E.T.

E.T. is the second episode of the first season. It is preceded by The Woz and is followed by Stonervision.

Plot

The episode starts with Dave waking up in his and Jerry's office, naked and still hung over from weed. He and Jerry talk about what he did the night before (as Dave was too high to remember anything) and Clare entered the office to announce that Larrity was calling a meeting in the Break Room. Dave decides to go to the meeting still naked.

At the meeting, Larrity announces that he has a "special guest." As Larrity is getting the guest, Dave expects it to be a motivational speaker who will tear up phone books, but it ends up being Steven Spielberg. Jerry ends up wetting himself because Spielberg is his idol. Larrity announces that he has secured the rights to make a game about Spielberg's upcoming movie, E.T.: The Extra Terrestrial, but the game had to be done in one night. He assigned Dave to go see the movie, and come back and tell everyone about the plot. However, at the theater, he ends up selling his ticket to a boy and using the money to go to a strip club.

When he gets back, he finds that Jerry (who he had Benny give candy to earlier) was so hyper that his fists were bleeding from punching the wall. He improvises the plot, making up things that would sound ridiculous to anyone who had seen the movie, such as ET looking for the Ark of the Covenant and becoming an actor.

Needless to say, the next morning, the game ended up being horrible due to Dave's retarded story. Dave wanted to make some tweaks to the game, but there was no time, as Clare announced that the truck had left, and the game would be in stores within an hour.

Dave and Jerry stole Larrity's car to try and take the rig. Though they could not outfight the truck driver, when he went inside the gas station, they unhitched the trailer and took it back to GameAVision, only to find out that that was only one of a series of trucks shipping a total of over four million copies of the game. Knowing they could not possibly steal them all, Jerry simply crossed his fingers and hoped that the kids would not notice that it sucked. In fact, the game was so horrible that one child even got more cancer.

Back at GameAVision, a mob was coming their way. Dave and Jerry tried to evacuate Larrity from the building, but upon looking out the window, noticed that the mob was headed, not for GameAVision, but for Bellicovision. Larrity explained that he knew how horrible the game was, and swapped the logos so that Bellicovision would get all the heat for creating the game. After scolding Dave and Jerry for stealing his car, he calms down, and shows them a warehouse where 3,999,000 of the four million ET games were being stored as the show ends.

Video Game References

• The scene where Dave and Jerry attempt to intercept the truck containing the games copies the look and gameplay of Spyhunter.
• Big-Ass Dolphin, the game Jerry completes at the very beginning of the episode, is likely a reference to Ecco the Dolphin for the Sega Mega Drive.

References

• E.T. actually was a video game released at the time this show takes place. Like in this show, the real game was rushed through production (though it had five weeks, instead of one night). It was so horrible that it played a large part in the (now historic) Video Game Crash of 1983.
• Larrity's deal on the E.T. licensing was $30 (I said 20, you son of a bitch!) million, the same amount as the cost in real life.
• There were three instances of Larrity settling his differences with someone else with a wrestling match called Wrassle Mania. This is a reference to Wrestle Mania, the biggest show in professional wrestling, and wrasslin', which is the word "wrestling" pronounced in a deep southern accent.
• The boy who wants to buy Dave's ticket to E.T. is named Manoj, but Dave says it's too long and he will call him M.  Then Dave pitches him a movie idea about a guy who's dead but doesn't know until the end.  The boy is M. Night Shymalan and the pitch is the plot for The Sixth Sense.
• There are several references to Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark in this episode. Part of Dave's game pitch steals from the plot and infamous face-melting scene from the movie (e.g. "He's searching for the Lost Ark of the Covenant and he has to melt a Nazi's face off."). In the montage of displeased gamers across Sunnyvale, one of the scenes shows a bunch of Nazis getting incinerated by a pixelated Ark of the Covenant, another reference to the face-melting scene. In the final scene, the 3.99 million copies of the games are stored in a warehouse in the back of the office building that closely resembles the warehouse that the Ark of the Covenant was stored in in the final scene of the movie. George Lucas also makes an appearance here, who directed Indiana Jones.

• The real fate of the E.T. games had them taken to a landfill in New Mexico. Unlike the fate of the games in the episode, the cartridges in real life were all crushed and buried under concrete.

Notes

• Larrity swapped the names on the cartridges because he knew how horrible the game was. One episode prior, he admitted that he knew nothing about video games, but after revealing the truth, proclaims "I don't have to be a pig farmer to know a cow turd when I see it!". Either he was lying, or he learns quickly. Judging by the other players' reactions to the game, it's more likely that he knew what he had to do simply because it was that bad.
• Howard Scott Warshaw is the designer and programmer of E.T. The Game. In the world of Code Monkeys, Jerry fills this role, who coincidentally idolizes Warshaw.
• Interestingly, its first airing was on the same night, immediately after The Woz.
• Mary's line about Dave and Jerry's E.T. game being the "Ishtar of gaming" is actually an anachronism. E.T. was released in 1982 while Ishtar would not be released until 1987.