The rumors are true! Back in 1983, a landfill in New Mexico was filled with cartridges of the infamous ET game for the Atari 2600. Today, these cartridges were finally discovered by a team of excavators in Alamogordo, New Mexico. For years this was but an urban legend in the gaming community and many were skeptical regarding the rumors surrounding the ET video game. Just last year the excavation project was approved by Alamogordo officials and plans were set in motion just two weeks ago. Interestingly enough, a documentary about the entire situation is currently in development by Fuel Entertainment, also in association with Xbox.
The ET video game on Atari 2600 is considered one of the worst video games of all time and played a role in the Video Game Crash of 1983. This game along with several other major disappointments from Atari in 1982, is what led to the landfill decision. So many games had been produced and were not selling and the ones that did sell were usually returned to stores. This led to massive overstock issues of worthless Atari games and eventually a landfill dumping in New Mexico. This event was a turning point for Atari and the video game industry as a whole, and gaming would not recover for several years until Nintendo released the NES in North America in 1985.
Do you have any memories of struggling through this game back in the day? If so, let us know if you think that dumping it into a landfill was justified! Is the game truly awful enough that it deserved to be buried underground for 30 years? Surely there were other methods that could have been done to deal with the situation. Of course, this was an extreme case and something of this scale has never occurred since. However, it’s now official, and we can all let our minds rest easy knowing that what was thought to be only an urban legend, was actually reality all along.