It also destroyed the video game industry for a generation. So y'know, that was fun.

 

Superman 64, you couldn't fly down a street without something going wrong.

 

I don't make a habit of playing bad games... almost ever.

One of the worst ones I've played in recent memory has to be Kingdom Hearts 3 though. I got so annoyed and frustrated with it I eventually just gave up. I remember ranting to Jon about it while playing it, so I had countless thoughts about it, the only positive one being 'The Toy Story world is kinda pretty,' and that's about it.

 

Every Final Fantasy after 10.

 

There was a PC game back in 2002 named Revolution, and it was fucking unplayable. Granted, it was a Fun Labs game, so in retrospect it's unsurprising, but 15 year old me didn't know that and just saw a cool-looking cyberpunk game (not to be confused with a Cyberpunk game).

I say unplayable because somewhere around the 4th or 5th level, someone at Fun Labs forgot to put a trigger to open a door and the game was unbeatable.

 

I think when it comes to the Great Video Game Crash of 1983, ET was far more a symptom than a cause. After all, there've been plenty of other shitty movie tie-in games since then, and none of them crashed the industry.

 

Eh. It was the straw that broke the camel's back.

Essentially, what had happened is that the game industry had entered a period of excessive shovelware, where incredibly shitty games that barely worked (or sometimes just flat-out didn't work at all) were shat out incredibly quickly to capitalize on the emerging market. Even before ET was released, there were signs that the gaming industry was in for a rough time, but nobody cared. They were in a bubble, it couldn't possibly pop!

Then along comes ET, which Atari bet big on, investing millions intro advertising and manufacturing it (and basically nothing on actually developing it). It came out, was total garbage, and the audience at large recoiled in horror, and it lost so much money investors were scared off of video games for over a decade.