7 TERRIBLE Video Games That Made The Industry Better

3. E.T. - Tie-In Games No Longer A License To Print Money

This point has been made at varying times over the years, with the most recent being the initial slate of MCU tie-in games (Captain America: Super Soldier, Thor and The Incredible Hulk), putting Marvel off doing anything other than apps until Spider-Man came along in 2018.

LONG before that though, was E.T. - a game assembled in just five weeks. Why? Because there was money to be made, Atari were flying very high indeed, and a game licensed off an incredibly popular movie should've been an easy cheque to cash.

Instead... it almost killed the entire gaming industry.

You can do wider reading on the state of gaming at the time - how the medium was seen as something for children, and mostly a way to kill time - but the real takeaway comes from treating consumers like total fools. In this case E.T. fans, who'd blindly snap up anything with a recognisable logo.

E.T. the game sold like hell, its remaining copies were buried in the Nevada desert in an attempt to move on, and it would take Nintendo arriving on western shores with both Mario AND Zelda to get half the planet caring about video games all over again.

E.T. will forever be the biggest reminder, that just because you HAVE a "license to print money" in theory, it's never a foregone conclusion.