Thursday 6 June 2013

News: "ET game excavation confirmed by studio"

Press START to begin the game read the news!

I've chosen this article because it's got an especially interesting background story and I feel a little proud since I knew about it before reading this piece of news. The proof that I am a good game nerd :)

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(sometimes I feel like a toddler playing around with this big/small stuff)

I'm going to explain you the story in the right order from the beginning to the end in my own words so you can understand it easily.
You know the film E.T.? E.T., the Extra-Terrestial? (Seems that this alien thing will follow me until my death...)
It's a classic movie directed by Steven Spielberg which tells the story of an alien called E.T. that came to Earth. A little boy and his siblings become friends of E.T. and they try to help him (/it) to get back to his home planet (or wherever he lives) and keep him hidden from the other people.
And it's an unwritten law that practically every film that is expected to receive a considerable success (and this one being a movie of Spielberg certainly accomplished that condition) gets its videogame counterpart. We gamers call them "license games" because, obviously, these games need the license of the creators of the film and this usually means that the games are relatively expensive to produce. Consequently, there's not much money left to invest in the production itself. Thus, (I know, a long causal chain) the license games usually are... Well... How could I say it in a respectful way.

They're as exciting as a visit to the dentist.

To date there are only a few exceptions to this rule. And E.T. was not amongst them. Indeed, it might be the license game disaster par excellence. Well, I could explain you why this game was so bad, but since it's from 1982, there is little sense in criticizing it when it has nothing do with the game standards of today. Basically, its problem was that players didn't really know what to do and the level design was horrible. The few pixels the game had were even bad placed, so to speak. Shortly afterwards, the videogame industry suffered a big collapse. It was not the fault of this single game, however, the console games couldn't measure up with the popularity of the recently commercialised PCs (yep, someone did his research project about videogames last year)
So what about this whole excavation thing?
Well, it's said that Atari buried its failure along with several million copies of the E.T. game and maybe also some Atari 2600 consoles in a landfill site in Alamogordo in New Mexico.
Talk about pollution.

It's a myth between gamers and now the Canadian studio Fuel Entertainment is going to look for this buried "treasure", the One Piece. Sorry, I just got confused.
Well, after all it would be interesting to know if the story's real and I'm sure there are many many crazy gamers (yep, WAY crazier than me, which is possible, yep) who would pay a big amount of money to get one of the mysterious buried E.T. copies.
Modern treasure hunting! Sometimes our world can be so... Weird.

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