![\"Tetris](\"http:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/04\/Tetris-score-screen.jpg\")
<\/a>Nintendo Tetris score screen<\/p><\/div>\n
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Gather round, young whippersnappers. Uncle Jan is going to tell you about the time they say gaming almost died.<\/p>\n
The year was 1982, and Steven Spielberg\u2019s E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial took the box office by storm.<\/p>\n
This was in June, and by\u00a0December, Atari released a tie-in video game that would set the precedent for games based on movies for years to come.<\/p>\n
Regarded as the worst game ever made, E.T. was credited with damaging the reputation of the North American video game industry to the point that the whole thing came crashing down in 1983.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s the conventional wisdom, anyway. And it is completely wrong.<\/p>\n
While Howard Scott Warshaw did only have 5 weeks to design and build E.T., his former Atari designer colleagues came to his defence in the 2014 documentary \u201cAtari: Game Over\u201d.<\/p>\n
E.T., they said, was far from the worst game ever. That title should really belong to games like Fire Fly and Trespasser.<\/p>\n
It was a series of unfortunate events that led to the fall of Atari and the great North American video game crash.<\/p>\n
A flooded console market, bad games that had poor sales, and competition from home computers all contributed to the crash.<\/p>\n
Regardless of the reasons, Nintendo was waiting in the wings to step into the void Atari left, giving birth to some of best-known franchises in gaming.<\/p>\n
<\/a>Nintendo Tetris score screen<\/p><\/div>\n