You can honestly do far, far worse. E.T.'s biggest issue is its lack of conveyance, something that was a potential issue with every video game of that era if you lost the manual. If you fall in a pit, hit left or right as soon as you switch screens. If you're struggling with the FBI Agents/Scientists, switch to Game 3 to get rid of them. Don't sweat the timer of doom.
E.T. is a bad game, of course, but it's not really the cause of the 1983 Video Game Crash. It's more emblematic of Atari's hubris at the time. Right before Atari went all-in on E.T.'s success, they produced 15 million copies of the 2600 port of Pac-Man when only 5 million Atari 2600s had been sold. To hope any single game would move ten million consoles was foolhardy; to put that hope into one of the all-time worst video game ports was just inviting disaster. E.T. needed to be an overwhelming success; to that end, they got the best possible talent they could in developer Howard Scott Warsaw, gave him five weeks, and set him at it. Warsaw did the best he could, but there was no escaping the hole Atari dug for themselves.
E.T. is a bad game, of course, but it's not really the cause of the 1983 Video Game Crash. It's more emblematic of Atari's hubris at the time. Right before Atari went all-in on E.T.'s success, they produced 15 million copies of the 2600 port of Pac-Man when only 5 million Atari 2600s had been sold. To hope any single game would move ten million consoles was foolhardy; to put that hope into one of the all-time worst video game ports was just inviting disaster. E.T. needed to be an overwhelming success; to that end, they got the best possible talent they could in developer Howard Scott Warsaw, gave him five weeks, and set him at it. Warsaw did the best he could, but there was no escaping the hole Atari dug for themselves.