E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial (Atari 2600, 1983)

What!?  Surely this is a prank.  Is this April Fool's Day?  I couldn't seriously be adding one of the most despised games in history to a list of Great Video Games.  E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial (1983) for the Atari 2600?  The game that killed the system, and caused the video game market crash the same year it was released?  There is absolutely no way this could be.  But, yes, I'm serious.  I'm adding E.T. to the Great Video Games because of its influence, historical significance, and because frankly, I kind of enjoy it.
I suppose I should tackle the last thing I said there, as that is sure to be the most controversial.  No, I'm not saying that this is some kind of misunderstood, underrated masterpiece.  It is a severely flawed piece of software, the product of misguided corporate decisions and rushed production.  It is, of course, based off of the classic Steven Spielberg film, where the eponymous alien botanist is stranded on our planet, and befriends a young boy named Elliot, who helps him escape Earth.  The game follows this plot.  Loosely.  I can't recall the part of the movie where E.T. had to go jumping in holes to search for pieces of the telephone, and I must have missed the scene where a scientist takes him to jail (only for him to walk right out again).
So the search is on.  E.T. has a limited frame of time (9999 footsteps, to be precise, shown in a counter at the bottom of the screen) to find three pieces of a phone which are hidden in random holes across a map.  These holes become the centerpiece of the hatred for this game.  "You have to check every one!  Plus climbing out of them is a nightmare!  Once you fall in, you lose health!"  Well, no, you don't actually have to check every hole.  If you stand in a certain spot on each screen where a special symbol appears at the top and press the button, You can see which, if any, holes have a phone piece in them.  Climbing out of the holes is easy if you know how.  When you want to climb out, hold the button and the joystick up.  Once you are floating out of the hole, move to either the left or right side of the hole and you are out.  When you fall in the holes, press the button quickly and lower yourself down to avoid taking damage.
The world is crueler still to poor E.T., as there is a scientist and an FBI agent trying to impede his progress.  The scientist will grab E.T. and drag him to jail, where you can hilariously walk out of as soon as you are put in.  The FBI agent is far more devious though, as he will confiscate one piece of the phone you have worked hard to find.  There is a spot on each screen you can stand to send these two away, but your best bet is usually to run (and then fall in a hole).  The extra-terrestrial is not helpless though.  You can find Reese's Pieces scattered about, which you can trade with Elliot for extra health.  Once he has all of the phone pieces, he must phone home, and then stand in a certain spot so that the alien lander can pick him up.
So this game sounds kind of annoying (to say the least).  Don't worry, it is also buggier than that cave in Temple of Doom.  Glitches ooze out of every crevice of this game.  So, why do I enjoy it?  I suppose it is for the same reason I love bad movies.  Their flaws make them unintentionally hilarious.  The same goes for E.T.  I had one experience in the game where I called Elliot on to the screen, and then when he tried to walk off the bottom of the screen, he got stuck, unable to leave.  The crude sound of his footsteps produced a catchy beat, so he and I held a little informal dance party.  There is a funny bit where if you die, Elliot comes back to resurrect you, and you can still move E.T.'s dead body back and forth.  One of the funniest scenes was when I went to actually complete the game, and just as a got picked up by the ship, I ran out of health.  What followed was an hilarious bit where the carcass of E.T. ascended into the heavens, and then the game stopped because it couldn't figure out where to go from there.  I consider that completion, technically.
I mentioned in my Yar's Revenge article that the programmer of that game, Howard Scott Warshaw, also programmed this one.  With Yar, he proved that he was a competent programmer, so what went wrong with this game?  The fault is entirely on Atari.  They gave Warshaw only six weeks to go from concept to completed product.  To put things in perspective, a typical game on Atari could be expected to spend about three months in production, if not more.  It is a miracle that E.T. runs at all.
Its lasting impact is in what it did to the industry as a whole.  The video game market crash of 1983 was not the single-handed product of the game, but it played a big role.  After that, Nintendo would take careful measures to prevent its first home console, the Nintendo Entertainment System, from meeting the same fate.  All consoles after the NES follow its guidelines.  Also, it has a striking influence on games of the next generation.  Its gameplay style of randomly generated items may have led to the modern sandbox titles of today, and its nonlinear gameplay and multiple screen exploration can be seen in games like The Legend of Zelda.  Is it a bad game?  Certainly.  Does that alone make it ineligible to be in the Great Video Games?  I don't believe so.

The Atari 2600 (1977)

Video games are the only medium that one can have a deep discussion about the hardware.  Film historians may go in depth about film quality and formats, but you will rarely see two casual moviegoers discussing DVD vs Laserdisc.  Literature even less so;  you'll never see two people debating over which is better, quill and ink or printing press.  But video games are different because they inhabit the hardware they are played on.  The console becomes part of the gaming experience.  Back in the 90's, there was a debate between the Sega Genesis, Super Nintendo, and TurboGrafx16.  These days it is between the Xbox 360, Wii, and Playstation 3.
And so I would like to write my first analysis of a console with Atari's Video Computer System, more commonly known as the 2600 (named after its serial number).  Here is a video game in its purest form.  No pretenses, no preconceptions, and no real predecessor.  Released in 1977, it was not the first game console as believed by many, that was the Magnavox Odyssey (1972) which was a total failure on all accounts.  Atari must have taken the Odyssey's flaws into account and tried to remedy them for its own system.
The Atari used interchangeable cartridges for its games, a completely new idea in gaming.  At that point, most games were played in the arcade, with each cabinet holding only one game.  The 2600 separated the hardware and the software, allowing many games to be owned and played on one system.  The controllers feature only one joystick and one button, and were detachable from the system.  Its design is classic:  power and option switches on the front, top-loading cartridge slot, wood grain on the front.  The system was an immediate success.  The rest of its history would be read as a rise to glory, followed by destruction by its own hubris.
Early titles were mainly ports of arcade games to the system (although very well-made ones).  Games like Asteroids, Pong (renamed Video Olympics and featuring a number of Pong variations), and Space Invaders are all examples of the Atari's ability to accurately simulate the games of the arcade.  This trend would continue with the excellent later titles such as Centipede, Frogger, and Ms. Pac Man.  The relationship between Atari and third party developers is one that would be unheard of today:  Atari bought the property to the arcade titles, and then had one of their own programmers translate it to the 2600.
Atari made their own games as well.  They were the first to realize that having a console at home meant that they could make games that could be completed.  The earliest example of this is Adventure, which I have written about previously.  Later titles to follow in this trend would be Raiders of the Lost Ark, and yes, the dreaded ET the Extra Terrestrial (more on that later).  With Atari handling all of the major releases, things were going well for the 2600.  It was at the height of its popularity that it started to show some major flaws, that would lead to its downfall.
The first mistake Atari made was in not allowing its programmers the dignity of credit for their work.  Creative designers could sneak their initials or names into the games via Easter eggs, such as Howard Scott Warshaw and Warren Robinett.  The majority of them were unsatisfied though, so in 1980 there was a major exodus of Atari's most talented programmers, who went on to form the massively successful Activision.  There was nothing Atari could do about Activision games being sold for its system; it featured no lockout chip to differentiate between licensed and unlicensed games.  Anyone could make 2600 games, and everyone who could, did.
There became a flood of games on the system, most of them being completely terrible.  But surely Atari was able to maintain the same level of quality in their own games to keep itself from sinking?  With only the most inexperienced programmers left, even the first-party releases suffered.  There are two main games which are blamed for the death of Atari, the first of which was Pac-Man.  Atari really screwed the pooch with that one.  They arranged for there to be more games made than there were existing Ataris, and paid the programmer by each game made, not sold.  It was still the best selling Atari game, technically, but the disgustingly low quality of the game caused many returns and refunds, making it a major flop.
The second of the terrible games was the infamous ET.  Made by Howard Scott Warshaw, an actually talented programmer, it should have been a great game.  The problem was, Atari wanted the game completed within a six-week time frame, giving Warshaw barely enough time to squeeze out what was a very buggy and half-realized game.  The released product should very well have been only a prototype.  ET was, like Pac-Man, an initial success, but angry players returned the games, making it another bomb.  Urban legend states that Atari took the leftover carts of ET and buried them in a landfill in a New Mexico desert.  With more product being made on the market than sold, Atari went bankrupt, and the whole video game market crashed in 1983.
Years later, now that the smoke has all cleared and we can look at the system in full clarity, we can appreciate it for what it truly was:  an ambitious, yet failed, experiment in home video game technology.  Why was it a failure?  It still had a vast library of first-rate titles, many of which still hold up to this day as marvelous fun and entertainment, and is looked upon with fond nostalgia.  Its failure was entirely on the part of the company that produced it, but on the bright side, future game consoles would learn from the experience, the first of which being a brave grey box produced by Nintendo.

Yar's Revenge (Atari 2600, 1982)

At a distance, this game will appear to be a jumbled mess of information.  The premise doesn't make even the slightest bit of logical sense.  The screen features a block of random flickering pixels, and each character is a distant abstraction of what they are meant to represent.  And yet, Yar's Revenge (1982) is one of the most finely crafted and enduring games on the Atari 2600, and also my favorite on the system.
The game was designed and programmed by Howard Scott Warshaw of Atari.  Most people will not be able to know him by name, but he was one of Atari's more prolific programmers, having also made the adaptation of Raiders of the Lost Ark and, yes, the ill-fated ET the Extra-Terrestrial.  This game is proof that ET's failure was not on the part of Warshaw being an incompetent designer (it is, in fact, evidence to the contrary), but Atari's poor business decisions.  His influence on Yar's Revenge's success is a stroke of genius.  Originally meant to be an Atari port of the arcade game Star Castle, which the 2600 would not have been able to support due to technical limitations, Warshaw changed the premise of the game to make it workable.
The premise is this:  you control a housefly trying to fight off an attack by the alien, Yar.  You may move and shoot in eight directions (highly uncommon for Atari shooters).  First, you must shoot down the barrier the Yar hides behind to expose him, while avoiding (what might be) a homing missile.  That flickering area I mentioned earlier?  That is a neutral zone, where the missile cannot kill you if it touches you, but you cannot shoot.  Once the Yar is vulnerable, you touch him to summon a bomb, and aim carefully to hit him with it, which will blow him up and advance you to the next level.  Be careful through, because without much warning, the Yar may decide to fly out and attack you!
This may sound convoluted in theory, but in practice, it is great fun.  This game actually offers a high level of strategy and fair challenge relative to the other games of the age.  If you shoot from a distance, you are safer from the attacks of the Yar and also the missile.  If you draw close, however, you can achieve greater accuracy and speed, at an increased risk.  You must use the neutral zone to your advantage, and since you wrap around the screen (go off one edge and you reappear on the opposite) it can be used to make quick escapes from the missile, which grows progressively faster with each level.
What Mr. Warshaw created is one of the greatest games of its day.  While other Atari games age and/or rot around it, Yar's Revenge stays fresh and fun.  Compare it to his other titles.  While Raiders of the Lost Ark is generally considered to be better than ET, it is still archaic, cryptic, and in some places, dysfunctional.  Yar's Revenge, on the other hand, shows its age only in its visuals.  Howard Scott Warshaw has been unfairly criticized for ET, whose flaws are mostly not his fault.  He ought to be celebrated for the enduring classic that he created.

Pitfall! (Atari 2600, 1982)

As stated in my review of Adventure for the Atari 2600, programmers for Atari were not allowed to a credit for their work anywhere in the game, or on its packaging, manuals, etc.  Because of this, a group of Atari's most experienced and talented programmers became fed up, left Atari, and founded their own company in 1979 called Activision.  Each programmer in Activision was allowed to make their own games, which would be credited to them (this was back in the days when you only really needed one person to program a 4-bit video game).  The greatest of these is often considered to be David Crane's Pitfall! (1982)
There are a few distinctive qualities to an Activision game.  They are often highly experimental (by 2600 standards), and typically take full advantage of the system's graphical capabilities.  Activision never restricted themselves to a single genre, and not even the confines of a genre.  They made a few space shooters (Spider Fighter, Megamania), sports games (Ice Hockey, Boxing), and some games that defy genre altogether (HERO, Pressure Cooker).  Pitfall! is one of those rare Activision games that helped invent a genre, the platformer.
In this game, you control the adventurer, "Pitfall" Harry, on his quest to collect as much gold and treasure as he possibly can in twenty minutes (one of those short expeditions), and survive the harsh jungle environment. Among the many hazards in this game are the eponymous pitfalls, crocodile-infested ponds, snakes, fire, barrels, and scorpions.  Harry can only run and jump, and if he sees a swinging vine (one of the most fluid animations on the 2600) he can use it to bypass certain obstacles, giving out a Tarzan cry.
The game is not broken up into levels, but screens.  Harry may go to the left or right in a never-ending wilderness, and every new screen he enters is randomly generated.  On one screen, he may have to hop across the heads of crocodiles, but on another, there will be a vine for him to swing by them.  One screen may have a ladder going down to the underground, which may offer a safer shortcut past hazards, or a dead-end.  Harry jumps in only one arc, making it impossible to steer him in mid air, but each hazard is designed so that Harry's precise jumps will have plenty of room for execution.
As common as they would become, platformers were a pretty rare kind of game in the early 1980's.  Mario had gotten the ball rolling with his arcade smash Donkey Kong, but the genre still had a long way to go to the  platforming opuses on the NES and SNES.  Pitfall would get a sequel on the 2600, called Pitfall II: The Lost Cavern which made several improvements to this first game, including a bigger map to explore, but was just not the same as the original.  The later Pitfall games on the NES, SNES, and Genesis would all be catastrophic, some infamous, failures.  David Crane would eventually make the NES cult hit A Boy and His Blob.  This classic Atari game will always live as one of the best, and most influential games in the system's library.

Adventure (Atari 2600, 1978)

It was exceptionally rare to have a game on the Atari 2600 that could actually by completed.  Almost every game was endless, with a focus on getting a high score, rather than having a quest with an ending.  The technically superior arcade games were like this, so games on the 2600 sought to emulate them.  The couple games that did have endings included Raiders of the Lost Arc, ET, Mountain King, and this game from the 2600's earliest lineup, Adventure.
The story is as basic as it gets.  You are some kind of adventurer, and your chalice (possibly the Holy Grail) has been taken from you by the dragons of the world, hid it away in their black castle.  To get it back, you must navigate your way through mazes, solve puzzles, and slay many dragons.  This game has three difficulty settings.  The easiest is fairly short and simple to win with only one maze to navigate through and the resources fairly easy to find.  The second has two caves, two mazes, and the bat, who will relocate objects throughout the game.  The third level is like the second, but with every object places randomly in the maze.
Games on the 2600 required a huge amount of imagination to make its rudimentary graphics resemble what they are meant to.  The sprite you control is a square.  A sword looks more like an arrow.  Keys barely look like keys.  a blue maze makes me instinctively think of water, and my assumption is validated by a bridge (shaped like a pair of brackets ] [ ).  The bare-bones presentation must be excused to enjoy the game, and is in fact, one of its charms.  This holds especially true for early 2600 games, which came out long before Activision would make some of the best looking games for the system.
The graphics were a necessary sacrifice to fit the gameplay into the cartridge's memory.  Your only actions are to move, pick up items and drop them with the button.  To slay a dragon, you only have to touch the sword to it.  There is a surprising level of strategy that subtly comes into play with this simple play mechanic. If I want to go into the black castle with the black key, should I go back and find the sword before I progress?  Where do I place the bridge to go forward, or even create shortcuts?  Is there any way for me to use the bat to my advantage?
Adventure has grown a kind of charm that comes purely from its technical limitations.  This game was programmed by one man, Warren Robinett, in a time when Atari did not allow its programmers and designers to have a credit anywhere in the game.  Robinett found a brilliant way to sneak around this.  He made a hidden room in the game, accessible by cryptic means, which holds the credit "created by Warren Robinett," also the first easter egg in gaming.  We may now credit this man for taking the first bold steps to what would become modern video gaming.