JCC Landfill where Atari videogames were buried to be excavated

Alamogordo city council grants approval

C'mon man, really? Why, besides the curiosity factor, would you do this? Like those games would still be playable after being crushed and buried under concrete and trash for three decades.

Also, if that E.T. game is as bad as they say it is, maybe they belong down there. Lord knows that Atari 2600 port of Pac-Man does.

Oh great. Now I got the sound of that game in my head.

EEEH OON EEEH AHHT

 

I played that game a couple of times, it can stay buried.

 

It's not that nobody could play E.T., it's that nobody knew how. The game was, dare I say, ahead of it's time in terms of gameplay and initiatives (most Atari games were known for being simple, easy to pick up arcade ports). Though I will say that it's the type of game that wouldn't go over well with kids, which was unfortunately the target audience.

Now, it's nice to see some light being shed on this urban legend after all these years, but it'll barely prove anything that we don't already know. I wouldn't expect anything to actually be salvageable after the abuse they've been through. On top of that, E.T. is still a common game today, despite the landfill scandal. But I'm still curious about what will be unearthed there.

 

ET...

http://www.2600online.com/ET.html

 

you bastard. of course i had to click it again. but thankfully my java is out of date or something. *fist pump*

 

I'll say the 2600 version of E.T is pretty common, as well as the 2600 port of Pac-Man (It was the pack-in game sold with the system for a time). I saw a copy of the 2600 E.T. at a local Goodwill a few years back (No, I did not buy it).

But the reason why the 2600 version of Pac-Man is so common is that Atari, in their hubris, made more Pac-Man games than there were Atari 2600 systems out on the market, much less even sold! It think they made like 5-10 million more Pac-Man carts than there were 2600 systems or something like that. An Atari executive said they did this because they thought people would want a second copy for their ski house or something like that. Yes, an executive actually said that.

It was thinking like this (one video game company exec supposedly said something to the effect of "I could put horse**** in a box and it would move a million units) that led to the video game crash of 1983. To be honest, reading up on it, you get the feeling some of the companies brought it on themselves.

 

An E.T. Atari for every household!

 

Attitudes like that lead to the crash of other industries as well. OTOH, executives like that just flocked to the music industry, which explains the current spate of crap they keep trying to tell us is cool.

 

Reading about the XBox One, does anybody else think things are going to be looking bad for the video game industry, i.e. a second crash or something along those lines? You get the feeling Microsoft is setting themselves up for a world of hurt.

 

From reading a lot of gamers' displeasure (I'm not one, but I know a few through various message boards and sites and some members of my family are gamers), about all the various consoles that are coming out, most notably XBox One, and I'd say yes.

 

DRM is a pipe dream. Someone will either find a way to counteract it or the market will voice its displeasure to MS.

 

That game was so bad......soooooooooooooooooooooooooo bad...........so terrible..........

 

The legends were true!

 

Given the reaction all over social media today about this, I guess I'm supposed to care.

 

It's a game so terrible that it helped kill the industry in the U.S. Doesn't that make you want to play it?!

 

I guess the tourist gift shops in Alamogordo have run out of trinitite, so now they'll begin
selling the rotted remains of failed Atari game cartridges.

Whatever.

 

The article mentions people leaving because of the stench from the trash .

Nice to see it confirmed, though.