The 10 Worst Games of All Time

Number 1: The Worst Game of All Time

1. E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (Atari, 1982)

Platform: Atari 2600

About a third of the people I quizzed came up with this title almost instantly, and it's not hard to see why. No matter how you rate it, E.T. was a misbegotten product that deserved to be buried. (And, as things turned out, it was. More on that in a minute.)

How, you may wonder, does someone screw up the one-two punch of the year's most popular movie and the number one video game console? Through a combination of poor planning and unbridled optimism. Warner Communications, then Atari's parent company, sealed the deal to make a video game adaptation of the blockbuster movie in the summer of 1982, aiming to have the cartridge out for the Christmas shopping season. (Remember the TV ad, with E.T. in a Santa outfit? No? You can refresh your memory.) The result was a severely compressed development schedule, giving programmer Howard Scott Warshaw a mere five weeks to pull the game together.

Then corporate hubris entered the mix: With the expectation of runaway sales, Atari produced 4 million cartridges.

Unfortunately for Atari--and the collective psyche of anyone who ended up buying the cartridge--the rushed development was apparent on the screen. Everyone I spoke to who singled out particular gripes mentioned the pits that the player, as E.T., fell into and would then have to slowly levitate out of, which led to horrendously monotonous game play. None of the qualitative comments I received about the game are printable, except for one: "Famously bad."

Atari's big gamble didn't pay off. Less than 40 percent of the cartridges sold, one of the major financial blows that resulted in Atari's bankruptcy in 1984.

Amazingly, E.T.'s story doesn't end there. In 1983, faced with literally millions of unsold and returned E.T. games added to its already sizeable inventory of unusable cartridges, Atari opted for an environmentally unfriendly (some would say downright hostile) solution: The company dumped them into a city landfill in Alamogordo, New Mexico, where they were crushed, buried, and later covered in a layer of cement. The incident was reported in the New York Times and prompted protests and legislation from city officials.