[gwern]

To expand on eref's comment a little: you absolutely could apply this or MCTS to ALE (and Guo et al 2014 did it very nicely). After all, the ALE is deterministic and simulatable by definition, so of course you can explore the game tree and reset the simulation as necessary. But people aren't much interested in this approach because using the ALE as a 'simulator' is cheating as far as testing full-strength AI techniques (we don't have simulators of the real world, after all), and the ALE games themselves (unlike Go) are of little intrinsic interest so there's no real benefit to engaging in cheating.