E.T. Phone Home!

Also known as: N/A

Developer: Atari

While it has its defenders, E.T. on the Atari 2600 simply is not a good game. It shows signs that it could have been if it had been given more time for the developer to work out the bugs and figure out a way for players to not drop into a pit every three or four seconds…but it still wasn't very good. A year later, Atari took a stab at it again, but this time with their 8-bit computers. In the Atari 2600 game, E.T.'s interplanetary phone had been broken into three pieces and you needed to navigate the hairless sloth-looking alien around in an effort to collect them all. In Phone Home, it's a similar situation, except you're in control of Elliot here…and instead of collecting piece of a phone, you're collecting various items so that E.T. can build his own phone. You're looking for a battery, a circuit board, a coat hanger, a fork, a record player, a saw blade, a tin can, some tinfoil, an umbrella, and some wire….depending on the difficulty setting you choose, you only need a few of these items. On higher difficulty settings, not only do you need more items, but you'll find multiple colors of the same item and you'll need to return not only the correct item, but the correct colored item to that needy alien. The items are invisible at all times, and only appear when Elliot is close to them…so how exactly do you find these items without wandering around like a lunatic? The player can use E.T.'s psychic abilities to show Elliot where the items are on the map…but you need to be careful when using this, as it costs energy to do so. Ask E.T. for help too many times and he may not be able to phone home after you retrieve those items. Agents and scientists prowl the neighborhood and Elliot also needs to avoid them…somehow they know that by picking up some tinfoil that was laying in the woods, he's obviously helping that extra-terrestrial that they're trying to hunt down. If you collect enough pieces, you then control E.T. and have to navigate to the landing site in the forest so that he can get on the ship and fly home safely. Overall, this is a much better effort than the Atari 2600 game was, and while I only find it to be just barely passable, I didn't completely hate my time playing this. Running from agents and scientists can be annoying, and it takes some time to get familiar with the map, but if you were looking for an E.T. game that didn't make you want to toss your copy in a pit, so it knew your pain, then E.T. Phone Home! might win you over.

Review added: 07/20/2026