by JoeAltmaier on 1/1/14, 2:21 PM
ET was green in the game, I'm guessing, because Howard wrote it (completed it!) before the movie was released. The whole thing was on a punishing deadline, which is why it may seem rough and strange to lots of folks. Howard was tremendously proud of finishing a whole Atari 2600 game in just a few weeks; not a single other Atari programmer was willing to take on the challenge. In fact, Howard had to do it against management's wishes.
by mambodog on 1/1/14, 4:23 PM
by tujv on 1/1/14, 11:46 AM
Also recommended is "Racing the Beam" from MIT Press [1]. It is a terrific tour of Atari 2600 software development by examining several different games, including another Howard Scott Warshaw cart, Yar's Revenge.
[1] http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/racing-beam
by jpace121 on 1/1/14, 5:30 AM
Stuff like this is personally really cool, and is one of the reasons I learned to program in the first place/ still play with programming.
by brickcap on 1/1/14, 5:35 AM
If you manage to complete it send it to angry video game nerd. His faith will be restored :)
by nitrogen on 1/1/14, 10:57 AM
I love reading reverse engineering and ancient game modding stories because it's like an extreme form of inheriting a messy, undocumented codebase.
by kken on 1/1/14, 9:44 AM
This is insane in a good way :)
by Pitarou on 1/1/14, 8:34 AM
Makes me proud to be a nerd. :)
by millerm on 1/2/14, 3:18 PM
Nice job. It's fun to seem some creative hacking. You could flame bait the title by renaming it to "Why I stopped using E.T. and started using E.T." :-)
by Theodores on 1/1/14, 3:44 PM
Did anyone have difficulty recognising 'E.T.' in any of the screenshots, particularly the first one? Or was it just me?
by __m on 1/1/14, 7:40 PM
Well, it still sucks.