ATARI Cartridges found in desert

A story like this really couldn't have come at a better time as 2014 is supposed to be the year that the Angry Video Nerd will release his film which is said to cover this exact topic.

http://www.theverge.com/2014/4/26/5...unearth-legendary-cache-of-atari-games-in-new

For those not in the know, the 1980s Atari game, E.T (film license tie-in) was said to be one of the greatest failures of the gaming industry before Duke Nukem Forever, Big Riggs, Sega Dreamcast or Nintendo Virtual Boy. It was so bad that it almost nearly crashed the games industry in the 1980s. There has been a persisting rumour that the cartridges to E.T were buried in the desert, only to be found now.

 

I followed the story on IGN. Apparently some of those cartridges look in such good condition so as to be playable.

Very nice, you stupid humans. You just opened an Oblivion gate and more were all gonna die.

 

crazy stuff. i had e.t. back then and it was terrible.

 

I was monitoring this all day yesterday at work, was so cool when they announced the games were actually in there. I will definitely check out the Xbox doc when it comes out.

 

Huh, funny to have one of the gaming industry's urban myths proved true. I heard they had been working on an attempt for a while, getting money and permits and such for it. Too bad I don't have an Xbox to watch the documentary, but should be interesting when its released. That era was before my time, but its always sounded interesting, the game industry mostly collapsing and not really pulling itself back together until... the NES I think?

 

the game consisted of e.t. walking across the screen, falling in a whole and then trying to figure out how to get him out of the hole. if you could figure it out the next thing you did was fall down another hole. some holes (apparently) had items like a record in them. i never got past the first couple holes. there were no saves back then and life is too short.

 

The backstory is actually really interesting. When E.T. broke box office records and beat Star Wars as the highest grossing movie of all time in 1982, Atari payed Spielberg a huge amount of money to do a videogame based on E.T. for a rushed Christmas release. They actually manufactured 12 Million copies of the E.T. videogame, never mind that at that time only 9 Million people actually owned an Atari 2600. The executives at Atari anticipated that not only would every single human that owned an Atari 2600 would rush out to buy a copy of E.T., but they also expected that 3 Million more people on top of that would also rush out to buy an Atari 2600 system so that they could play this crappy, quickly produced cash-in game. That hubris is exactly why tons of unpurchased (and returned) copies of E.T. were buried in the desert.....