Diggers find Atari's E.T. games in landfill

yahoo.com ^ | JUAN CARLOS LLORCA

[BenLurkin]

ALAMOGORDO, N.M. (AP) — A documentary film production company has found buried in a New Mexico landfill hundreds of the Atari "E.T." game cartridges that some call the worst video game ever made.

Film director Zak Penn showed one "E.T." cartridge retrieved from the site and said that hundreds more were found in the mounds of trash and dirt scooped by a backhoe.

...

A New York Times article from Sept. 28, 1983, says 14 truckloads of discarded game cartridges and computer equipment were dumped on the site. An Atari spokesman quoted in the story said the games came from its plant in El Paso, Texas, some 80 miles south of Alamogordo.

...

Alamogordo Mayor Susie Galea said finding something in the landfill might bring more tourists to this city in southeastern New Mexico...

[Yo-Yo]

Landfills aren't eyesores, they're archaeological treasures for future generations.

[Yorlik803]

Same could be said for Detroit.

[ArcadeQuarters]

Some things are best left buried. They can’t even imagine the magnitude of frustration and disappointment locked in those cartridges. If it were to escape... I don’t even want to think about it.

[billorites]

Worst game ever? There's some pretty tough competition.

[ClearCase_guy]

All your landfills are belong to us.

[billorites]

Yes, "worst" is a relative term...

[Delta 21]

I threw that crap away for a reason.

[SamAdams76]

Interesting history regarding Atari. They were the ones that came out that that "Pong" game which ended up being the first video game brought into people's homes. It was basically a two-player game in which you controlled a paddle that went up and down and you batted a "ball" back and forth. That was basically it. Yet it was all the rage back in the mid 1970s. You hooked it up to a regular television set and played it for hours on end.

Then around 1975, the co-founders of Apple (before they started Apple) wrote a game called "Breakout." Legend has it that Steve Jobs got $5,700 for it but only paid Steve Wozniak (who did all the work) about $350.

[Chickensoup]

loved PONG.

[Norm Lenhart]

Skyrim it ain’t, but it still is a lot of fun even today.

[Yo-Yo]

No, it couldn’t.

[Chickensoup]

I was too poor to afford it back then but would play it when we got to town and to Zayres.

[Starstruck]

loved PONG.

People today can't realize how state of the art it was at the time. My first computer was an Atari 64. Had a VisiCalc program to track my bills and wrote or was given programs to do graphics. Right up there with geting my TI-50.

[Chickensoup]

A friend was the wife of one of the authors of VisiCalc.

[KosmicKitty]

Pong was all we had, and dammit!! We liked it!

:-)

[NewHampshireDuo]

I loved Downland (TRS-80)

[ErnBatavia]

[BenLurkin]

Pong was a good game, as was tank.

Atari’s chess program would shut off the display while it was thinking (presumably so it could use all its computing power for play and not display).

I used to set up a board so I could examine the position as Atari was contemplating its next move.

[tophat9000]

Atari didnt make the 64..that was Commodore...Ataris first pc were the 400 and 800..I had an 800..the game system was the 2600