What do you think of this fact?
In 1982, Atari had one of the biggest movie licenses around: E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. What happened next became one of the strangest stories in gaming, and for decades it sounded like an urban legend.
Five weeks for a blockbuster
Programmer Howard Scott Warshaw got the job once the license deal was done. According to Guinness World Records, the development window ran from 27 July to 1 September 1982, which gave the game the record for the shortest development period for a videogame film conversion. Warshaw put it like this: “No one had ever done a game in less than five or six months and I had five weeks!”
Then the trouble started. The Centre for Computing History says 5 million E.T. cartridges were manufactured, but only 1.5 million were sold.
The landfill legend
In September 1983, truckloads of video game cartridges and computer equipment ended up in a landfill in Alamogordo, New Mexico, according to Waste360. Rumors spread that Atari was dumping truckloads of games in the desert. The Henry Ford museum puts the burial at 700,000 cartridges and says the story became “an obscure pop culture legend”.
Digging up the tomb
On Saturday, April 26, 2014, a crew put the legend to the test. Local contractor Joe Lewandowski was hired for the dig on the 300-acre site, and Equipment World reports that he could only dig one hole. If it came up empty, the search was over. Around 1 p.m., the crew hit games, and not only E.T.: Centipede, Space Invaders and Asteroids reportedly turned up too. The dig was part of “Atari: Game Over”, a documentary from Microsoft’s Xbox studio.
More than a thousand cartridges were recovered. Some were later auctioned online, and E.T. copies sold for more than 1,500 dollars. The Henry Ford calls the dig the world’s first video game excavation.
Bonus fact: The Centre for Computing History displays an E.T. cartridge from the dig, together with sand from the site.
The game nobody wanted in 1983 now sits behind museum glass. Pretty good career for a piece of landfill.