E. T. The Extra-Terrestrial - The Worst Video Game Ever?

The Kitchen Sisters Present

The Kitchen Sisters & Radiotopia

Society & Culture

4.6 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 3 June 2025

⏱️ 28 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Deep within the National Museum of American History’s vaults is a battered Atari case containing what’s known as “the worst video game of all time.” The game is E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, and it was so bad that not even the might of Steven Spielberg could save it. It was so loathsome that all remaining copies were buried deep in the desert. And it was so horrible that it’s blamed for the collapse of the American home video game industry in the early 1980s. The story of just what went SO wrong with E.T.

Produced by Lizzie Peabody for Sidedoor, a podcast from the Smithsonian with support from PRX.

The Kitchen Sisters Present is produced by The Kitchen Sisters (Davia Nelson & Nikki Silva) with Nathan Dalton and Brandi Howell. The Kitchen Sisters Productions is part of Radiotopia from PRX.

For more visit kitchensisters.org

Transcript

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0:00.0	RadioTopia. Welcome to The Kitchen Sisters present.
0:04.0	From PRX. We're the Kitchen Sisters, Davia Nelson, and Nikki Silva.
0:10.2	Hey there, I'm excited to tell you that one of our favorite Radiotopia siblings, Ear Hustle, is back with the new season.
0:17.0	Ear Hustle is a show about life inside prison, but it's not your typical prison podcast.
0:22.8	Co-host Nigel Poor and Erlon Woods have recently been spending time at four California prisons
0:28.0	and have a season's worth of funny, surprising, and unforgettable stories to share.
0:33.7	In a recent episode, they were able to visit a groundbreaking prison hospice, where they spoke to men who are grappling with the reality of dying inside prison.
0:42.7	Also coming up this season are stories about the objects people keep inside their prison cells, complicated mom-daughter relationships in prison, and incarcerated people who wonder whether they've become too comfortable behind bars.
0:55.8	Stories about life on the inside told by those who live it.
0:59.4	Find ear hustle wherever you get your podcasts.
1:07.6	Over the past weeks, I'm sure you've noticed, there has been a tsunami of firings and shake-ups
1:14.1	at museums, libraries, archives, universities, performing and cultural arts organizations
1:19.7	to say nothing of NPR, PBS, and CPB.
1:24.1	The keepers of our cultures, arts, history, humanities, keepers of the free flow of information and ideas are under attack.
1:33.3	This is all part of, quote, restoring truth and sanity to American history.
1:40.3	It says that the Smithsonian promotes narratives that portray American and Western values as inherently harmful and oppressive.
1:48.0	We beg to differ.
1:50.0	Today, the Kitchen Sisters present an episode of Side Door, the Smithsonian's podcast, that takes you deep into the museum's collection, where a small dirt-covered object reveals the buried history of the fall of a corporate giant.
2:22.1	This is Side Door, a podcast from the Smithsonian with support from PRX.
2:23.4	I'm Lizzie Peabody.
2:35.7	I'm part of a crowd of some four or five hundred people waiting to get into a dump.
2:43.2	This is Howard Scott Warshaw, and on April 26, 2014, he was part of an unusual scene.
	...

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