Go! broadcasting an episode tying into / included with the game. Still, for what it’s worth, this is the only officially sanctioned way you can have E.T. interact with figures like Betelgeuse, Homer Simpson, and Marty McFly;  or to see them riding Knight Rider’s KITT through the likes of Hogwarts, and parroting Sonic the Hedgehog in saying “Gotta go fast.” So, at least there’s that!

With those last bases covered, I reckon I can finally bring this article to a close. With the 40th anniversary due in just a couple years, though, who knows what it might bring? Maybe I’ll have some occasion to revisit the list, and to append another entry onto the end. With so many years removed from “the game that nearly killed gaming,” maybe some studio executive will determine that it’s finally time for E.T. to star in more substantive software again. We can only hope not. In the meantime: I’m content to not have to look at E.T.’s bulging eyes and noodle neck again for a nice, long while.

[1] Burns, Ed. “An Interview with Hank Mishkoff – Part II: Interview by Charles Good, 1995.” RidingTheCrest.com. Original interview conducted November, 1995. Webpage published circa 2002? Web.
[2] “E.T. Has Dial-Up.” IGN. May 17, 2000. Web.
[3] ‘The Pickford Bros.’ “ET and the Search for Dragora.” Zee-3.com. Web.