The story of the Atari E.T. debacle is a classic tale of corporate mismanagement. In the early 1980s, Atari controlled 80% of the $2 billion video game market on the strength of hits like Pong, Centipede, and Missile Command. The company had also produced a successful adaptation of Raiders of the Lost Ark, one of the first video game adaptations of a movie. So, in 1982, Steven Spielberg approached the company about making an E.T. video game.
Atari president Steve Ross paid $21 million for the rights to the E.T. game, which meant he would need to sell 4 million copies to break even. In order to pull this off, Atari needed to have the game ready for the Christmas sales season. The problem was that Spielberg and Atari made their deal in July of that year. Raiders had taken 10 months to develop, but game designer Howard Scott Warshaw only had five weeks to make a viable product. Miraculously, Warshaw finished the game and Spielberg signed off on it, but the designer later called it the toughest five weeks he ever endured.
The game hit stores with much fanfare, but gamers soon began complaining about its confusing gameplay system and E.T.’s tendency to fall into holes and get stuck. The game still regularly makes lists of the worst video games ever made. In the end, it only sold 1.5 million copies.
With literally tons of unsold copies of E.T. on its hands, Atari opted to bury them all in the desert in Alamogordo, NM. Although Atari tried to keep the dumping quiet, it got reported in The New York Times. However, without the internet to keep it alive, the story faded into memory and eventually became little more than a rumor.
That is, until 2014, when a documentary crew led by filmmaker Zak Penn found the dumping site and excavated it. The photo here depicts actual unsold Atari cartridges retrieved from the dump!
