10 UNACCEPTABLE Video Games

8. E.T. The Extra Terrestrial

Rebounding off that ball of depression, we have a game that was unacceptable for a totally different reason: E.T. Those in the know probably don’t need any more explanation as to why this one made the list but just in case you aren’t, let me run you through it.

This 1982 adventure game is commonly accepted to be one of the worst video games of all time.

Partially a victim of its own hype, the game was criticised for its gameplay, story, bizarre frequency of holes for our hero to fall down, and general crappiness. This was likely due to the extraordinarily tight turnaround demanded of the developers but it didn’t make the poor final product any more acceptable. In fact, the game was so badly received that a load of cartridges were discarded by Atari and buried at a Texas landfill. Though initial reports suggested the dumped video games were exclusively copies of E.T., this wasn’t actually the case, though there were at least 1000 copies of it in there, so, it wasn’t exactly flying off shelves.

Perhaps the worst thing we can say about this iconic disaster, though, is that it contributed to the crash of the video game industry in 1983. Yikes.