Somebody eventually looked at one of the most mocked video games ever made and asked the more useful question: what, specifically, is wrong with the code?
Visit Neocomputer’s E.T. repair project
The Neocomputer project on Atari’s E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial did not stop at repeating the familiar story about the 1982 cartridge, the rushed development schedule, terrible reviews, and the New Mexico landfill. It treated the game as software that could be analyzed.
That led to something far more interesting than another “worst game ever” list.
The project was created by David Richardson, also known as Recompile, and published in 2013. Richardson examined the Atari 2600 ROM, documented several of the behaviors players hated, and made targeted changes rather than rewriting the game into something else.
The most famous problem was falling into wells.
One pixel could ruin your afternoon
In the original game, E.T. could fall into a pit when part of his sprite overlapped it even though the character appeared to be standing safely beside the opening. The Neocomputer analysis traced the behavior to collision logic and changed the relevant code so that the game judged E.T.’s position more sensibly.
The project also adjusted energy consumption. The original game drains energy constantly as E.T. moves, making exploration punishing. The patched version changes that behavior so ordinary walking is less expensive while actions such as running, falling, and hovering still consume energy.
Another tiny modification corrected E.T.’s color closer to the tan appearance of the movie character by changing hexadecimal values in the ROM.
These are small changes, which is exactly why the project matters.
E.T. was written by Howard Scott Warshaw under an exceptionally short development schedule in 1982. Decades of retelling eventually compressed the entire game into a punch line. Richardson instead demonstrated that specific frustrations could be identified in the program and altered without discarding the underlying design.
PCWorld documented the project in 2013 and later identified Richardson as the sole creator of the repair. Warshaw himself praised the work and said the changes addressed problems he would have liked more development time to fix. The patched ROM also escaped the original webpage and continued circulating through emulation and preservation communities.
That afterlife is important because the Neocomputer page itself has become unreliable to reach. The work did not disappear with one server. It has been discussed in Atari communities, technical articles, academic writing about game archaeology, and later fixed-ROM releases.
There is a nice old-Web lesson buried in there. A hobbyist can publish a careful piece of reverse engineering on a small personal site and, if the work is specific enough, it becomes part of the historical record of the thing it studied.
CacheRat’s 1,967 Ancient Web Domains research list turns up plenty of pages whose influence is easier to see in the links and citations they left behind than in their current traffic or appearance. Neocomputer’s E.T. project is one of those.
The game that supposedly belonged in a landfill ended up getting a code review thirty years later.