Posted on 04/28/2014 12:59:36 AM PDT by canuck_conservative
... About 200 of residents and game enthusiasts gathered early Saturday in southeastern New Mexico to watch backhoes and bulldozers dig through the concrete-covered landfill in search of up to a million discarded copies of “E.T. The Extraterrestrial” that the game’s maker wanted to hide forever....
The “E.T.” game is among the factors blamed for the decline of Atari and the collapse in the U.S. of a multi-million dollar video game industry that didn’t bounce back for several years.
Tina Amini, deputy editor at gaming website Kotaku, said the game tanked because “it was practically broken.” A recurring flaw, she said, was that the character of the game, the beloved extraterrestrial, would fall into traps that were almost impossible to escape and would appear constantly and unpredictably.
The company produced millions of cartridges, and although sales were not initially bad, the frustrating gameplay prompted an immense amount of returns. “They had produced so many cartridges that were unsold that even if the game was insanely successful I doubt they’d be able to keep up,” Amini says....
(Excerpt) Read more at business.financialpost.com ...
Not exactly the lost treasure of the Incas, is it?. Would these things even be playable after this long in the ground?
CC
Awesome find. Story of the century for sure, hope the documentary goes well, will pay to see it.
Article says they found dozens intact (still shrinkwrapped), took them home and played them succesfully in their game consoles.
ping
pong
I’m guessing that with the success of that “angry bird” game (tough to last more than 8 seconds or so I’ve heard), this E.T. thing might be all the rage with the kids today!
OK, they work. but if the game is as frustrating as they say, kids could’ve just gone to the Obamacare website and gotten their thrills for free.
CC
Okay - I knew that “Angry Birds” thing wasn’t right. It is “flappy bird”. (I’m old.)
I got this one for Christmas one year. Very lame
WHY would they want to search through a “concrete covered land fill” for all of these video games? If they were flawed back then, they are still flawed.
The ET games were not all that was dumped there. Most of the inventory was dumped there, apparently. All sorts of games and even consoles and computers. Before it was concreted over, lots of kids snuck in there and made off with hardware.
From wiki:
On September 27, 1983, the news service UPI reported that “people watching the operation said it included cassettes of the popular video games E.T., Pac-Man, Ms. Pac-Man, the consoles used to convey the games to television screens and high-priced personal computers.”[15] The news service Knight-Ridder further reported on the looting of the dump on September 28 by local kids, stating “kids in this town of 25,000 began robbing the Atari grave, coming up with cartridges of such games as E.T., Raiders of the Lost Ark, Defender, and Bezerk.”[16]
LOL, I was just thinking about pinging him to this important archeological news.
Who would even want to waste money digging up these miserable excuses for a video game?
> The “E.T.” game is among the factors blamed for the decline of Atari and the collapse in the U.S. of a multi-million dollar video game industry that didn’t bounce back for several years.
The video game industry collapse had nothing to do with the games. It was greed by the industry giants. They paid squat to the game authors and programmers. I authored and programmed a video game for Atari in 1983; They sold 780K copies and paid me less than $1000 for my efforts. I stopped writing games after that.
Signs of a pretty sick society when they go to all that trouble to locate an obsolete and flawed “game”. Isn’t there enough “entertainment” already available?
Some of us plan ahead.......
I have around 300 plastic wrapped, in the box, in the tin, pristine AOL floppies and Cd’s
I’m going to be rich, rich I tell ya”
I’m waiting for 8 Tracks to come back. Just wait I’ll be rich!
Define ‘playable’. The thing was so hideously bad that it routinely turns up as #1 on lists of the worst video game ever made. I’m not sure why anyone would want to dig these things up.
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