In E.T. The Extra Terrestrial, you play as E.T., who just landed in the forest and was marooned by his space ship. You have to use varios "zones" on the screen to find phone pieces, avoid the FBI and a Federal Scientist while enlisting the help of Elliot to get you out of sticky situations and earn him bonus points by giving him Candy (Reese's Pieces in the movie), and "phone home" to your spaceship so you can go home.

The game sold like hotcakes, but was in general, a mediocre release at worst and marginally good at best. No, I'm not an E.T. Apologist, I'm just stating what the REAL truth about E.T. Was. Most of what we think is "history" started in 1990's when various people, trying to be funny on the early internet (myself included), started rambling on about the infamous video game crash. The REAL reason for the video game crash, was low quality games being put out by companies like Data Age (Bugs, Journey Escape), or the occasional critique of rushed releases like E.T., Pac-Man, and Coleco's port of Nintendo's Donkey Kong for the VCS. The REAL reason for the crash, was it was an early industry started by ex-hippies gone tech moguls, who were still figuring things out. Which by that point was being controlled by what usually is the REAL source of failure for all things business: BUSINESSMEN! They didn't understand their industry, saw these things as mere toys, did not ensure quality control, or enlist people they would view as "unprofessional" otherwise to actually TEST and Vet their games. The average Boomer c-suiter in 1983 was more interested in sneaking snorts of nose candy in their walk-in closests and flaunting their Rolexes and BMWs than they were creating a quality video game product. To them, a "proper" game would have been Pinochle or Cribbage over some Cabernet or Chardonnay on a Saturday night at the kitchen table. That Atari thing though? That's just a kid's toy! Maybe I'll buy him an IBM PC or Macintosh next year! The fact it was "so baD" it was dumped in an Algomordo New Mexico landfill is seriously overstated, it was just the typical American Corporation behavior of purging excess stock and ruining it so people can't buy them on the second hand market or let this stuff tarnish their image with an overstock of games that won't sell.

The biggesst problem with E.T. is you need the manual to understand what's going on, and up till that point of 1982+, Atari games were meant to be something you could pick up and play without reading a manual to figure out on your own. They were a lot like indie game Five Nights at Freddy's in it's original release versions (first four) - you just picked it up, you got minimal instruction either informed by the game design or trial and error, and then you went about playing the game. That was it. This is a big part of why the 2600 continued to be a success up until 1983 or so, because the games were "pick-em-up-and-play", not like now where you need to read 500 pages of lore, look for hints and crap, and listen to an anime waifu tell you how to play it to play the game. Heck, even a complex RPG like friggin Dragon Warrior is more pick-up-and-play than E.T. is.

The so called "cheap fail" in this game, is usually the pits, which is mentione din the manual, not very well, but it's mentioned. The trick is to stop pushing "UP" the minute you are back on the map screen and no longer in the pit, so you can move left or right to get away from the pit.