ET.
Not only did it suck.
It caused The End of Video Games! Well until the Japanese saved us thankfully.
Atari was essentially done after that.
And millions of cartridges of the game were possibly crushed and buried in a landfill.
Big Rigs sucks sure, but it didn’t end all racing games for 3 years.
E.T. wasn’t the sole cause of the crash though, it was just the straw that broke the camel’s back. Blame Atari and their inept policies and not an individual (albeit still extremely shitty) game.
I think that ignoring the historical baggage that E.T. brings with it Big Rigs still beats it as the worse game. E.T. still function in a basic sense, Big Rigs doesn’t. When released your “opponent” was non-functioning. That is, it was impossible to race since there was nothing to race. Since this is a racing game that means that the game managed to fuck up at the very core level. And yet this thing was still released commercially. E.T. functions, it functions in a horrible and completely broken sense, but it still can be called a game. Deep down somewhere in that awful cesspool there are gameplay mechanics, you can actually play it, you can’t even say that much about Big Rigs.
ET gets a bad rap; as noted by posters above, it gets a lot of the blame for the game crash, though it was just a symptom of the inherent unhealthiness of the market (and Atari’s hubris). It’s a symbolic “worst game” but it’s really just an average 2600 title.
Taken on its own, it’s a middling entry in the genre of “2600 adventure.” IMO, it’s better than the first two Swordquests, Haunted House, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and Riddle of the Sphinx. It suffered more from the inability of players of the time to read the manual, who expected every 2600 game to be simplistic and immediately playable 30 seconds after plugging in; it’s often maligned for gameplay of “keep falling into pits on accident and keep being unable to get out of them,” but a couple of minutes’ worth of practice is all you need to (1) get out of pits easily and (2) only drop into pits when needed. It’s got decent graphics for the day, and is also a remarkably solid bit of programming. If you want a glitchy, unplayable mess of an “adventure,” try out Swordquest: Fireworld sometime.
If “Footbal” I what I think it is, I LOVED that game! Yeah the graphics were lousy, but it was damn fun! I like Haunted House, and my brother loved Raiders.
The chance at the ‘chalice of light’ made a lot of those bugs easy to overlook.
/thread
I remember actually enjoying E.T.
Granted, I was like 5 years old, and hadn’t actually seen the movie (and I’m 35 now and still haven’t seen it), and had no concept of what I was supposed to be accomplishing in the game, but I remember I liked just walking around and falling in the holes.
Also, we only had like 3 games so I played the shit out of all of them just because I had no other choice (IIRC I believe the other 2 were Combat and Raiders of the Lost Ark).
If we’re going by badness as measured by failing to measure up to promise, let me ask you all two questions:
“Spore” was supposed to be the best, the greatest. People drolled over it for over a year. It was, well, awful, six Ipad-level-or-worse games pasted together. I wouldn’t install it for free.
The first Japanese video game that I played in English (as opposed to in Japanese) was also my last: Final Fantasy X, which had by far the worst voice acting of any game I’ve ever had the misfortune to play. It made what was ultimately a very enjoyable game (when I played it in Japanese) pretty much unplayable, because it’s hard to grasp the video controller when you’re trying to drive a fork into your ears.
Combat was actually a surprisingly fun game given the simplicity of the concept. (My favorite boards were the reflecting shot tank fights.)
Raiders of the Lost Ark was a crappy game that was impossible to win without hints or an extreme tolerance for try doing anything you can think of with every piece of inventory and see what works. It’s pretty much the epitome of the “guess what the programmer was thinking” type of adventure game. (E.g. Buying the flute and selecting it in your inventory makes you immune to death from snakes. Dropping a grenade against a nondescript section of wall allows you to actually continue beyond the first two screens. Of course, it all makes perfect sense now. :rolleyes:)
ET was as Student Driver mentioned a winnable game. With clearly explained and achievable goals if you read the manual. Granted, it was boring as Hell and as mentioned was the epitome of game company hubris, but it hardly counts as the worst game ever. It wasn’t buggy (well, except for the zones in the first screen rearranging their locations after you left the screen for the first time). It was just badly designed.
I think you misspelled “Black and White”, but yeah, I understand. 
Though, really, neither of these games are “worst of all time”.
E.T. was not that bad. It was too simplistic for the ten-year-old I was at the time, but it was mildly amusing (well, just almost-not-boring enough that I played it to its easy victory conditions many times) and not nearly as obnoxious as the Strawberry Shortcake game. Falling in the pit wasn’t nearly as obnoxious as the many things that could wrong in Raiders of the Lost Ark. At the time, I wasn’t aware of the reputation that the game had for ruining the Atari, but really E.T. was merely not good. It wasn’t the epic fail that people make it out to be.
You sound upset! Let’s laugh to feel better! Ha ha ha! There, now you try it! Just laugh! Ha ha! See how easy it is?
I haven’t played any of these, but my vote would be for the original arcade version of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Up until that point, if you were good enough, you could extend your time of play without paying more money. However, this game started a new and very disturbing trend: each quarter paid for time, not for lives or health. While they weren’t the first to use a timer (I believe the original gauntlet also used the same system) it was impossible to play without feeding a steady stream of quarters into the game. A top player, iirc, could finish the game in under 8 quarters. Not only did health go down from time passing, the power move also cost health, and there was no way to get more health except for putting in more quarters.
Myst. Such hype, such sales, for such a crappy, boring, stupid game.
Football was fun, because it’s the only sports game where I could consistently beat the computer.
I recall really liking it too.
This is news to me. I can’t find any reference to this; can you point me to one?
Yeah, it’s kinda hard to discuss “worst” without some more detailed parameters. Is it a game that doesn’t work period? Is it a hugely-hyped game that was crushingly disappointing?
For example, looking at the list posted:
E.T.: Haven’t played it myself, only seen online videos. It certainly looks pretty bad, and somewhat buggy, but it really earns its appearance on this list for nearly killing the entire industry of video games, though.
Custer’s Revenge: Gameplay-wise, it’s nothing too terrible for an Atari 2600 game. “Worst” only for it’s sheer offensiveness.
Daikatana: Buggy as hell, full of bad design choices, behind it’s time, and of course all of this followed John Romero’s incredibly ill-advised advertising scheme. The sad thing is that it actually had some cool ideas, and I’d actually like to play a (good) reboot/remake version of it (which will likely never happen). It’s a good choice for the worst given the above, but it’s still got enough decent parts to it…
Duke Nukem Forever: The hype was always more fan-generated than developed-generated, so it’s hard to blame them like Daikatana. Still, incredibly disappointing game. In many ways, it doesn’t belong on this list… it’s not buggy, the graphics are fine, and the individual pieces all work. But playing this myself, I found the whole thing just so intensely uninteresting that I had to force myself to finish it. It felt like a chore. Just a combination of disappointment and not feeling like what a Duke Nukem game should be (2 weapons at a time?)
You’re going to have to MAME it i suppose. I just remember thinking this was the biggest scam of all time when I saw it in the arcade.