I actually remember that game for just that reason. I never played video games, but I would watch neighbor kids play their Ataris and laughed my ass off to the idea of ET constantly dying.
I was too young to realize just how badly those games sucked, because we'd just gotten a 2600 so I rated all Atari games on a scale of "great" to "kickass" until we got an Intellivison.
The ET game programmer has defended himself well, he says he had to singlehandedly write the whole thing from scratch in a couple weeks.