Legendary E.T. Atari landfill to be exhumed for documentary

[RyGuy45]

Final resting place of the game that brought down the US games industry to be excavated

A Canadian film company has secured the rights to excavate a site in the Nevada desert rumored to be the final resting place of more than 3.5 million copies of ET for the Atari 2600. According to krqe.com, a deal has been struck that will see Canadian film products Fuel Industries excavate the site for a documentary.

The game famously collapsed the US games industry in the early 1980s. Atari – then the most powerful console maker globally – paid $25 million for the license to make the game version of ET. In today's money, that's just over $60 million.

The game's development is famous within the industry for being rocky. Negotiations for the license ended in late July 1982, leaving creator Howard Scott Warshaw with just five weeks to program the entire game. It was critically panned and was a huge commercial failure. Even today it is frequently named the worst game ever made.

The 1982 release quickly became the stuff of urban legend.

The biggest legend is that unable to sell the games, Atari buried the cartridges in a landfill outside El Paso.

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There’s an old story often told by video game fanatics about Atari, a New Mexico landfill and the worst game ever made. As the story goes, when the bottom fell out of the once-booming video game market in 1983, Atari was left with millions of unsold copies of the E.T. game for the 2600 console. The company then sought out a landfill in the American desert (only about 150 miles away from Roswell) in which to dump millions of unsold game cartridges and some other equipment.

This story is commonly told as a cautionary tale, a story about one of Corporate America’s largest failures. Now one Canadian documentary film crew wants to get to the bottom of the great video game crash of 1983 and the alleged New Mexico dump. According to KRQE News, the city council of Alamogordo, New Mexico has granted the film crew access to the landfill and will let them excavate the site to discover if Atari really did dump millions of copies of E.T. in a desert. The Canadian film company, Fuel Industries, has chosen a good time to begin the digging, as September will mark the 30th anniversary of the alleged 1983 New Mexico Dump.

According to TVTropes.org, Atari is often blamed for kickstarting the Great Video Game Crash of 1983. American companies like Atari had long dominated the video game scene with consoles, arcade games and popular titles like Pac-Man. Yet things were getting shaky at Atari, a company which Apple cofounder Steve Jobs once worked for in the mid-70s. Former employees were launching independent gaming platforms, many of which used stolen parts or ideas from Atari.

Facing competition, the company started the scramble to stay relevant. One way to do this – so the they thought – was to pay between $20 and $25 million to license the rights for the film E.T. – The Extraterrestrial, the box office smash of 1982. They acquired the rights for this game in July, placing them in a serious time crunch to have the game ready in time for the lucrative holiday season. Their developers had only five weeks in which to create this game, a project which they allegedly spent up to $125 million to build in addition to the licensing fees.

Atari clearly expected this game to go gangbusters and created five million copies. Yet when the game finally hit the shelves, gamers complained about terrible graphics as well as a confusing and endless game play. According to some reports, Atari sold only 1.5 million copies of the game, many of which were allegedly sent back to the company by angry gamers who felt it was a waste of money. Later that year the company announced a smaller increase in profits than expected by analysts and, as a result, their stock crashed. Atari was left with nearly half a billion dollars in losses by the end of 1983, and some of that likely came from the dump in Alamogordo, New Mexico.

The Alamogordo Daily News covered the Atari dump when it happened, but they did not catalog exactly what was being dumped. What’s more, one man who owned a garbage company at the time claims he saw Atari dumping cartridges and consoles in September 1983, and the New York Times even did a story on the dump, claiming the company had 14 truckloads full of material from their El Paso, TX warehouse. "It was the game systems, actually the game systems themselves it was actual cartridges and games, ET and so on," Joe Lewandowski said.

Fuel Industries now has six months to go digging in search of these 30-year-old icons of failure, but it might not be easy going. According to KRQE, when Atari completed their dump, they smashed the cartridges and consoles and covered the heap in concrete. Fuel may very well locate the forgotten heap, but it’s possible that nothing they find there will be salvageable.

Source: Michael Harper for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online

 

[supermanblue79]

Great read.I played this game as a kid on my 7800 and hated it.
It's by far the worst game I've ever played.

Can't wait to see what's burried in that landfill.

There are so many defunked gaming systems from my childhood.
-Atari 2600, 5200, 7800, Jaguar, Lynx
-Colecovision
-Vectrex
-NEC TurboGraphix 16
-Sega Master System, Gensis, CD, Saturn
-Panasonic 3DO
-Philips CDi

My parents threw so much money away during my chlidhood.

 

[lobotomybeats]

come on, the graphics weren't that bad

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[dens415]

is that a dong on E.T.?

 

[johnny quid]

It would be awesome if, for some reason, they were not able to pull the games out of the hole.

 

[elpablo21]

Atari 2600 was a glorious system

 

[cincoseisdos]

W TF does complaining about something such as graphics on an ATARI even mean?

 

[putting in work]

Didn't read the whole article, but what was the purpose of them doing this?

 

[Ja's 2¢]

Didn't read the whole article, but what was the purpose of them doing this?

the article ain't even that long.

 

[trasoul82]

PITFALL was that $#!+

Spoiler: Warning: Spoiler!

View media item 441139?#@% XBox and ?#@% Playstation.

 

[semf]

ha, I had this game too for my 2600. I bet it's in the attic somewhere. i agree, the game was just not intuitive to play.

ET was even harder and more frustrating than . . .
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[pr0phecy718]

angry video game nerd is supposed to be coming out with a movie on this

look up the trailer on youtube

 

[k town trash]

what was the point of the game tho? its like there was no objective just walking around in the green background

 

[beh235]

Atari 2600 was a glorious system

But this game was horrid. Even as yong beh I thought it was crappy . I also hated the Smurfs for Colecovision as well. Stupid knob

 

[beh235]

angry video game nerd is supposed to be coming out with a movie on this

look up the trailer on youtube

Really? He's that dude

 

[water]

Saw this article on yahoo and researched it a bit. Game was god awful. 

 

[beh235]

Saw this article on yahoo and researched it a bit. Game was god awful. 

Gotta play it to get the full effect young bretheren, but yes it was that bad

 

[elpablo21]

Atari 2600 was a glorious system

But this game was horrid. Even as yong beh I thought it was crappy

. I also hated the Smurfs for Colecovision as well. Stupid knob

I never played it myself.

I had mostly sports games

Boxing was my ****

 

[beh235]

Atari 2600 was a glorious system

But this game was horrid. Even as yong beh I thought it was crappy . I also hated the Smurfs for Colecovision as well. Stupid knob

I never played it myself.

I had mostly sports games

Boxing was my ****

View media item 441352

Trust me, you didn't miss anything. Once ET falls in the pit you might as well stare at it. I couldn't figure out how to get out