Buried Atari E.T. game carts unearthed

by Vladimir Cole { Jan 25th 2006 at 4:01AM }

This music video by director Keith Schofield for the song "When I Wake Up" by Wintergreen doesn't appear to have a damned thing to do with the song's lyrics, but we dig it anyways because it tells the story of Atari's E.T. game fiasco in which the company mass produced a ~~game~~ piece of garbage that nobody wanted. This is one of the most important lessons in video game history distilled to a three-minute music video. What's not to like?

[Thanks, Laughingman]

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

SilverSurfer @ Jan 25th 2006 4:21AM

Is ET truly the worst game ever? I am inclined to get it on Ebay or rom and give it a go.

Will @ Jan 25th 2006 4:21AM

Did they actually dig up a bunch of the old cartridges for the shoot or were all those duplicate props?

vc @ Jan 25th 2006 4:30AM

Those are props, Will.

skyrous @ Jan 25th 2006 4:40AM

I owned ET beat it several times. It wasn't the worst game ever for the 2600 but it was nothing special. ET became the glaring example of how badly run the video game industry in general and Atari in particular.

Shelling out 20 million for the rights was a stupid idea. Then putting a developingment deadline of 5 weeks in order to make the christmas season was even dumber. And finally manufacturing more cartridges than 2600's to play them on was the final screw up, they also did the same thing with pacman. With management like that at the primere video game company of the era it's pretty obvious why the crash happened.

I doubt those were real cartridges I had always heard that Atari rendered the cartridges in an inoperable condition (in pieces) before the shipped them out and after being buried for 20 years there is no way they'd look that clean.

filpaul @ Jan 25th 2006 5:27AM

Legend has it that in order to keep the site from being looted, steamrollers crushed and flattened the games, and a concrete slab was poured over the remains. http://www.snopes.com/business/market/atari.asp

Frexy @ Jan 25th 2006 5:34AM

I like the song =)

Aaron @ Jan 25th 2006 7:06AM

It was indeed a bad game... but the 'Indiana Jones' game Atari did was just as bad... think Dr. Jones with 'ET' graphics... it was horrid.

paralipsis @ Jan 25th 2006 7:25AM

Made me smile

G @ Jan 25th 2006 7:39AM

I loved the Alamogordo dump location as I grew up in that city. Somewhere I still have a copy of the game.

sharpfish @ Jan 25th 2006 8:20AM

no, the worst game ever award must surely go to "Rise Of The Robots".

Sloopydrew @ Jan 25th 2006 8:26AM

Anyone else think we'll be seeing a video with people digging up discarded XBOX 360's in about 20 years?

SetupWeasel @ Jan 25th 2006 8:48AM

Only in Japan, Sloopydrew. Only in Japan.

White Rose Duelist @ Jan 25th 2006 9:17AM

ET was not the worst game ever. I maintain that UO was (closely followed by FF7), but I don't think a lot of people agree with me. It's just that there were more copies of this game than there were Atari 2600s (apparently they expected people to buy multiple copies), and it was pretty bad. Thus, massive overstock.

abx0r @ Jan 25th 2006 9:38AM

No no no... The worst game ever is:

Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing

YOU'RE WINNER!

Craig @ Jan 25th 2006 9:55AM

E.T. is selling like gold since the video was uncovered. :) Shameless promotion: visit my website if you need a copy.

C-Dub @ Jan 25th 2006 10:21AM

God that music video was horrible. The history aspect of it was pretty neat though.

Mark 2000 @ Jan 25th 2006 10:21AM

I don't think they made the game look stupid enough. It just looked like a normal game. They should have had them constantly trying to get out of the same hole over and over again.

Ryan @ Jan 25th 2006 10:32AM

Selling like gold? Are you sure you used the right expression? I'm not so sure that gold exactly flies off the shelves like bread in Georgia during a snow warning, but what do I know?

jabbertrack @ Jan 25th 2006 11:10AM

One of the worst games ever for the 2600 with a 'big name' was Jedi Arena
http://oldschoolgameguys.blogspot.com/2006/01/star-wars-2600-jedi-arena.html

jabbertrack @ Jan 25th 2006 11:14AM

Lets try that again, I did not put any tags in yet it screwed my link up

http://oldschoolgameguys.blogspot.com/2006/01/star-wars-2600-jedi-arena.html

pennywise969 @ Jan 25th 2006 12:27PM

Nostalga. I had this game on my Atari. I loved my Atari. One day I spilled cherry(or strawberry, something red) koolaid on it and then didnt clean it up. The next day my atari was invaded by ants. The ants were killed by raid. My poor Atari didnt survive. R.I.P.

sxates @ Jan 25th 2006 1:00PM

I still have this game somewhere. Sounds like a lot of us bought it at the time. I keep hoping everyone will lose/trash theirs and it'll actually be worth something someday :)

dronetacular @ Jan 25th 2006 2:03PM

It was the same thing over and over, but did anyone else have Journey Escape (yes the band). That game was terrible.

Cento @ Jan 25th 2006 2:27PM

The reason more cartridges were made than there were consoles sold at the time was the theory that not only would every current 2600 owner want a copy, but that current non-owners would rush out to buy the console just to own this game. Losing money on a title that in the end actually sells consoles is still a strategy followed today in the game industry, if a bit less recklessly than it was in the case of ET... ;)

I worked for a couple of years with the guy that got tasked with making the ET game in 5 weeks. Really interesting funny guy. Remember that in addition to the infamy of ET, he also made Yar's Revenge, which was always one of my favorites from the 2600 era...

theron @ Jan 25th 2006 3:28PM

E.T. is one of the greatest games of all time, in my opinion. You guys just can't handle it. I would put it in my top 10.

Everybody knows that Revolution X is the worst game of all time.

w00gy @ Jan 25th 2006 4:19PM

I find it funny that they crushed all the ET cartridges to prevent looting.

Who would loot a dump for ET?! That's the reason it's there, nobody wants it.

And why throw them out, couldn't they just give them away for free? But I guess if they did that the game would still end up in the garbage anyways, so they just cut out the middle man.

Captain Obvious @ Jan 25th 2006 4:30PM

The problem with ET wasn't that it was a bad game, it was that there were unrecoverable, frustrating bugs that prevented you from completing the game. The pit comes to mind. You basically had to reset the game and start over.

As far as those carts being buried. Yeah, they're under concrete.

Worst game ever created? Hardly. But it was one of the most over-hyped games at the time, that was a major disappointment.

I got out of the pit... @ Jan 25th 2006 5:06PM

I got out of the pit, in fact, I did it over and over.

I think Captain, you're off base. The game was doable, it just wasn't fun to play.

How do you know the carts are under concrete, anyway?

I think these stories are getting confused with 2600 Pac-Man. Pac-Man was the one produced in larger numbers than the console itself. And it was a huge disappointment. On the consumer stage, ET is a relative footnote, now if you're Atari footing the bill, I'm sure you remember ET more vividly, as Pac-Man still sold, it just turned everyone off to later games (esp. preorders).

jabbertrack @ Jan 25th 2006 5:49PM

captain is absolutely correct, if you didn't have enough uh... 'energy' you could not escape the pit and you had to reset the console

and yes, E.T. was the game that had more copies produced than consoles at the time

wikipedia is a great source of info mr. "i got out of the pit"

The ZeroCorpse @ Jan 25th 2006 6:15PM

THERE WAS NOT A "GREAT VIDEO GAME CRASH OF `83"

This is a lie. I was around then, and although Atari, Magnavox, Mattel, and Coleco dropped out of the video game biz, the arcades were still jumping, the Commodore 64 hand THOUSANDS of games, and the PC was just coming into its own. Gamers were not without games. Stores were not without product to sell. Just because the CONSOLES hit a wall doesn't mean that there was a gaming crash.

Besides, everybody who was there knows that the Commodore 64 was more gaming console than computer. Who seriously got any work done on the C64?

The 'crash' is a myth. There was no crash. A big video game company died (Atari, and only the first of many times) and the other companies willingly pulled out of the console business because the computers and arcades were kicking their butts. This does not constitute a crash. This is a SHIFT.

I'm so sick of this lie being turned into some sort of legend. It's false. We were playing games EVERY YEAR during the 80s. There wasn't any span of time when you couldn't find any games in stores. There wasn't any span of time when Epyx, Electronic Arts, and Capcom (among others) didn't have a platform to publish for. There wasn't a period of time in the 80s when you couldn't find an Atari 2600/5200/7800 on which to play the hundreds of games, even if the company was dead their consoles were still in stores longer than any other console in history.

And Nintendo/Sega came along real soon after the supposed crash. We didn't have some horrible desert gulch of gamelessness. It didn't happen the way they say it did.

E.T. didn't kill gaming. It only killed Atari.