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Will the world's worst video game remained buried in a New Mexico dump forever?

IContainMultitudes

IContainMultitudes

Well-Known Member
V.I.P Member
E.T. the video game legend: Is the Atari game really buried in a New Mexico landfill?

(This article from a couple of days ago says that the dig is back on now: Update: Planned landfill excavation for Atari 2600 ‘E.T.’ cartridges will go on | Dallas Morning News)

While we're on the subject, if you don't agree that E.T. is the world's worst video game, what would you nominate?

As I mentioned in another thread, you can play E.T. in-browser here:

E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial (1982) (Atari) (NTSC) : Free Streaming : Internet Archive
 
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Shame that the cartridges were (allegedly) thrown away rather than recycled somehow. I'm not a fan of environmental pollution.
 
Ereth said:
Shame that the cartridges were (allegedly) thrown away rather than recycled somehow. I'm not a fan of environmental pollution.
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Tbh, it doesn't make sense that they wouldn't at least re-use the plastic casing for the cartridges instead of throwing them all away. That would've at least made up for a tiny percentage of the colossal amount of money that the developers and publishers lost, if nothing else.

edit: played it using the link, thought I figured out how to get out of the pits, fell into a pit and got stuck forever anyway :)
 
This story has always sounded more like urban legend than reality to me. Even if Atari wanted to dispose of a bunch of unwanted E.T. cartridges (I wonder if perhaps one or two prescient Atari employees stashed a few away as potential collector's items?), wouldn't there be more efficient ways to do it rather than burying it out in the desert like nuclear waste or something?

I wonder if there's a big landfill full of unwanted AOL CD-Roms somewhere, that seems a little more plausible to me since those things were just about inescapable in the late 90s-early 2000s.
 
In theory you could reuse the casings...in theory. However, the video game crash would have meant that there would have been no video games being made to reuse those casings on.

This would not have happened with AOL because they made sure they all got mailed. My friend's son made mobiles out of them. :)
 
I was totally going to post that, ICM. I guess FB really is good for something. :D Cause that's where I saw it today.

Mystery solved. Guess they must be handing out Scooby snax in the desert. :D

And I also must say... I find this news highly symbolic with respect to... a lot of things.

Pretty cool.
 
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Flinty said:
In theory you could reuse the casings...in theory. However, the video game crash would have meant that there would have been no video games being made to reuse those casings on.

This would not have happened with AOL because they made sure they all got mailed. My friend's son made mobiles out of them. :)
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This is a good point which I hadn't considered when I made my first post - They could've reused the cartridge casings, but since they were producing millions more copies of games than they were selling, the new games would've inevitably just ended up as landfill anyway.

Interesting to see that there was a centipede cartridge found amongst them too. I wonder what else they've found/will find?
 
IContainMultitudes said:
This story has always sounded more like urban legend than reality to me. Even if Atari wanted to dispose of a bunch of unwanted E.T. cartridges (I wonder if perhaps one or two prescient Atari employees stashed a few away as potential collector's items?), wouldn't there be more efficient ways to do it rather than burying it out in the desert like nuclear waste or something?

I wonder if there's a big landfill full of unwanted AOL CD-Roms somewhere, that seems a little more plausible to me since those things were just about inescapable in the late 90s-early 2000s.
Click to expand...

How about a landfill of Apple LISA computers in Utah? (You know, the Mac's bigger and older sister, that didn't sell very well, just like the Apple ///?)


Never teach a pig to sing. It wastes your time, and annoys the pig.
 
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