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E.T. Found In New Mexico Landfill
skipkent sends this news from Kotaku:
"One of the most infamous urban legends in video games has turned out to be true. Digging in Alamogordo, New Mexico today, excavators discovered cartridges for the critically-panned Atari game E.T., buried in a landfill way back in 1983 after Atari couldn't figure out what else to do with their unsold copies. For decades, legend had it that Atari put millions of E.T. cartridges in the ground, though some skeptics have wondered whether such an extraordinary event actually happened. Last year, Alamogordo officials finally approved an excavation of the infamous landfill, and plans kicked into motion two weeks ago, with Microsoft partnering up with a documentary team to dig into the dirt and film the results. Today, it's official. They've found E.T.'s home—though it's unclear whether there are really millions or even thousands of copies down there."
To determine the truth value of a proposition, namely whether or not Atari buried a shitload of bad video games under the literal earth. Not so that those games could then be played.
Atari denied it.
When prompted key Atari figures would not comment and the lead programmer said there is no way we would have done that.
Locals say otherwise.
I was interested and there maybe more gems there (like ET was a gem) like the experimental controller that never hit the market, documents, and other materials. Centipede was found there too. It looks like they just cleared a whole warehouse and dumped it.
So yes this qualifies as an urban legend.
http://saveie6.com/
Well, first they tried to get the cartridges to levitate themselves out, but they kept falling back to the bottom of the landfill.
I liked the game too as a kid. It had its shortcomings which by the way are all addressed here. ET is no longer an awful game:
http://www.neocomputer.org/pro...
The fact that you were not good at the game doesn't mean it sucked. I never found a pit that I couldn't get out of in that game. The game was better than 80% of the 2600 games made. It got panned so badly because it was too complex for most 2600 game players. As rsilvergun pointed out, you actually had to read the manual.
To make matters worse, the 'hard core' gamers that might have appreciated the game had moved on to the C64/Apple II where they already had 2 Ultima games to compare E.T. to.
Then the final nail in the coffin was the level of hype put on the game due to the movie left people completely let down.