2 – Pac-Man (Atari 2600)
Now hold on, before you burn me at the stake, I love Pac-Man just as much as the next person, but the version that was ported to Atari from arcade was ghastly. The Atari wasn’t powerful enough to run Pac-Man in all of its glory, so the result was serious frame-rate issues that only allowed one ghost on the screen at a time. Even the graphics took a hit (as if the graphics could get any worse). It sold well at the time but I attribute that to the hype it built from the arcade version. If you want to enjoy a nice game of Pac-Man, for the love of all that is holy, do yourself a favour and avoid the Atari version.
1 – E.T. The Extra Terrestrial (Atari 2600)
No surprise here! E.T. takes the cake for top spot in worst video games ever made for the simple fact that it sunk Atari and almost destroyed the entire video game industry — it’s really that bad. Where do I begin? First, E.T. took only five weeks to make because it was rushed for a Christmas launch, which didn’t give developers enough time to work out the kinks. The game itself had terrible graphics, even for Atari’s standards, but the worst part of it was the gameplay in that no one knew what to do or how to do it.
About 1.5 million copies were unsold and shipped out to a landfill in New Mexico to be buried. When you have to shamefully dispose of your game in a desert, that’s a good indication it was garbage. The discarded games have since been dug up, most likely to be used as kindling for a fire.
So there you have it, the worst video games we’ve ever seen. I have to give credit to these games because in some retrospect having made such terrible games helped future developers learn from these mistakes. There’s still many bad games out in the world, if there’s any we’ve missed sound off in the comments.