I was thinking the same thing and bummed that the series wasn't based on the Huston book.

There is a novel called Sleepless by Charlie Huston about an FFI-esque plague that i thought was excellent…thought that book was the basis for this series from the headline.

There was an article on Slashdot a while back where a home programmer went into the ET source code and made the game more playable as a result: