"Atari were of a mind that giving game designers credit for the games made about as much sense as crediting the office carpet or venetian blinds, and a bunch of designers disagreed and split off to form Activision. Essentially, this blew the starting whistle for 3rd-party development, flooding the market with badly-made, derivative garbage by inexperienced companies. The enormous letdown of such a hugely anticipated game as E.T. merely caused the scales to fall from the eyes of the buying public: "Hey! All these overpriced, bleep-y games with pixels the size of Post-It notes are actually kinda shit!" Yeah, seems obvious to us, but cut them some slack. It was the '80s; they still thought Bananarama was good."