Il termine blockbuster, or those cinematic films that, thanks to a series of fortunate circumstances (a successful advertising campaign, iconic characters, and wide distribution in theaters around the world), become so popular that they remain recognizable and appreciated even over time, did not originate with the loud Fast and Furious saga or even with the Marvel superheroes: we have to point the telescope of time much further back, more precisely to the early 1980s, when a young and hopeful director named Spielberg turned the universal childhood desire to call home into something memorable: that is how E.T. – The Extraterrestrial was born.
And from that day on, the world of video games was never the same again, because E.T. is (unfortunately) synonymous with the biggest failure for the Atari 2600, but with its E.T. Phone Home version in 1983 it somehow managed to make amends, although the greater damage, burying thousands of unsold copies in the desert (I swear it's all true!), had already been done.
E.T. Phone Home immediately distances itself from its unfortunate predecessor, released the year before, bringing to the center stage no longer the friendly alien with the shiny, healing finger, but rather his best human friend, Elliott, the boy with the legendary red hooded sweatshirt whose mission will be to recover the “pieces” needed to contact the alien’s family among the stars and thus lead them to Earth, so as to truly bring him home.
An inversion of trend that is very strong, as far as the narrative structure is concerned if we want to call it that, because in fact it “puts aside” the main character, a figure of extreme success on celluloid but, alas, painfully unsuccessful on the purely video game level.
Rigorously in single player, we will guide the small and brave Elliott through the depths of his provincial town, among woods, roads, and houses in search of the pieces needed to build the phone the alien needs: we will be able to move in all eight possible directions using the joystick, that evil device you attached to the table with suction cups and which risked coming loose from its base every time you played. During the quest, it will be vital to avoid at all costs encountering law enforcement and government men, whose only goal is to capture E.T. in order to study him like a guinea pig, denying him the right to make the phone call; otherwise we would run into a nice paradox.
Il gameplay of E.T. is basically all there is to it: wandering around the game areas on offer, collecting the items needed to assemble the device E.T. needs, and avoiding being caught red-handed. Graphically, there is a nice leap forward; the textures of the houses, trees, and cars in the neighborhoods are enjoyable (we’re talking about 40 years ago), you can select the difficulty level, and this becomes important if we were to have trouble completing the game, in which we will see E.T.’s parents’ flying saucer arrive on Earth to retrieve the prodigal son, just like in the film.
A different matter from the game for the 2600, it must be said that the effort to offer something extra is there and it shows, such as the possibility of telepathically contacting the alien, who has remained at home without energy, so as to have constant reminders about the pieces we are missing to complete the mission. But trying at all costs to give a chance to a game born old even for its own time would not be objective, let’s admit it: despite interesting additions such as Elliott’s energy bar, which gradually decreases as time passes and gives the overall gameplay a sense of urgency that increases its difficulty (and longevity), E.T. Phone Home does offer a meaningful experience from a purely historical point of view, but it retains most of the flaws of its unfortunate predecessor.
