ET found in a dump

bop1977

Back in 1983 Atari released the movie tie in ET game. It flopped and ruined Atari. Atari dumped about a million copies of the game in a landfill.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/E.T._the_Extra-Terrestrial_(video_game)

Well a documentary team have found the dump site:

http://www.abc15.com/news/national/diggers-find-ataris-et-games-in-landfill

Akrasia

Breaking news, The makers of a documentary looking for the E.T. burial site have dug an even deeper hole and returned all of the cartidges to landfill

Joe Lewandowski was quoted as saying "Yeah, what were we thinking. This game really sucks. We're gonna seal these babies in concrete so that nobody ever has to play this game again."

80s Synth Pop

the only pics I've seen online are one or two carts and packaging. I thought there was a million carts?

If the game was that bad you would find one or two mixed in with regular household garbage after kids threw them out. perhaps that's all they've found.

Retr0gamer

80s Synth Pop wrote: »

the only pics I've seen online are one or two carts and packaging. I thought there was a million carts?

If the game was that bad you would find one or two mixed in with regular household garbage after kids threw them out. perhaps that's all they've found.

They had 4 million carts unsold.

It wasn't thrown out because it was a bad game. It was thrown out since it was cheaper than moving Atari's excess stock so if it is true they'll find lots of other atari games and stuff there. I heard they found some indiana jones carts.

Los Lobos

A lot of the stock was sent to venezuela too and is still being found in warehouses to this day. Ntsc games like motorodeo and ikari warriors that sold for $200 odd dollars a while back can now be bought still shrink wrapped for a pittance.
Its mental really. Would love a fossilised et cart though!

80s Synth Pop

looking forward to that documentary.

although even in that video there are only one or two carts. It just seems possible with all that digging in a general purpose landfill that all they found were a few carts thrown out in household rubbish (thrown out by the householders because the game was so bad) and not the atari overstock of thousands (millions) of carts....

The Last Bandit

Atari had a production plant near there and when they closed down everything was dumped, should be mostly carts but various other Atari bits and pieces as well.
ET actually sold very well, its one of the top selling games on the 2600. It just they got the sale predictions wrong and produced way too many.
Lots of the details are in the "Atari: Business is fun" book.

CiDeRmAn

Retr0gamer wrote: »

They had 4 million carts unsold.

It wasn't thrown out because it was a bad game. It was thrown out since it was cheaper than moving Atari's excess stock so if it is true they'll find lots of other atari games and stuff there. I heard they found some indiana jones carts.

It was thrown out because it didn't sell.
It didn't sell because it was a bad game.
Actually, no.
It didn't sell because it was a fupping awful game.
Like, Pacman 2600 awful, the original release, not the brilliant homebrew edition.

KeRbDoG

Also the rumor is that they made more carts than they had consoles in homes

Retr0gamer

KeRbDoG wrote: »

Also the rumor is that they made more carts than they had consoles in homes

They did that for Pac-Man. There's no rumour there either, it's pretty much confirmed. Videogames was a new business so really Atari was the guinea pigs. They reckoned that every Atari owner would buy Pac Man and there would be millions of new adopters.

seamonkey92

Looked like the worst game ever made but I want to play it.

J_E

Wonder how much people would pay for the 'landfill edition'?

Los Lobos

seamonkey92 wrote: »

Looked like the worst game ever made but I want to play it.

The thing is it's far from the worst game on the 2600, never mind ever made. It's actually very complex for a 2600 game, but most people never read the manual to find out how to actually play it.
It ended up getting tagged as the reason for the crash, which was a bit of a scapegoat. Lots of pirate and shovelware games had more to do with the crash

I remember when I was a kid I had a 2600 jr,
now I knew f-all about games but I knew what I liked.

Anyway my granddad used to go to the markets around Dublin and the odd weekend he'd come home with a plastic bag full of Atari carts!
I'd go through them one by one and they'd all be muck.absolute muck.even as an 8 year old i knew they were muck.

Wasnt till a few years ago I put 2+2 together and realized it was during the height of the "crash" and I was being giving shovel ware!
The 2600 had some pure tripe on it.
and some gold like snoopy and the red barren/big birds egg catch.quality titles

Los Lobos

I'll give ya a loan of Snoopy some time Just gotta get a hold of Jazzer

CiDeRmAn

I have Defender 2 on the 2600 and it is very impressive indeed.
As I said, I must pick up the recent version of Pacman as well.

Atavan-Halen

4 player warlords is immense fun too. I remember we played it at one of the first beers