Every gaming community has its ghost story. Ours is a New Mexico landfill and one small alien who allegedly killed an entire industry. A new piece on Note goes back to the actual game, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial for the Atari 2600, and asks the question we've all been too busy dunking on it to ask: is it actually the worst game ever made?

The short answer is no, and it's kind of refreshing to see someone say it out loud.

The legend goes like this. Howard Scott Warshaw coded the whole thing in about five weeks in 1982 to hit the holiday season, Atari printed millions of cartridges, the game confused kids, sales cratered, and unsold copies got dumped in the desert. The landfill part turned out to be true, excavated in 2014 in a genuinely great documentary moment. Somewhere along the way, E.T. went from "rushed and confusing" to "single-handedly caused the 1983 crash," which is a lot of weight for one little pixelated alien to carry.

The re-examination digs into the actual design, and this is where it gets interesting for anyone who's ever wiped on a raid boss and blamed the game. E.T. had goals beyond the typical 2600 fare. You collect phone pieces, you evade a scientist and an FBI agent who can steal your progress, you manage an energy meter that ticks down with every action. There's a real game in there, an adventure-style loop with actual objectives in an era when most games were "shoot the squares."

The infamous pits are the sticking point, and fair enough. Falling into a well and clawing your way out by floaty levitation is the part everyone remembers, mostly because the collision detection was punishing and the mechanic was never explained. In 1982 you didn't get a tutorial. You got vibes, a photocopied manual, and hope.

Read fairly, the whole thing comes down to this: E.T. wasn't broken, it was under-taught and over-shipped, made on an impossible timeline by one developer who was genuinely proud of it. Warshaw himself has spent decades being lovely about it, and he's right to be proud. The game that followed his Raiders of the Lost Ark was ambitious in ways most of its contemporaries weren't.

Was it good? Not really. Was it the worst game ever? Not close. Ride to Hell exists. I wrote about that list of the worst games of the 2010s recently and it's a reminder that we keep handing this one title to a 1982 cartridge out of narrative convenience more than merit.

What I keep coming back to is the community side of it. The landfill dig in 2014 wasn't a punishment, it was a celebration. Hundreds of people showed up in Alamogordo to pull cartridges out of the dirt and take pictures with them like relics. The "worst game ever" became a piece of shared history that people actually cherish, and the copies that got dug up went to museums. That doesn't happen to games people genuinely hate.

If you've never actually played it, E.T. is easy to find in Atari's modern collections. Boot it up with the manual open next to you, which is how it was always meant to be played, and give it twenty minutes.

Ever defended a game everyone else wrote off? That's the E.T. experience in a nutshell. The little alien deserved a better trial, and it finally got one.