E.T. cartridges found in infamous Atari landfill

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Tophat Dragoneye

Tophat Dragoneye

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Evidently, Atari did bury its biggest mistake in the New Mexico desert.

Excavators have found copies of the 1982 Atari 2600 cartridge E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial — a notorious flop blamed for console gaming's collapse a year later — in a dig at an Alamagordo, N.M. landfill on Saturday.

The highly publicized dig, which will be the subject of an upcoming documentary, appears to confirm the story that Atari dumped thousands of unsold E.T. cartridges at the site more than 30 years ago.

The image above is of materials recovered from the dig. Polygon's Matt Leone, on the scene, says at least one E.T. package has been found "complete with inserts. They say there are lots more games down there."

Atari, then the dominant maker of home consoles and video games, paid millions for the rights to make an adaptation of the 1982 blockbuster E.T. The resulting game is considered one of the worst of all time and, along with a similarly disappointing port of Pac-Man for the Atari 2600, is blamed for home consoles' ice age from 1983 until the North American launch of the Nintendo Entertainment System.
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Article is from Polygon, here's a link to it: Link

So it turns out that one of the greatest myth in video gaming history is actually true! I must admit, I'm surprised.
 
That is rather awesome. I've seen pictures online that are in black and white showing a mound of games being dumped in a landfill.
 
Well, they do say there's some truth behind every rumour, and this is just one of those times, it seems.

It seems it would make economic sense that they'd landfill stock they know isn't going to move rather than using valuable storage space for it (or maybe just out of embarrassment :p). Still, it's cool that they've been found. Quite a throwback!
 
Wonder how much they'll sell for. Prolly something ridiculous.
 
For some reason I always believed that was a fact (and not a myth), so I'm glad to see it confirmed. :p Wonder if those cartridges still work, or if someone is willing to buy them... and for what price. I assume there must be quite a few copies in there.
 
From what I've read in the past they dumped an ungodly amount of the cartridges in this dump. So if you didn't buy it when it first came out you didn't have it. It would be a miracle if any of these cartridges still worked for as long as they have been in this landfill. I'm not sure they would go for much money. It all depends on how many are found and what condition they are in. Would they go for money then the ones people bought because they have been in the landfill? We don't know.

EDIT: Link

I found another story about it and this one is a good read.
 
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It was basically the videogame equivalent of stripped books.

Oh, and:

MSN said:
He says they found dozens of crushed cartridges that they took home and were still playable in their game consoles.
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Polygon made a new article regarding the excavation, and it would seem that while it was true that E.T. - the videogame was found buried, it is, so far, not in the million as some would believe.

It was true all along.

When the filmmakers at Fuel Entertainment declared their intentions to dig up the landfill where thousands of the 1982 flop E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial have long been said to be buried, many imagined — if not secretly hoped for — an outcome like Al Capone's vault: Shovels full of dirt and debris and nothing connected to the first giant of home console gaming.

In hindsight, the odds were pretty good that yesterday's dig in Alamogordo would find exactly what it was looking for: a copy of E.T. The real dispute over the years was how many of the infamous cartridges — blamed for the mid 1980s console gaming collapse — were actually buried there. The Atari manager responsible for the dumping told the Associated Press that more than 700,000 cartridges were buried on Sept. 26, 1983. Yet while yesterday's excavation did turn up copies of E.T., it does not appear to be a mass burial of the mistake that sealed Atari's doom.

As the story goes, Atari had a lot of unsellable stock in a facility in El Paso. The publisher decided to write off the failure — some $20 million in licensing fees were said to be paid for the rights to adapt E.T. to a video game —and dump it in a landfill 90 miles north in Alamogordo, N.M.

E.T. didn't appear to be the only unsold stock put in the dump, later said to be covered with a concrete layer to discourage scavengers. Indeed, yesterday turned up copies of Atari 2600 adaptations for Centipede, and Phoenix, and another licensed adaptation that bombed, Raiders of the Lost Ark, complete with their old packaging and inserts.

Xbox Entertainment will deliver the documentary of this excavation later this year to Xbox One and Xbox 360. It's provisionally titled "Atari: Game Over" and it is produced by Simon and Jonathan Chinn, and directed by Zak Penn, who has a writing credit in 2012's The Avengers.

So, myth busted? Or finally confirmed? The truth probably is somewhere in between. Yes, Atari's gamble on E.T. — an expensive license for a crummy game rushed to market for the 1982 holidays — doomed the company. And Atari's fall carried with it the home console era of the Intellivision and ColecoVision, too. And the hubris of those days was interred under several feet of New Mexico soil.

In the dark times to come, video gamers turned to arcade games like Gauntlet (made by an Atari division spun off after the crisis) and to home computers, for things like Jumpman and Beach Head and Hardball! Then, in 1986, the Nintendo Entertainment System arrived, ushering in an even greater age of console gaming.

It reads like the canon preceding a fantasy novel — golden ages, proud rulers, a downfall, a restoration, a mystery buried in the desert. Yet there really was some truth to it all, all along.
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Link to article: Link

The link also has some photos of the excavation site if anyone's interested.
 
IWell someone had to eventually find it. About time, pretty neat though
 
Ho ho ho!

But seriously, interesting find especially for gamers :p It doesn't surprise me that they still work, though: electrical systems were a lot simpler then, so there's less intricate parts to come loose or get damaged from old age :L
 
I think they could possibly still go for something even if they didn't work - they could make quite a funny little gaming artefact with all the speculation that surrounded them. Clearly they were interesting enough to make a documentary about, so since it seems they still work, I figure they're enough of a gimmick to make somebody some money.
 
I always figured that there was some truth to this rumor. Glad to know I was right!

And before you ask: yes, E.T. was a truly terrible game. I had it, played it and beat it once by sheer luck. It is one of the buggiest games you'll ever get. The AI sucks, the enemies move faster than you and can walk over obstacles that cripple you, your steps are measured, the tiles that you need are completely random and it's very difficult to actually beat the thing. The basic plot? Build the phone and make the call to get E.T. home. But government agents will hamper you by taking phone parts, if they're not dragging you off somewhere. And beware the pits that you'll fall into as they will eat away at your step meter. Oh and once the phone is built and you've found the right tile to make the call, you have to get to the landing site. And you've only got a certain amount of time to find that area. But if a human follows you there or you don't make it in time, the ship will leave without you and you have to do it all again! Yeah, it wasn't such a bad idea to pitch these things in a landfill. =/
 
If that doesn't make you wanna beat your face into the wall. I never did understand the point of the game.
 
I've never played the game (even though I posted the articles regarding the excavation of it) , but from what I've read here, I can get the idea of how horrible it was.
 
Silverwynde said:
And before you ask: yes, E.T. was a truly terrible game. I had it, played it and beat it once by sheer luck. It is one of the buggiest games you'll ever get. The AI sucks, the enemies move faster than you and can walk over obstacles that cripple you, your steps are measured, the tiles that you need are completely random and it's very difficult to actually beat the thing. The basic plot? Build the phone and make the call to get E.T. home. But government agents will hamper you by taking phone parts, if they're not dragging you off somewhere. And beware the pits that you'll fall into as they will eat away at your step meter. Oh and once the phone is built and you've found the right tile to make the call, you have to get to the landing site. And you've only got a certain amount of time to find that area. But if a human follows you there or you don't make it in time, the ship will leave without you and you have to do it all again! Yeah, it wasn't such a bad idea to pitch these things in a landfill. =/
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I found an interesting read in defense of E.T.'s game design. It basically boiled down to:

1 - You need to read the manual before playing the game. The game's design is too complex to just leap in and figure things out as you go (and for the Pac-Minded era it was released in, this was a pretty gutsy move). And unlike the simple arcade games, there's no automated demo to show/explain it for you (or is there?) .

2 - Yes the game was released with obvious flaws (poor pit collision detection, timer too fast). Somebody actually fixed that. If it hadn't been rushed to market it would have been a better game.
 
Stratelier said:
2 - Yes the game was released with obvious flaws (poor pit collision detection, timer too fast). Somebody actually fixed that. If it hadn't been rushed to market it would have been a better game.
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That would have made a huge difference, as my poor hubby gave the game a whirl on an emulator. This was straight out what you got on the Atari, no fixes or anything and he couldn't finish it. He found it far too irritating to complete. He was pretty surprised that I even attempted it when I was younger and managed to beat it, as it was too much for him.

Yet, he can sit there and do PvP on Marvel's Avengers Alliance... >.<
 
After reading a lot of posts on the matter and watching gameplay videos, I can't help but feel sorry for the kids who loved ET when it first came out and bought this game.

Snarl said:
Beausoleil said:
Snarl said:
Wonder how much they'll sell for. Prolly something ridiculous.
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Probably nothing, since they've been buried in a desert for three decades and probably no longer work.
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Negative, I hear it was confirmed that they still work.
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At this stage, they'll just be infamous collectors' items. People will pay a lot for rare stuff, no matter what it is.
 
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