Under the microscope: E.T. Interplanetary Mission (PlayStation)

In which the beloved movie alien condemns terrorism in very colorful terms

It’s a Saturday morning in October of 2001. I’m at a high school cross country meet in the Midwestern United States, warming up with my team for the race that’s about to start. Suddenly, a shout rings out: “Oh no!”

The shout was from one of the parent volunteers. “We don’t have enough flag stickers!” she explains, panic in her voice. She had, of course, been putting American flag stickers on our race bibs in honor of 9/11.

“Don’t worry,” another parent said. “I’ve got more.” He went to his truck to retrieve them — crisis averted. Everyone was relieved.

Why am I bringing this up in an article about reverse engineering old video games? Well, as a partial explanation of this image:

A video game screenshot that I promise is real. It shows E.T., the famous movie alien, underneath some text that reads “Fuck off Bin Laden.”

Look, it was a strange time. There were anti-Taliban songs on the radio. Video games featuring airplanes were being canceled. Movies were being hastily edited and re-shot. Even old movies were getting altered — a new version of E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial was released in 2002, and in one scene the word “terrorist” is replaced with “hippie.”

That brings us to the topic at hand: that anniversary edition of E.T. was accompanied by a video game adaptation, E.T. Interplanetary Mission. This E.T. game was better received than the first one, but hasn’t managed to hold much interest in the years since it came out.

I took a look at this game, however, and found some things that held my interest:

• The message about Osama Bin Laden above.

• A cheat code that gives you 100 lives.

• A hidden model editing screen.

Details on how to access these in-game — and on the reverse engineering involved in finding them — are below.

---

The secret credits

To get to the Bin Laden screen, first start a new game. In the first stage, approach each of the flowers with the D-pad. Press Circle to activate them, then stand next to them to pick them up them:

The “healing” instructions screen.

Once you’ve collected the fourth flower, you’ll be taken to the next stage. Before doing anything there, press Start and choose Exit from the pause menu.

You’ll be returned to the main menu. Choose Options and then enter this sequence:

R2, R1, L2, L1

A new item will appear — Credits:

Left: The Options screen in its normal state. Right: The Options screen showing the hidden Credits item.

Select it to see the staff roll:

Some of the credits screens. One of them misspells “friends.”

The Bin Laden message is at the end, as shown in the video above. I presume it was put in by Diego “Egg” Link. Or possibly Mark “Beno” Bell? I’d love to know — I reached out to both of them, but didn’t get a response.

This trick works in both the NTSC-U and PAL versions of the game.

---

100 Lives

The game recognizes another cheat code. Enter this sequence at the title screen:

L2, L1, R2, R1

When you start the game you’ll have 100 lives:

100 lives in the ice level

---

The graphics editor

I found one more hidden thing in this game — there’s an “Edit graphics” screen that was presumably used by the developers:

This isn’t accessible with a cheat code, alas. Changing a single memory address during gameplay makes it show up, though. 80077d38 (NTSC-U version) is usually 0x04 while you’re controlling E.T. Setting it to 0x01 makes the menu appear.

---

Technical details

I found these screens by examining a memory snapshot from the Mednafen debugger:

The Bin Laden string in memory

You can see in the debugger screenshot that there are neighboring strings that seem to be part of a staff roll. Looking for things related to that, I found:

8007788c "CREDITS"

Loading the memory snapshot into Ghidra allowed me to trace that string to the function at 80033bb8. Setting an execution breakpoint for that function’s address in Mednafen’s debugger showed that it’s active on the Options screen.

Part of the Options screen handler function has logic like this (pseudo-Python adapted from Ghidra’s decompilation):

if DWORD_800777e4 != 0x00000000:
    ... # Some input handling code
    print_string("CREDITS")

That is, if the value at 800777e4 is nonzero, the Credits menu item shows up. Later in the function is the logic that sets that value:

if (pressed_button !=0) and (flower_count == 0x04):
    if (cheat_counter == 0) and (pressed_button == R2_BUTTON):
        cheat_counter = 1
    elif (
        ((cheat_counter == 1) and (pressed_button == R1_BUTTON)) or 
        ((cheat_counter == 2) and (pressed_button == L2_BUTTON))
    ):
        play_sfx(0x18, 0, 0)
        cheat_counter += 1
    elif (cheat_counter == 3) and (pressed_button == L1_BUTTON):
        play_sfx(0x17, 0, 0)
        DWORD_800777e4 = 0x00000001

That’s the cheat code handling. If press the buttons in the right order, a counter increments and a sound effect plays. When the fourth button is pressed, the value that activates the Credits item is set.

There’s very similar code in the function at 80032f8c, which handles input at the title screen.

For the graphics editor, I noticed these strings:

80011704 "EDIT ATTRIBUTES"
80011714 "EDIT GRAPHICS"

Tracing references to them in Ghidra led to the function at 80020678, which gets called if 80077d38 is 0x01. That value is something like “game state” — 0x04 is normal gameplay; 0x06 signals the end of a stage; and 0x07 is “game over.”

---

Outro

Putting “Fuck off Bin Laden” in your video game seems weird now, but I think it probably made sense at the time. The Onion ran an article in September, 2001 called Not Knowing What Else To Do, Woman Bakes American-Flag Cake. If your medium was cake, you expressed your feelings in frosting. If your medium was video games, you expressed them in Easter eggs.

I wonder if the game would have been pulled from shelves if the credits Easter egg had been published in 2002? Hidden content in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas caused some trouble a few years later. Maybe copies this E.T. game would have to have been sent to landfills too.

I do these articles about retro game reverse engineering every week. Here are some others you might enjoy:

• The “SRK” Easter egg in Radiant Silvergun

• The “falling lamp” mechanism in NiGHTS Into Dreams

• Cracking Ecco the Dolphin: Defender of the Future’s password scheme

Subscribe to get the next one as soon as I publish it:

Feel free to use the information and screenshots in this article on your favorite reference site or fan page. You may use the video if you link back to this article.

Many thanks to my friends Lee and Michael for reading the first draft of this article and providing feedback. And thanks as always to Ashlyn Anstee for the Rings of Saturn logo.